A Gull on the Roof (7 page)

One Monday morning Tommy Williams came striding up the lane while we were sitting on a rock sipping cups of coffee, idly watching Monty stalk a mouse in the grass. Tommy was now working the first three days of the week for us, another two days for John; and thus his loyalty to the potato meadows was divided. On this particular morning he had an evangelist look, his chin thrust out, and his tall figure in ragged working clothes like a prophet on the warpath. ‘John’s told me he’s starting to draw this morning,’ he rushed out as if he had brought news that war had been declared, ‘we must go down the cliff at once and see what ours are like. You bring the chips and I’ll take the shovel.’

We swallowed our coffee and off we went, Tommy with the shovel over his shoulder, I with a bundle of chips, and Jeannie walking hopefully behind. The weather was perfect. The sea was smooth as a pool and flecked with gulls swimming nonchalantly like ducks; and as we trudged down the cliff the old steamship
Scillonian
sailed past outward bound to the Scilly Isles, cutting through the water as gently as a yacht. Tommy brought out the telescope he always carried with him. ‘Got a car on board,’ he said importantly. In the summer she sailed to and fro the islands every day, and in the winter every other day in each direction except when the Scilly flower season was at its height. She was a friendly sight and she became, as her successor has also become, a timepiece. ‘Has the
Scillonian
gone past?’ I would call out, or Tommy or Jeannie.

Her course took her parallel to our meadows a half mile out, a sea-green painted hull and a yellow funnel; and sometimes in a storm when the sea was running mountainous waves we would watch with our hearts in our mouths as she lurched toy-sized among them. Then Tommy – brutally – would roar with laughter; ‘I bet them passengers are feeling bad.’ In fair weather she berthed at Penzance, in bad she made for Newlyn, and as she was the link between the Scilly flower growers and the mainland markets, her skipper sailed her in seas when she might have been expected to remain in harbour. There was one occasion when, after leaving the islands, a gale so fierce blew up that when she reached Mount’s Bay she was three hours late and it was dark. The skipper, a Scillonian, unexpectedly decided it was too dangerous to enter Newlyn harbour, and chose to spend the night steaming to and fro across the Bay, sailing out the gale. There was wry laughter in the Scillies when this was known. The Government, a few weeks before, had announced that the Scillonians were to be liable for income tax – and off the boat the following morning stepped two sick-looking Inland Revenue Inspectors.

We reached a meadow at the top of the cliff and I cut the string of a bundle and singled out a chip while Tommy banged the edge of the shovel on his boot in the manner of an acrobat calling attention to a special trick. Then, with Jeannie and me standing expectantly beside him he stabbed under a plant and turned it upside down. Several little white potatoes connected together as if by a string lay in the soil. Tommy said nothing and moved to another part of the meadow and stabbed again. The same thing happened.

‘Look’s like we’re going to be disappointed,’ he murmured, ‘we’ll try the May Queen over there. They should be ready.’ We walked over to the meadow which was steep and fringed with bluebells. Tommy turned over one plant, then another, picked up the stems and shook them, and ran his hands through the soil. We were out of luck. The May Queen were no better than the Pilot we had tried first. ‘Marbles!’ Tommy snorted with disgust, ‘just marbles!’ We gathered up the little white things for ourselves, cross and disappointed, and trooped back silently, disconsolately, to the cottage. As Tommy put away his shovel he looked at me, his eyes no longer blazing, and grunted: ‘Don’t say a word to anyone in the village about this. Keep your affairs to yourselves. Some of them are a mean lot and they’ll be pleased.’ I nodded solemnly in agreement.

Our village of St Buryan stands on high ground three miles from the coast on the road to Land’s End, and the church spire is a beacon to ships far out to sea. It is a sturdy village of neat granite cottages with grey slate roofs and no pretensions about being quaint. It is a businesslike village and makes you feel that it prides itself in brawn and courage rather than in brain and guile, in the basic virtues rather than those which are acquired. Until a year or so ago there was no main water and the village supply was tapped from a spring in the square opposite the inn; so that when you stood in the bar looking out of the window, you watched the inhabitants filling their pails of water as their ancestors had done patiently for centuries before them. It is a village which challenges the sensibilities and yet soothes them, as if it were an integral part of the gales which lash it and the calm which follows. It is not a village in which to live and be idle, for work conscientiously performed is the yardstick of value. It is generous both in spirit and in pocket, for no worthy cause fails to meet with success; but if it is willing to like, it is also quick to distrust, and slow to forgive. It is, in fact, a village of character.

The name comes from that of an Irish girl saint and is pronounced Berian. How she came to the Land’s End peninsula is obscure, but in ancient days Irish pilgrims used to travel to the continent by way of Padstow and Mousehole. The object was to avoid the stormy passage around the ‘corner’ of England by landing at Padstow, travelling overland to Mousehole and embarking in another ship for France. It is believed that in the sixth century she was one of these pilgrims. In any case the shrine of St Buryan existed in the tenth century when King Athelstan swept into Cornwall to drive out the Danes who garrisoned the county and the Isles of Scilly. His final great battle in Cornwall was at Boleigh Hill, two miles from Minack, and he afterwards rested his troops at St Buryan before setting out from the beaches of Sennen near Land’s End to invade the Isles of Scilly. On the day before he sailed he worshipped before the shrine and vowed, if the expedition was successful, that he would as a thank-offering build and endow a church.

The original church decayed into rubble during the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth the present one was built. It is a beautiful old barn of a building, and in a village whose limited number of inhabitants are divided between Methodists and members of the Church of England, it has the effect of a cathedral. In a corner of the church is a collection of ancient finds that have been made in the district and which were gathered together by a remarkable old man named Croft who was Vicar of St Buryan when we came to Minack. It seemed that Croft was as much interested in the past as he was in his parishioners and he spent much of his time seeking the history of the parish from ancient documents and in leading groups of earnest archaeologists in excavating from the soil the traces of Stone Age settlements.

A few months after our arrival, a mason repairing a wall in the cottage had discovered a cavity, neatly roofed with small stones, which he explained was an old oven dating back some five hundred years. A few days later I looked out of the window and saw an old man struggling slowly up the steep path to the door. ‘The Vicar’s come to call!’ I cried out to Jeannie, and Jeannie in those few split seconds between the sight of an unexpected visitor and his arrival, rushed round the room picking up papers and hiding unwashed plates. ‘Why didn’t he warn us?’ she moaned, while I wondered how I was going to explain why I never went to his church. I ushered him into the room and he sat down on the sofa, panting from the exertions of his walk. He sat silent until he had recovered himself then, with a gleam of excitement in his eyes, looked at me and said, ‘I’ve come to see the oven!’

The trail of archaeologists used to irk the inhabitants of St Buryan and there was one old man, many years ago, who became a hero to the village for the trick he played on a group. He was a specialist in stories about Athelstan’s Battle of Boleigh which, he declared, had been handed down from father to son in his family from generation to generation; and so sincere was his note of authenticity that historians never failed to bring out their notebooks in excited belief. The fields where the battle is supposed to have been fought are known as Gul Reeve which is the old Cornish for ‘red field’; and as neither the soil nor anything else in the neighbourhood is red, it has always been presumed that the name is derived from the blood that flowed. Nearby is a farm and the old man declared one day to a group of believers that the dead of the battle were buried in a long trench in a field adjacent to the farm buildings. He knew the exact position, having carried in his head the number of paces from each corner of the field that led to the trench, details that had been told to him by his father. A score of men dug for two days and not a bone was found. The archaeologists were angry, the men who had done the digging happily pocketed their pay, and the old man grinned. ‘If mistake there be,’ he said, ‘it be due to father.’

On these same Gul Reeve fields stand, some distance apart, two massive upright stones which are known as the Pipers. They are, in fact, Peace Stones, representing the Conqueror and the Conquered, erected presumably after the Battle of Boleigh. But during the centuries in between they acquired the name of the Pipers so that they might dovetail into the story that the elders of St Buryan told their children about the circle of nineteen stones known as the Merry Maidens which stand in a field a few hundred yards away on the other side of the road. The elders told the story as a warning against playing on Sundays. The nineteen stones were nineteen maidens of the parish who were lured by two young men to dance on a Sunday afternoon; and while the girls tripped daintily hand in hand, the young men played their flutes – until there was a flash of lightning and they were all turned to stone.

Our post came from St Buryan, and the telegrams from a sub-post office at Lamorna. Our first postman had an eccentric sense of delivery and his route to the cottage across fields and over hedges was to him an unwelcome steeplechase. Letters, therefore, sometimes reached us two days late, sometimes three, sometimes not at all. This waywardness fitted our mood until one morning I received a writ for an unpaid account without ever having seen the letter of warning which preceded it. The telegrams also came across the fields, and the authorities awarded the sub-postmaster with a special bonus of sevenpence for each delivery. Usually they were from Americans who had arrived at the Savoy to find Jeannie had left, and a telegram would arrive asking us to lunch the following day as if the distance between Minack and the Strand was that between Chelsea and Kensington; or else it would be a request for us to telephone at some inconvenient hour as if the charge was a fourpenny call and the call-box in our front garden.

After a sequence of such requests I made enquiries about installing a telephone, half-hearted enquiries which were more of a gesture to conventionality than a desire to have one; and made in the confident belief that the cost of installation with its half-mile of wire and poles would in any case be prohibitive. I was surprised when the Post Office informed me that the cost would be twelve shillings and sixpence and the installation immediate; and the Post Office was surprised when it received my letter explaining I had changed my mind and did not want one after all. We still have no telephone and although it is sometimes irritating to drive two miles to the nearest call-box, we are spared the far greater irritation of a menacing ringing bell.

A month after our arrival, and when the tension of the impending potato season was reaching its climax, we received a telegram, ‘Expect me tomorrow night’ and signed ‘Uncle B’ – the nickname by which many knew Baron, the photographer. He was to be our first visitor and the first to pose a problem difficult to solve. If you earn your living from the land you have to work regular hours like anyone who goes to an office, but unlike the office worker, you do not have the security of an office building to shelter you from your friends. A further difficulty is that most people who visit Cornwall are on holiday with time to spare and an inclination to look up old friends or to stay with them for a night or two at the same pressure of gaiety as in the days of their former acquaintance. On our part although we usually quailed at the prospect of visitors, we surrendered when they arrived and suffered penitence for the lost hours after they had departed. Our real difficulty arose when such visitors arrived in sequence throughout a summer, each an old friend regained from the past, each deserving the full attention of a merry reunion. It was on such occasions, and those when we paid rare visits to London, that our ego of sophistication reasserted itself leaving that of the peasant to provide the remorse.

The gusto of Baron was that of a roaring gale which eventually exhausts itself into stillness. He pounded every twenty-four hours like a punchball, working, playing, loving, talking, drinking, dazzling his friends with his wit, kindness and a great gentleness. His behaviour was often outrageous. He once asked me to introduce him to Mike Cowles, proprietor of the American magazine,
Look,
and I arranged that we should all meet at Claridge’s for drinks. After an hour and there was no Baron, Jeannie suddenly turned to me, ‘Heavens,’ she said, ‘it’s Thursday!’ Thursday was a notoriously unreliable day for Baron as it was the day of his weekly Thursday Club luncheon. Another half-hour and we saw him beaming smiles at surprised strangers as he weaved his way towards us. ‘Jeannie, Jeannie,’ he cried, ‘forgive me, forgive me!’ And he thereupon knelt down in the dignified foyer, clasping his hands together in mock prayer. A few days later I was with him in the Savoy bar when Mike Cowles passed by and I waved. ‘Who’s that?’ asked Baron. I told him. ‘That’s the very man I want to meet,’ he replied, ‘do introduce me.’ I put down my drink and looked at him. ‘I have done so already . . . we all spent an hour together the other evening at Claridge’s!’