A Drake at the Door (11 page)

There was the basic fact that Jane possessed the same wild love for the coast along which we lived as we did ourselves. It is no ordinary coast. The stretch where Minack lies and where Jane’s cottage still stands gaunt, staring out at the ocean, is not the kind of country which appeals to the conformist. The splendour of the cliffs does not lead to beaches where people can crowd together, transistors beside them.

The cliffs fall to rocks black and grey where the sea ceaselessly churns, splashing its foam, clutching a rock then releasing it, smothering it suddenly in bad temper, caressing it, slapping it as if in play, sometimes kind with the sun shining on the white ribbon of a wave, a laughing sea throwing spray like confetti, sometimes grey and sullen, then suddenly again a sea of ungovernable fury lashing the cliffs; enraged that for ever and for ever the cliffs look down.

And among the rocks are the pools; some that tempt yet are vicious, beckoning innocently then in a flash a cauldron of currents, pools that are shallow so that the minnow fish ripple the surface as they dash from view, pools so deep that the seaweed looks like a forest far below, inaccessible pools, pools which hide from everyone except those who belong to them.

High above, the little meadows dodge the boulders, and where the land is too rough for cultivation the bracken, the hawthorn, the brambles, the gorse which sparks its yellow the year round, reign supreme. This is no place for interlopers. The walkers, tamed by pavements, faced by the struggling undergrowth, turn back or become angry, their standardised minds piqued that they have to trace a way through; and it is left to the few, the odd man or woman, to marvel that there is a corner of England still free from the dead hand of the busybody.

The badgers show the way. Their paths criss-cross, twist, turn, pound the soil flat, a foot wide, high roads of centuries, and when the bracken greens or coppers the land, the way is still there, underneath, so that if you have a feel for the countryside the undergrowth does not halt you. The badgers lead you. As you walk, feet firm and safe, you part the bracken to either side and after you have passed, it folds back again, leaving no sign of your passage.

Here, on our stretch of the coast, man has not yet brought his conceit. It is as it always has been. Gulls sweeping on their way, a buzzard sailing in the sky, foxes safe from the Hunt, birds arriving tired after a long journey, others ready to leave, swallows, white-throats, chiffchaffs, fieldfare, snipe, the long list which we welcome and to which we say goodbye. Our stretch of the cliff has a savagery that frightens the faint-hearted.

‘Why isn’t there a decent path cut out along the cliff top? Absolutely disgraceful.’

‘All right in the summer, I suppose?’

‘I wouldn’t live here if it was given me.’

‘How wonderful if uranium was discovered!’

‘There’s going to be a coastal path. You can’t escape it, you know!’

‘This is marvellous. An August day in Cornwall and no one to be seen.’

There they are, the philistines and the individual they would like to destroy. Mass enjoyment, mass organised walks, mass anything if it can score a victory over the sensitive; thus the philistines, barren of feeling, plod their dreary way, earnest, dull, conscientious, honest, misguided – I pity them. So did Jane. But Jane, like ourselves, was infuriated by their conceit.

Every day of our lives was spent in unison with this coast, the rage of the gales, salt smearing our faces as we walked, east winds, south winds, calm summer early mornings, the first cubs, a badger in the moonlight, wild violets, the glory of the first daffodil, the blustering madness of making a living on land that faced the roar of the ages. These were the passages of our year. Glorious, hurting, awakening us to the splendour of living. But the philistines. They nose. They want to disturb. Yet they are blind to beauty. They glance at our coast as they rush by. They want to see a path on the map. That is their object. Everything must conform. No time to pause. Hurry, hurry, hurry . . . we have another two miles to go.

Once there was an uncommunicative young man who spent a month on behalf of some Ministry, mysteriously hammering on the rocks of our cliff, making a map and taking samples from the results of his hammering. His presence immediately alerted us to the possible dangers of his activity. Was he looking for uranium? Or tin? Or some other metal vital for industrial progress?

And only a few weeks afterwards, on a hot June day while we were digging potatoes, an aeroplane had droned to and fro all the day long over our heads, towing a boxlike contraption several plane lengths behind. It angered us. And while Geoffrey and I plunged our shovels up the rows, and Jeannie and Jane knelt picking up the potatoes and putting them in the baskets, our conversation buzzed over the possible threat the box might represent. It also, of course, provided a diversion from our monotonous task. Jane seized my shovel, at one stage, stood in the middle of a meadow and with the mock fury of a native who had seen a white man for the first time, pretended to hurtle the shovel at the plane like a spear.

Her response, however, to the young man with the hammer had been mischievous. He was shy and desperately earnest and although both Jane and ourselves tried to get him into conversation as he went to and fro his rocks every day, all we were able to extract from him was a ‘Good morning’ and a ‘Good evening’.

It was Easter and on the Sunday the young man arrived to perform his hammering on some lonely rock beneath the cliffs. It was beneath Jane’s section of the cliff and before climbing below, he had dumped his haversack in a meadow that sloped steeply from Jane’s cottage. He was, however, unaware that he had dumped it exactly in the middle of the area in which a regular Easter game was about to be played; for in Jane’s family there was a tradition to hide each other’s Easter presents outside in a chosen area of ground. In the garden, or, as on this occasion, somewhere in the meadows in front of the cottage. Jane, her mother and young Jeremy played their game, and then Jane decided to play another.

She took two small chocolate eggs wrapped in silver paper, stole down to the haversack and placed them neatly so that the young man would see them as soon as he returned from his duties. Later that day she saw him clamber up the cliff and arrive at his haversack; then she waited for his reaction. None. He hesitated for a moment, then strapped up the haversack and hoisted it on his back, and marched off. But what delighted Jane was that he kept the Easter eggs, he made no gesture of throwing them away. And so, because she was fanciful and because next day he made no mention of his find, she came to a happy conclusion. The young man had believed a pixie had put them there.

Jane had no fear of climbing the cliffs and sometimes I called her foolhardy. There was one section the marine commandos used to use for climbing practice. They came in their boats from Newlyn, then nosed inshore, and one by one they sprang on a sea-lashed rock; or they fell in the water. I have seen a dozen in the sea swimming in their life-jackets.

Their attempts would be watched by Jane who, after they had gone, would clamber to the spot they had chosen and begin to climb herself. She had the good sense not to go very far but she felt forced to make the attempt; it was a challenge and she was always looking for a challenge.

Heaven knows how she ever reached her secret bathing pool, which could not be seen from anywhere above; and then climbed back afterwards. Jeremy, her brother, never dared do it, and he was adventurous enough. It lay in a zone below the cottage, first a steep grass slope, then a sheer drop of a hundred feet, except for a narrow grassy ledge which fell like an almost perpendicular toboggan run on one side.

I do not know how anyone could stay on the ledge without slithering to the rocks at high speed unless there was a rope to hold. Jane never had a rope. And she thought so lightly of the risk, that on hot summer days she would rush back from Minack at lunchtime so that she could spend the greater part of her hour splashing in her pool and sunbathing beside it.

High above and eastwards towards Minack was the meadow she called her own. It was cradled in a cliff called Carn Silver, fifty feet above the sea and facing south to the Wolf. She reached it by a tortuous path that could never have been found by a stranger, and that, of course, was part of her fun. It was her own meadow and, she once told me, it seemed to welcome her as if it were alive, as if it were an animal. It was edged by man-placed stones, but it had been neglected for scores of years, and so it was perhaps possible that the spirits were glad Jane had become their chatelaine. She suited them. Her ways belonged to them.

It was here in this meadow of about thirty feet square that she carried out her market garden activities. They were not, of course, of the scope which merited the name market garden, but she had a game which she enjoyed and this was to pretend that it was indeed a market garden. Hence she used to write to various horticultural suppliers heading her notepaper after the name by which the three cottages were known. The Pentewan Nurseries, she called herself and her meadow.

She liked digging the meadow by moonlight. I wonder what the badgers and foxes said to themselves as this mid-twentieth-century teenager, long fair hair over her shoulders, sturdy, utterly content, jabbed the spade into the turf; for at first it was hard going, the ground had to be turned and the result waited upon, before it became soil. There she was, poised above the restless sea, the moonlight giving the Carn behind her its name, watched by the wild, sensed by the spirits, echoing the ageless effort of the peasant.

‘How did you get on?’ I would ask her next day.

‘I think I’ll finish it in another two nights.’ Her voice, as always, piped. Voices that are high can irritate. They can provide the effect of a false note. One feels sometimes that the person behind such a voice is shallow and that their behaviour is designed for effect. Jane pretended, she wrapped herself in illusions, but hers was always a true part in a glorious game.

In due course Pentewan Nurseries began to have callers or, to be exact, callers tried to find out where to call. A representative of a famous seed establishment, another on behalf of a world-renowned fertiliser company, another who had special lightweight flower boxes to sell, another who had a rotovator to demonstrate, these people wandered the district looking for Jane’s meadow.

On one occasion a Dutchman who had come to see me at Minack told me his next call was at Pentewan Nurseries and solemnly asked me to direct him. We have a number of Dutchmen who visit us during the year selling bulbs. They are an earnest, persistent lot. They have a silver-tongued patter which is persuasive and it was particularly persuasive in the years after the war when daffodil prices were high.

The farmers, envious of their horticultural neighbours, set out to plant bulbs as if they were turnips. They were also fascinated, since many of them had never left their own parishes, by the charming broken accent of the Dutchmen. It was a hint of the great world beyond, of naughty Europe, of sophistication they only read about. The Dutchmen played upon this weakness with such effect that West Cornwall was swamped with bulbs, and where cattle should peacefully have grazed, there were acres of daffodils. The honeymoon did not last very long. The farmers defeated themselves. They bought so many bulbs that they were incapable of looking after the daffodils. They had neither the time to grade and pack to professional standards, nor the wish to do so. They were only interested in the cream of the market and a quick return; and so when prices began to fall and daffodils were no longer easy money, they gave them up. And the charming Dutchmen had to be glib elsewhere.

They came often down the lane to Minack, in small cars with a left-hand drive, so easily recognisable that if one of us saw a flashing glimpse of the car through a gap far up the lane we would shout: ‘Look out, a Dutchman’s coming!’

We were a little malicious towards them. Jane, in particular, liked to tease them, although they had no notion that the teasing was in progress. She hatched a plot, for instance, to deal with those Dutchmen to whom I owed money.

It was easy to owe them money because part of their salesmanship was to offer credit until the flowers were in bloom. The fact that a glut had occurred, the prices had been low, and we had made a loss on the deal did not, of course, matter. The bulbs had proved their virility. And inevitably in the spring the Dutchmen would be coming down the lane to collect their cheque.

It was for this reason that Jane devised a series of compost heaps, each of which bore the name of a creditor. She got the idea from a story Jeannie told her from a thriller she had read. A gentleman, famed for his prize vegetables, had murdered his wife and buried her under the compost heap which was the envy of his neighbours. The story titilated Jane.

Her theory was that anyone who was so bold as to come to lonely Minack asking for money should be attacked, then buried in the compost heap allocated to him. Hence, when one of these people arrived, I would catch sight of her in the background making elaborate, fanciful signs denoting the method of his disposal. Sometimes, as I solemnly talked, I would see her aiming at the back of a creditor as if she possessed a bow and arrow, and the arrow was about to fly. I have also seen her, when looking over the shoulder of my visitor, performing bloodcurdling gestures with a knife; the creditor’s throat was being symbolically cut.

On one occasion there was an especially tough creditor, a man so dominated by his mission that he failed to praise the glory of the coastline. Such a failure vexed Jane as much as it did ourselves. We judged people by the degree of enthusiasm they displayed for our coast. Those who said how awful it must be in winter, as if the isolation could only be tolerated in summer, were placed by Jane and ourselves at the bottom of the dustbin. This particular creditor seemed to think that Minack was an appalling place in which to live a twentieth-century pattern, winter and summer.

Jeannie, nevertheless, because it was teatime, was prepared to offer him a cup of tea. The creditor and I were on a white seat outside the cottage and I saw Jeannie, as I sat there, hand Jane a cup, then Jane disappeared for a moment.