A Drake at the Door (3 page)

Gulls swept above the rocks below, and cormorants sped over the waves, and on the inaccessible cliff to the left a colony of jackdaws spent the day long in endless chatter. At places below the cottages, wondrous to a stranger, were shadows of once cultivated meadows lodged in the cliff like crevices. Who thought they were worth creating? Jane was to find them and to this day there is one where the daffodils she planted still bloom in the spring. There was no electric light in the cottages, no indoor sanitation, and water, except for a trickle of a well, was drained from the roof. The main road, and the bus stop, were a mile away.

Each cottage had a small garden with a gate that opened on to a narrow field which broadened as it went eastwards until it met another, a huge one leaning towards the panorama of Mount’s Bay like a giant carpet of green. At the distant end was a low stone wall. Over this into another field, and halfway across the tip of Minack chimney comes into view, then its massive width, then the roof. So many countless times was Jane to come this way; and when the gales blew she either had to fight head down for every yard she covered or had to race across the ground like a feather in the wind.

I looked at her now as she sat neatly on the edge of a chair. She was dainty, small hands and feet, and although her figure was sturdy she did not suggest the stamina for a landgirl.

‘What does your mother say?’

‘Mum’s not quite certain, but if I get a job . . .’

Her mother was in the quandary of all mothers. The age of breaking away, the taut arguments which swing this way and that, the rampaging emotions of love and responsibility, so anxious to act for the best, not to be selfish, not to yield to the temptation of keeping a child at home when the horizons await.

‘Mum wants me to do what I feel I want to do, and I want to work on a flower farm.’

No wonder we were the ace up her sleeve. Five minutes’ walk over the fields and she would be home. A job, in fact, on her doorstep. A home where her mother would be with her and her animals around her. We were her only chance. There was no other market garden in the neighbourhood who would need her; and neither did we.

‘Jane,’ I said gently, ‘you see we don’t need anyone like you. I’ve a man helping me and I don’t want anyone else.’

She flushed, and her eyes wandered away from mine; and there was a silence except for Hubert the gull who chose this moment to cry for his dinner from the roof.

‘That’s Hubert,’ I said, grateful for the distraction, ‘he’s very old and I don’t think he’ll be with us much longer.’ Jeannie had gone outside and thrown him up a slice of home-made bread, and the silence had returned. I did not doubt that Jane would be useful but another wage, however small, only added to our expenses. And yet . . . enthusiasm cannot be priced.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘when you get back next term you’ll find you want to stay on after all.’ And then, yielding a little, I added, ‘if the winter flowers do well we
might
be able to give you a couple of days a week after Christmas.’

We did not see her again until the first of January. I had almost forgotten her. Unaware of her character I imagined her visit had been a passing whim and some other excitement was now occupying her mind. Suddenly, however, I looked out of the window at eight o’clock on New Year’s Day morning, and there was Jane coming up the path to the cottage.

‘Heavens,’ I said to Jeannie, ‘the girl’s here. What on earth am I going to say?’

There was no need for me to worry. Within a fortnight she had nudged her way into our life. Within a month we had engaged her permanently.

Geoffrey was our mainstay at the time. His home was in our village of St Buryan where generations of his family had lived. He was in his early thirties, strong as an ox, and the fastest picker of daffodils I have ever seen. He raced through a bed of daffodils as if he were some special machine devised to do the work automatically. The art of such picking lies in turning your hand backwards, burying it in the foliage, then moving forward, breaking the stems off at the base until your hand can hold no more; each handful is dropped on the path and collected into the basket when the length of the bed has been completed. As always the final skill lay in instinct. Geoffrey had an uncanny knack of inevitably picking the right stem; for myself, if I tried to go too fast, I would curse myself for picking a daffodil still green in bud.

He was a good shovel man. This is an outworn phrase today but when we launched our ambitions at Minack, a man who was so described by his fellow villagers was among the labouring elite. The area was greatly dependent on cliff meadows and such meadows could not be dealt with by machine. The long Cornish shovel was the master. It turned the ground in the autumn, it planted the potatoes, it dug them out, and in August it was at work again planting the daffodil bulbs.

‘He’s a good shovel man,’ therefore became a testimony as powerful as one given to a Rolls-Royce engine.

I have spent many hours of my life behind Geoffrey and his shovel. I felt humble as I watched him for there was a polish about his actions which I could never hope to emulate. Just as he picked daffodils with style, so did he use his long-handled shovel.

And there was Shelagh.

We first met her in the square outside St Buryan church and we left her on that occasion without knowing her name or having any idea that she was to become for ever a part of Minack. We had A. P. Herbert staying with us at the time and one morning when we had gone up to the village a cluster of people had gathered around us, autograph books in hand, pressing A.P.H. for his signature.

Sometimes at such moments autograph hunters are like moths round a candle; they see one of their number collecting a signature, and they press forward themselves without knowing the identity of the celebrity whose signature they are seeking. Something is up, they realise, and they must not be left out.

Among this particular cluster were a number of children who, because of their age, had no real reason to know of A.P.H.’s distinction; and one of them was a young girl about twelve years old with mousey-coloured hair and pink cheeks who hovered shyly in the background, notebook in hand, until everyone else having received their autograph, she moved forward.

By this time it was perfectly clear that none of the children had the faintest idea who A.P.H. could be. He had gently asked each one, and each one had only been able to reply in a mumble. He, of course, was not upset at all by this. He only asked the question to bring life to a situation which might otherwise have been embarrassingly silent. Then up came Shelagh.

‘I’ll give you a shilling if you can tell me who I am,’ smiled A.P.H. taking her notebook and beginning to scribble. Shelagh blushed confusedly and looked down at the ground.

‘Sir Hubert . . . or something,’ she blurted out.

Even then, unknowingly, she had become a part of Minack. For a gull that summer had begun to haunt our cottage, sweeping inland every day from the cliffs, perching on the roof, watching us as we went about our business, splendidly emphasising a sense of community with the wild.

‘An old gull it’ll be,’ someone had explained to us, ‘it won’t be with you long. They often start coming to a habitation when their time is near.’

For that reason we had given it no name. If it were soon to die it was better for it to remain anonymous. So when it sailed to us out of the sky, one would call to the other: ‘The gull’s here!’ Just a nameless gull out of the hundreds which passed daily over Minack. And yet, as week after week passed by, and it became as familiar to us as the chimney beside which it strutted, we began to realise that sooner or later it must have a name. The gull had character. We found ourselves accepting its company in the same natural way as the sight of Monty our cat, stretched on a wall in the sun.

It was up there on the roof that morning we returned from St Buryan. We drove up the lane in the Land Rover, pulled up outside the cottage, and as I switched off the engine, the gull suddenly put back its head, pointing its beak to the sky, and began to bellow the noise of a bird-like hyena.

‘That,’ said A.P.H. in mock solemnity, ‘is a protest against my being called Sir Hubert . . . or something.’

From then on the gull had its name. For no other reason than this he was known to the end of his days as Hubert. He had a long time to go; and, as I will tell, Shelagh was with us when one day years later he came to us dying, shot through the foot by an airgun.

But at the time of Hubert’s christening, we of course did not know the name of the girl who had inspired it and we did not see her again for a year or more. Then her mother by adoption, who had a house in the village, came to help Jeannie in the cottage once a week, and when she was not at school Shelagh came too.

She was very shy. Some who grow up without ever knowing the love of their true parents develop a grudge against society; and who is to blame them? Unwanted from birth, they have reason to punch at life like a boxer hitting his opponent in the ring. They carry with them an unremovable scar. Their creation was a careless indulgence yet they, not their true parents, pay the penalty. I do not think it would be easy at times to be calm if one was one of them.

But there are others, and Shelagh was one, who suffer the hell of no confidence, who pursue their lives in a secret world in which kicks are expected; who, though yearning for affection, cannot believe it can be gained without hurt. They are suspicious without being cynical. They seek for ever to give and find the love their sweet natures were born to receive.

Shelagh came from St Buryan parish but spent the first few years of her life in the north country with the couple who had adopted her. When they retired they came to live at St Buryan; and inevitably everyone in the village knew of Shelagh’s secret. In a village where people were not so kind this might have been a bitter experience but no one, not even the children, ever made her deliberately aware that they knew of it. Yet she must have known that she was pointed at. She certainly knew she was pitied.

She blushed easily and was very silent; and when she did say a few words she mumbled them so that they were difficult to hear. She was, however, extraordinarily intelligent. We never had to tell her twice how to carry out a task, even in those first days when she was still at school; and if we praised her she greeted it with surprise.

She was learning to be a seamstress, and was already an excellent one; and so Jeannie used to give her socks to darn, zips to put in, the hem of a skirt to be altered, curtains to make, and so on. She used to take whatever it was home with her, and when she returned she would timidly ask for some tiny charge which Jeannie used immediately to treble. Jeannie, because they were of the same size, used to give her clothes she no longer needed herself; and I remember a tweed suit which Gertrude Lawrence had given Jeannie when she was playing in
The King and I
on Broadway. Shelagh was wearing it one Saturday afternoon when I saw her gaily sauntering down Market Jew Street in Penzance. The mark of Fifth Avenue on a waif.

When her mother by adoption stopped working for us, Shelagh continued to come on Saturday or Sunday mornings. We did not specifically ask her to do so, but she would arrive and start doing something useful like cleaning the shoes or, during the flower season, washing out the jam jars and galvanised pails. And there was one occasion, the first in which she played a vital part in the pattern of our life, when her presence seemed to us to be beyond value.

Jeannie and I had developed an idea in which we believed lay our flower-farm fortune. It was one of those ideas which come to you in the middle of the night and, to your surprise and delight, appear still just as bright in the middle of the following afternoon. The idea was to exploit the urge of holiday visitors to acquire mementoes by offering them a neat pack of daffodil bulbs. Instead of the factory-made light-houses, ashtrays and other ornaments, I would offer them something that was genuinely Cornish. They would look at their daffodils the following spring and happily remember their holidays of the previous year; and as daffodil bulbs need not necessarily deteriorate, each future spring would give them the same pleasure. Something alive to take back from Cornwall, instead of a tasteless inanimate object from a gift shop.

Nor did we have any competitors. Pre-packs at the time had not yet entered the bloodstream of the public, and certainly no one had thought of pre-packed Cornish bulbs. They were to do so, of course, the following year; but Jeannie and I were the pioneers, and the pathfinders for the big growers who thought our idea such a good one.

We now had to put our plan into effect; and there was a brush between Jeannie and myself. It was January, and though the holiday season was six months away we had immediately to begin our preparations. The fundamentals were clear. We would use for the packs the bulbs of those daffodils which we had found commercially uneconomical. We would begin digging them up when the foliage had died back in the middle of May or the beginning of June; and we would distribute the bulbs in one-pound packs to any gift shop in Cornwall which would take them. My difference with Jeannie was that I wanted to begin cautiously with a plain polythene pack and a suitable label attached, while she insisted the secret of our success would lie in an attractively designed pack which caught the eye.

I compromised by agreeing to seek the advice of an expert, and in due course the gentleman arrived at the cottage. He represented a huge company. He was a merchandise expert dealing with a vast variety of prepack designs throughout the country. He was smoothly self-important. He crushed me with facts, figures and theories until inevitably I realised he had his noose around my neck. I had to surrender unconditionally to such a man. He
knew
how to sell a product whether nylon stockings, washed carrots or bulbs. He possessed the magic link between the idea and the tick of the cash register. We were lucky indeed to have found him.

We had, therefore, an elaborate design for our pack. It was in three colours, red, yellow and green. There was the map of Cornwall in yellow with certain holiday centres such as Newquay and Falmouth marked in black, a gay sketch of daffodils in bloom backed by a sheaf of green foliage; and in bold red letters at the bottom of the polythene bag the words, Bulbs From Cornwall. It was very effective. And it was crowned by a splendid idea of the expert. Balancing the design in large red letters were the two words, Lamorna Pack, and underneath in tiny letters, Packed by Tangye. Thus we had skilfully imposed upon the public a trade name. Throughout the land the public would be asking for
our
pack.