Seagulls in the Attic (18 page)

And so it’s arranged and working out fine. Will and Amy love it, playing with the three sock lambs on the farm along
with our lamb Patch, who like the others should have been off the bottle ages ago. But the children can’t resist giving him an extra treat now and again, even though he’s mingling with Joe’s sheep, eating grass and growing bigger every day. In fact most of Joe’s lambs have grown so much that we always feel sorry for the poor ewes, standing patiently while their babies, some as big as they are, head butt their bellies to get another drop of milk.

It was quite a lot of work at first, those early bottle-feeds, but everyone helped, and it was great fun watching Patch race towards us, his little bottom wagging furiously as he sucked on the bottle. Every time we check on him now, Patch leaves the flock and runs towards us, pushing up against us as if still hoping there’s something for him. We always bring titbits of food, scraps of lettuce or cabbage leaves, and Patch nibbles them politely, though I’m sure he prefers the fresh green grass of the lush pasture he’s kept in.

It’s hard too trying to get to the allotment after being up at dawn for work. The exhilaration at the beginning has turned into anguish as my back aches from the endless hoeing and weeding, my knees have crumbled and my hands feel gnarled and ugly despite wearing gloves. And even with all the hard work, the vegetables aren’t doing that great. Slugs, cabbage butterflies and rabbits again – sometimes it seems a losing battle with all the little creatures determined to eat everything I produce. Still, the feeling of euphoria that envelops me after a good day’s digging and planting makes up for every ache and pain.

I pick up the postal van behind the boatyard at St Geraint. It’s June and there’s a drizzling chill rain. At least it is better than the storms we had during part of half-term, though that didn’t stop the holidaymakers from coming down, much to the relief of everyone involved in all the businesses that rely on
tourists. The seafront was filled with bedraggled visitors filling the cafés, trying to soothe irritable children and spouses. Today is still grey but at least the gales and torrential rain have stopped, but we’re all longing for some sun.

I usually take a few moments before starting the van to look over at the sea, watch the gulls and terns, the changing blues of the sky. Today the horizon is a solid grey, impossible to tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. I’m missing Ben, fretting about my vegetables, fed up with the long spell of bad weather and worrying about the increasingly noisy and demanding adolescent seagull we’ve adopted, and the snake living in our house. Elvis seems to shed his skin and grow inches every day, although of course I know that this happens only once a month. Still, it’s incredible how he’s grown. I can’t get over my nervousness of him. Will walks around with Elvis draped all over him and my insides shrivel. Try as I may, I just can’t learn to love a snake.

Then there’s Google. The seagull tries to come into the house at every opportunity and it’s difficult keeping him out when the weather is good as we often leave windows and doors open. During one of the storms this past week he managed to get inside the kitchen door when I was holding it open trying to herd the children out. By the time I’d got them sorted and into the car before they got saturated, Google had demolished a fresh loaf of bread I’d baked, attacking it with his strong beak and plucking great holes all around it. Frustration and fury all fought a battle inside me. I only learned how to bake bread a few months ago, thinking I could supply the family with good wholesome organic loaves at half the price of bought bread. Since we don’t have a bread maker, I had to learn from scratch. My first few loaves were disastrous but this one was perfect. And now it was demolished by our tame seagull. If Ben had been around, we’d have ended up laughing
about it, but all I can think of now is the chore of having to bake again when I get home.

My mood is as gloomy as the weather, which is unlike me. Shaking my head to snap out of it, I try to start the van. As usual on damp days, it splutters and mutters and won’t start. It’s been looked at by a mechanic who can find nothing wrong. This is totally maddening as I know there must be something wrong when it keeps doing this to me. I get out of the van, sighing over the phone calls Margaret will get if the post is late. Some will be complaints, most merely queries. It’s inevitable the post is delayed sometimes, with new relief posties or van breakdowns such as today, but you can’t tell that to some customers. As Harry had said to me, many rural folk time their chores by the arrival of the post and any variation in the routine is upsetting for them.

Standing out in the rain, stomping about wondering if I should give up and walk back to the post office to try to arrange for a replacement van, I have one of those ‘what am I doing here?’ moments. As I’m thinking this, there is a shift in the light. The sun, hidden for days, is at last nearly visible behind a sheen of thin clouds. This causes a kind of iridescent effect on the water, as if thousands of tiny jewels have been scattered all over it. It’s magical, and so mesmerising that I stand there for a good five minutes watching the changing patterns of light and colour. This is why we’re here, I think as I finally get back into the van. This is why it is all worth it. My mood shifts back into its normal optimistic mode again.

I’ve forgotten the van wouldn’t start. I only remember when I jump in, give it a go and it splutters into action first try. This day is getting better and better. Even the weather is beginning to clear up at last and I’m not only smiling but humming as I drive out of the town.

By the time I’ve gone a mile or so my smile is gone. There’s
a terrible clunking sound under the van and my heartbeat quickens. Has something important fallen off? The engine perhaps? No, I’m still chugging along, but the sound seems to be getting worse so I immediately pull over in a layby. What now?

I get out, wondering what I’ll find dropping off the underside of the vehicle, but I don’t have to look far. There’s a forty-foot fishing net trailing along behind. I can’t believe it. Some-how it must have hooked on to the car as I drove out of the boatyard. I don’t remember even seeing it, no doubt because I was too busy being blissfully spaced out with the light on the ocean. Sighing, I get down under the car as far as I can, seeing if I can unhook it, but it’s no use. The net is totally wound up and fastened tightly. I have to call for help and by the time I’m on the road again, I’m an hour late on my round. Oh well, can’t be helped, and it’ll be a great story to tell Annie and my other old London friends.

At least the sun is now fully out and it looks like the weather has turned at last. When the sun appears after days of cloud and rain, people rush outside, and sure enough, there are Emma and Martin, sitting in their front garden enjoying a cup of coffee. They ask me to join them and for once I do, as I’m so far behind that another twenty minutes won’t hurt. When the coffee is poured, I ask them about their week, and I’m regaled with horror stories of the visitors they’ve had at the B&B.

‘Most are pleasant and no problem,’ Emma says. ‘But this week the complainers and troublemakers seemed to come all at once. It must have been the weather, which they seemed to blame on us. One couple actually accused us of false advertising on our website because we didn’t mention how wet and miserable it could be in Cornwall.’

‘Surely they must have been joking.’

As Emma shakes her head Martin says, ‘It wasn’t a joke.
They actually said they were going to report us, God knows to whom, not that it matters it’s so ridiculous. They got really obnoxious at breakfast and while the room was full, too. I had to walk out in the middle of their tirade as I’d have thrown them out there and then. Poor Emma had to go deal with them.’

His wife reaches over, takes his hand comfortingly as he’s getting agitated again, remembering the incident. He loathes having to run a B&B, misses his farm with a passion and now longs for the day when their market garden and goat herd will pay enough so that he and Emma can shut it down for good.

Emma says soothingly, ‘It was bad luck, having so many awful people in one week. It’s not usually like that. Most weeks pass with no problems at all.’

‘I know. It’s hard, though, even with the nicest of folk. People in our house, the house I grew up in, the house we married in, raised our son – I can’t get used to it.’

I feel I’m intruding now and finish my coffee quickly, start to rise. But Martin stops me. ‘I’m sorry, Tessa, I’m a miserable old sod I know. Come have a look at the goats before you go.’

I tell him truthfully that he certainly is not miserable and that I’d have problems too with people who treated me so rudely in my own house. ‘Forget them,’ Martin says. ‘That’s why I loved my cows when we were in farming, they never talked back, never made nasty comments. Like the goats. Can’t beat animals, a lot less complicated than humans.’

He’s in a much better humour as we wander over to the goat paddock. The kid I’d seen when still practically a newborn is nowhere around and I ask Martin about it. I’ve been watching it grow, feeling it was one of my own animals somehow, having been there not long after the birth.

Martin says, ‘It’s weaned now and down at Dave and
Marilyn’s, just took it there earlier today. It’s been sold to a man I know who keeps a few goats outside Truro. Dave’s going into work later and will drop it off in the van.’

I’m sorry that the kid is being sold but I don’t say anything. I’m trying to be sensible about animals on farms and not get sentimental over them. After all, I eat meat as does everyone in my family. I do wonder why Martin is selling it when he wants to build up his herd but I’m sure he has valid reasons.

I’ve got a few letters for Dave and Marilyn so I go there next. I’m pleased to see that the young kid is still there, in the fenced-in front patch where eventually Marilyn wants to create a proper English flower garden. ‘But that’s in the ten-year plan,’ she’d said to me, shrugging her shoulders. ‘There’s so much clearing up to do first.’

She’s there now, painting the downstairs window frames, her ginger hair shining in the sunlight. She’s wearing a sunhat as usual to prevent more freckles on her fair face, as she’s told me before. Plump and pert, she has round cheeks and wide expressive blue eyes. She makes a nice contrast to Dave who is tall, skinny and dark-haired.

Marilyn stops work to say hello and we rejoice together about the change in the weather. I tell her how they’ve made such a difference to old Mr Hawker’s house in the few months they’ve been here.

‘Still so much more,’ she sighs. ‘But we’ll get there in the end. I feel so lucky to be here I don’t mind the work.’

I remember that’s how I felt this morning, when I stood looking out over the sea and watching the light break through the clouds. I nod. Refusing a cold drink I say goodbye and get into the van. I have to back up and turn around to get away and as usual I check in my rear-view mirror that nothing has come up behind me, not that anything could as the cottage is at the end of a disused dirt track. I know that they haven’t a
cat or dog, or hens, or geese, all the animals that might be wandering around a house in the country, so when my mirror indicates all is clear I slowly reverse. Before I go more than a few inches I hear Marilyn screaming for me to stop. I brake, jump out of the car, and look in dismay as she falls to her knees next to the young goat.

I’m devastated. ‘Did I hit it? Is it OK? I thought it was fenced in?’

‘It’s supposed to be. It was, but somehow it must have got out, I don’t know how.’

The goat is lying on its side, panting. There don’t seem to be any outward injuries, nor is there blood. I was going extremely slow and hadn’t moved far, so perhaps it is only stunned. As we watch, unsure of what to do, the goat struggles to its feet. I’m filled with relief until I see it try to walk; it can hardly put its back right leg down.

At that point Dave comes driving down the track. The goat has now collected itself and is munching foliage at the side of the road, but he’s still not using that one leg.

Dave says to Marilyn, ‘I’ll have to ring the man who was having it. He won’t want it now, even if the injury turns out to be nothing much. He’s very particular about his goats.’

By now I’m wracked with guilt. I can see Marilyn and Dave are in a quandary. Marilyn says, ‘We’d better take it up to your parents, let them keep an eye on it. We’re both on a shift later this afternoon and I don’t think we should leave it on its own.’

I’m remembering how tired both Emma and Martin looked, about all the work they have to do with the animals and market garden now that most of the paying guests have left. They surely don’t need a maimed goat on their hands. Besides, Martin wanted to get rid of it.

This is all my fault so I say, ‘Look, leave it with me. I know someone who’ll check the goat over, a retired vet living not
far from me. I’ll take the kid and bring it back to you tomorrow if you’ll be around.’

They look relieved. ‘Are you sure?’ Dave says. ‘If you are, that’ll be great. I’ve got a day off tomorrow and Marilyn’s on a late shift.’

‘Perfect. I’ll bring the goat back in the morning and let you know what the vet says.’

‘OK. But if you run into any problems just take it back to Trelak.’

Dave puts straw in the van and gently lays the injured kid on top of it. My round finished, I head towards home, planning to return the van and pick up Minger later. But first I need to get this goat to the vet so I turn down the lane where he lives. Ben and I knew the man quite well in our old city days, before we all moved here, and I know he’ll help. Quite honestly, I can’t afford to go to a vet’s practice; I know the price of a visit is out of my league. I’m sure one of the Rowlands would have offered to pay for it but seeing it was me who ran it over, I could never accept.

My vet friend is just about to go out but kindly dons some overalls, comes out to the van and has a quick but thorough feel for broken bones or other injuries.

‘No need to do anything, that leg’s not broken. A good night’s rest is all that’s needed.’