A Drake at the Door (2 page)

I now found myself in the process of conducting two negotiations instead of one, and in both I was sure to be the financial loser. I did not care. I had the same irrational, dynamic instinct which pushes a man up a mountain, the urge for conquest without a material value, to reach a halo which rewards the individual but never the onlooker. Security at Minack meant to us a way of life we loved. How do you price such an acquisition?

I outlined the situation to the land agent who needed no persuading to appreciate the chance I was giving him. I was offering, in fact, to buy the lease of a farm, and return it without charge to the landlord. It had never happened before in the land agent’s experience; and yet, fortunately, he had enough subtlety of mind to realise there was guile behind my offer.

I was expecting payment, but the payment was not to be made in pounds, shillings and pence. I was asking for the fulfilment of my plan to secure a direct lease for Minack together with the extra land I required; and I was also asking to propose my own nominee for the farm proper.

Such an arrangement would enable the landlord once again to have direct control of Minack and the farm; and we would have the peace we sought. A secure lease for ourselves, a co-operative neighbour of our own choosing.

As it happened I already knew whom I wanted to have the farm. I had stopped the Land Rover by the milk stand which corners our long lane and the main road a week or two previously when a young farm worker called Jack Cockram came up to me. He had heard the farm was vacant and could I put in a good word for him?

At the time, of course, I could be of no help. I had neither the ear of Harry nor of the land agent, and so there was nothing I could do. But I knew the occasion was important. I had always liked Jack. He had been a wartime evacuee on the farm where he was now a skilled farmworker. He had married Alice Grenfell, niece of Jim Grenfell who kept the inn at St Buryan, and they lived in a council house in the village with their one little girl and were soon to have another.

He was plainly a type who could become a good farmer and yet, because of lack of opportunity, he would be more likely to remain a farmworker for the rest of his life. Both Jeannie and I now began to experience great pleasure that not only was there the prospect of benefiting ourselves but also the possibility of launching this couple into a new life. And so, as soon as the land agent had given tacit approval to my suggestions, I determined to complete my negotiations with Harry.

I had no need to force the issue. The evening I saw him he too had decided the time of dithering was over. I thought his proposals were perfectly fair, and I promptly accepted them. He had gained from the sale of the lease the amount he would, in any case, have received in due course from the rents of myself and my neighbour. But there was one aspect of the deal from which he could claim a victory. It was indeed a handsome victory; and when I returned from the meeting to Jeannie my elation was tempered by this subsidiary problem which now faced us.

‘Jeannie,’ I said, ‘we are now the owners of twelve useless cows.’

My concern was due to these particular cows being classified as reactors, which meant they had failed to pass the tubercular test examination. Up to a year or so before this would not have mattered as there were scores of farms in Cornwall with reactor cows. But there had now been a Government edict ordering all cows to be tested, and those which failed had to be destroyed and sold only for meat consumption. The deadline for this edict was at the end of this particular year.

The result had been that the value of such cows had nose-dived; yet I had contracted with Harry to pay him the price of eight years before, the same valuation of the twelve cows with which he had stocked Minack when my neighbour, the dairyman, was installed.

I was further hampered by my inability to set about selling the cows until Michaelmas Day when my neighbour departed. The only thing I could do was to study the cattle markets of various centres in Cornwall, and to stare at the cows themselves as they munched in the fields around us.

As they were now entities in my life, I inevitably began to feel sorry for them; but I also discovered the streak of the businessman was becoming alive in me. I was paying £35 for each of these cows and according to the markets they were not worth £15 a piece; and already the flush of my triumph in securing the lease had started to dissolve into an unhappy feeling that I was wasting a great deal of money. I waited for Michaelmas Day.

At midday the cows became ours. Twelve cows peacefully grazing in a meadow – £420 worth. They looked so content and handsome chewing the grass, the Guernsey buff against the green, the dark Minack wood behind them and in the distance the sea, that Jeannie and I found ourselves marvelling at the toughness of people who can deal in animals as merchandise. The first and last time we were ever to sell an animal. And the sooner it was done the better.

Jack Cockram, now installed at the farm, had agreed to look after them, but he too urged speed although for a different reason. The cows might get ill and then I would be worse off than ever; Thursday was market day at Penzance and the best thing I could do would be to arrange for a haulier to collect them. But I had observed that the prices at this market had been lower than anywhere else. It was Monday and I had two days to decide.

Meanwhile I had a most unexpected piece of good fortune. As the new owner I received the cow dossier, a document containing the history of each cow, and to my delight I found that one of them was not a reactor after all. It had passed the test. It was the equivalent of a thoroughbred. In a matter of seconds this particular cow had shot up in value from £15 to over £70. And there was more good fortune soon to come.

On Tuesday afternoon around four o’clock, at a moment when I was pacing the sitting room discussing with Jeannie what we should do, a car arrived; and when I looked out of the window to see who it could be, there was Harry getting out of one door and another man, in a faded tweed suit and a weather-worn trilby, getting out of another. This was the first occasion that Harry had arrived at Minack without being the boss. I wondered why.

It was an endearing reason. Having completed the deal with me, having tasted his victory, he had an unsophisticated wish to soften the difficulties in which he knew I would be involved. He had brought me a cattle dealer. Here was a man who, if I agreed to his offer, would carry the cows away and I would never have to see them again. It was an idea which had a special appeal to Jeannie.

I found myself, then, with Harry sitting on one side of me on the sofa and the cattle dealer on the other, while Jeannie, after a hurried instruction from me, was in charge of dispensing the beginnings of a bottle of whisky.

Harry, because that had always been his intention, performed the task of breaking the ice and he did so by extolling the virtues of the cattle dealer. He was an old man, and I felt that he carried with him the sniff of cattle on the move from one place to another; and, although he belonged to a world of human beings with whom I had no common denominator, I had enough zest for opportunism to listen and not to contradict.

The price discussion began. Out of the corner of my eye I admired the polish with which Jeannie removed one empty glass, refilled it, then watched again as that too became empty. Harry meanwhile, having unloaded his charm, slipped quietly into a corner, listening but taking no part.

I found a wonderful toughness within me that I had expected to be smothered by the threat of failing to complete a deal. Why does one have to wait for an emergency to be aware of the secret self? I can cope with the emergencies of my old life, the instant quick adjustments when countering the moves of those on similar wavelengths; but I fumble when faced by those with whom, except in the matter of the moment, I have nothing in common.

So there I was discussing the price of these cows when I saw Jeannie disappear out of the front door. One does not embark upon the kind of life I was leading unless one’s wife is so part of it that one never for one second has to consider her as one of its problems. Never begin if there is doubt on either side. This is an adventure which is doomed unless it is shared . . . and there was Jeannie disappearing out of the front door.

I had now become increasingly confident, a wave of unreality had taken charge of me and I was talking about cows to this cattle dealer as if I had myself been a dealer all my life. I did not believe my voice . . . ‘Give me £25 each for the lot and it’s a deal.’

I learned in due course that this was the moment when Jeannie felt she could do nothing more. She felt I was among wolves. Her affection was tested not by offering any practical help, but by releasing me from her presence; as if she, because of her familiarity, might bring doubt to me as to whether or not I was capable of standing up against so strange a creature as a cattle dealer.

She took a walk to the cliffs, and looked down on the sea of Mount’s Bay. It is a sea which is always reassuring. It has the familiarity of the street outside other people’s homes. For Jeannie, at that moment, it had the reassurance to bring her back to the cottage with the certainty that all was well.

And all
was
well. As she came up the path from the cliff, the cattle dealer was signing a cheque using the bonnet of his car as a desk . . . and the price for each reactor cow was £23.

Harry was looking for a cigarette and I gave him one.

Now we were ready for the next stage of our life at Minack.

Jane was with us now. She had knocked at the door of the cottage one August evening the year before while Jeannie and I were having supper. She wore jeans, sandals, and a dark-blue fisherman’s jersey. Hair, like a pageboy’s, fell the colour of corn to her shoulders; she was tiny, and yet there was about her a certain air of assurance, a hint of worldly confidence which belied her childlike appearance. She was fourteen years old.

‘I’m Jane Wyllie,’ she announced, ‘I want to work for you.’

There was no sound of the soil in her voice. It was a bell, a softly pitched bell and her words came pealing out in a rush; as if they had been rehearsed, as if a pause would break the spell of childish enthusiasm with which she was flooding the cottage. Neither Jeannie nor I dared interrupt. We had to wait until her role had been played, watching blue eyes that seemed to lurk with laughter, paying proper attention to an intense performance designed to prove her services would be invaluable.

Her mother said later that a relation had declared that Jane was deadly; meaning that Jane, once she had made up her mind on the course to take, was never to be deterred. She overcame obstacles by smothering them with her tenacity. She did not, like some, leap over them in the zest of temporary emotion, landing on the other side only to find the thrill had disappeared. She crawled to her goal and, once there, blossomed her achievement by being content.

Her plot, in this particular instance, was a simple one; for Jeannie and I were to be the means by which she would be able to leave school. We were the pivot of her future. If she could win us, total strangers as we were, over to her side she would be able to defeat an array of schoolmistresses, relations and friends who were urging her to pursue a scholastic career. We were, therefore, unsuspectingly the ace up her sleeve. We sat in innocence and listened.

She was at a boarding school near Salisbury and as she would be fifteen that November she would be old enough to leave at the end of the winter term. Her headmistress looked upon the prospect with displeasure; because, it seemed, she possessed the kind of brains which could be moulded into the pursuit of a conventional career. At this point, unknowingly of course, she had struck a chord of sympathy in both Jeannie and myself. Both of us carried the memory of youthful rebellion, and neither of us had ever regretted it. Jane had begun to seep into our affection.

Her home life, we learned, had been haphazard; and when she began to tell us about it she lost her tension, bubbling a tale of the nomadic adventures of her family as if there had never been any sadness in their substance. A farm in the New Forest, another on Bodmin Moor, another at Wadebridge . . . there were so many homes that I lost count and yet the theme, as she told of them, was one of happiness despite the plain fact that the story was one of a family struggling financially to survive.

I realised as I listened that here was a girl, young as she was, who appraised the values of life by the events she experienced rather than by what she was told. She was off the main road of convention rambling in the scrubland discovering pleasures that were hidden to others; and as she talked it became clear that she had a remarkable mother.

It was the impetus of her mother’s new job that had pushed her to Minack. The family, for practical reasons, had now split up. One older sister had married, another had become a groom in a riding stables, her father had entered the hotel business, and her mother had now become herdswoman at the neighbouring farm of Pentewan. She had arrived at the end of July from her previous job at Wadebridge together with Jane, Jeremy who was nine, Acid a brindle bull terrier, Eva a griffon, Sim a Siamese cat, Val a white Persian, Polly the parrot who had belonged to Jane’s grandmother, and Lamb. Lamb was now a sheep.

The farmer, a quiet fellow, from whom it happened I rented two acres of cliff land, had viewed the arrival of the Wyllie gang with surprise. He had expected only the herdswoman whom he had interviewed in a Truro hotel; but the caravanserai had arrived in a van with an élan which drove him into silence.

He greeted them doubtfully at the farm, then sent them on down the cobbled lane to the cottage which was to be their home.

It was the centre one of three that were strung together, posted above a high cliff, a cliff which plunged in stages to a sea that was restless even when the wind was light. And when the storms raged, spray drifted over the cottages, windows were filmed with salt, and sometimes the gales in their fury punched open the doors, spewing like a jet inside.