A Drake at the Door (4 page)

For by this time, and after several visits, the imagination of the expert had taken wings. We were now close friends. I looked forward to his visits with excitement for he conjured up prospects of our future prosperity so lush that I began to wonder where the bulbs were going to come from with which to fill our packs. Our sales would not be limited to Cornwall. We would compete with the imported Dutch bulbs. We would make use of the magic name of Cornwall and sell our packs throughout the country. The potential sales were enormous. My friend knew of city stores who would queue up for our supplies. I even began to worry that the object of our escape to Minack might be defeated. Supposing we ended up by having a factory?

We now had to decide how many packs to order. Before the expert had become my friend I had been thinking in terms of a couple of thousand, but now the picture had become so rosy that I had to think in the role of an imaginative businessman. After all, as the man pointed out, his firm would not be able to replenish our supplies at a moment’s notice; it would take at least six weeks and might we not lose in that time the flush of our sales? And there was another point, a very old point as far as salesmen are concerned. The more we bought, the cheaper per thousand they would be. It was a tempting situation.

We were being encouraged, meanwhile, by our friends and those with gift shops who would stock the packs. We were flattered by their applause and delightfully deceived by their enthusiasm. Ours was a gimmick that could not fail. A small fortune lay ahead of us. We would be fools not to prepare for such success with verve. We ordered twenty thousand. And it was their arrival which gave me my first apprehension.

Ours is a long lane, narrow and twisting, and the turning space in front of the cottage is confined. It is a major task for a lorry to turn. The prospect of one trying to do so is always disquieting. And on this occasion on a peaceful Friday in the first week of June when Jeannie caught sight of the lorry lumbering slowly down the lane and shouted: ‘British Railways are coming!’ . . . I suddenly found my confidence ebbing swiftly away from me. I had had good ideas before in my life so why should this one succeed when others had failed?

The threat from the lorry did not materialise. It turned without mishap and as it bumped away, Jeannie and I were staring at a huge cardboard packing case it had left behind. Again I had a sense of foreboding.

‘£120 worth of polythene,’ I murmured as I stuck a knife into the edge of the case. I tore the top off, and there were our Packs. A vast concourse of Packs, sandwiched together, thousand upon thousand of them, the map of Cornwall a shining yellow, the clarion call of Bulbs From Cornwall a gleaming red. It was immensely impressive. My friend, true to his word, had done an expert’s job.

‘They’re marvellous,’ said Jeannie happily.

My morale had many times been boosted by Jeannie’s buoyancy. She attacks a problem without burrowing too closely underneath it and thus balances my sense of realism which I so often find depressing.

‘Perhaps they look marvellous,’ I said lugubriously, ‘but we have to fill them
and
sell them.’

It was her luck, however, that at this very moment a car arrived and out of it stepped a handsome young man who explained he had a gift shop at Land’s End. He had heard, he said, that we had packed bulbs to sell and could we let him have a hundred Packs as soon as possible?

Land’s End! The prospect of having an outlet in this memento paradise seemed equal to winning a football pool. I was instantly at the other end of my personal see-saw. I was more excited than Jeannie. I visualised the hordes disgorging from their coaches and cars, posing beside the Last House in Britain, and returning from whence they came with our Pack in their bags.

‘We must get Shelagh tomorrow to help us,’ I said urgently to Jeannie, ‘this is our great chance.’

The three of us worked throughout Saturday and it was the charm of Shelagh that, young as she was, her enthusiasm was as great as ours. It was always to be thus. Some days, of course, she was to have her moods like everyone else and I would say to Jeannie: ‘What’s wrong with Shelagh today?’ I would ask sometimes the same question about Jane. But neither, when later the two of them were the backbone of our work at Minack, ever failed to give us the enthusiasm we hoped for.

Shelagh had quick hands. In front of us on the bench of the packing shed we had cardboard boxes in which were heaped the various kinds of bulbs. Hospodar and Lucifer and Bernardino, Sunrise and Laurens Koster and Croesus. We had bought these bulbs when first we had come to Minack, because they were very cheap and we did not know the blooms were no longer wanted in the markets. To us they were beautiful to look at; but daffodils have fashions, and these to the salesmen of Covent Garden were as incongruous as the costumes of the Twenties. They consumed, however, the same time and expense in picking, bunching and sending away, as daffodils which fetched three times their price.

But now at last they were rewarding us. A few of each in every Pack, then on the scales and off, a wire clip around the neck of the Pack, and it was ready to join the others. Jeannie at one end of the bench, I in the middle, Shelagh at the other; and for every Pack that I filled, Jeannie and Shelagh filled two. It was tiring. We had to concentrate. But never throughout that Saturday did Shelagh pause. She was only fourteen.

In the late afternoon Jeannie and I set out for Land’s End, the Packs grouped in boxes in the well of the Land Rover. It was a moment of high expectation; and when we joined the line of cars heading for the conglomeration of buildings, higgledy-piggledy like litter, which lay lumped at the end of the road, we were blind this time to the ugliness of the crowds. Land’s End, for us, had only been a place to visit in winter; when the seas were lashing the Longships, and the sun was setting angrily, and mysterious cargo boats struggled on their course, and we were alone except for the seagulls. But on this afternoon the crowds were our friends. The jammed car park was a delectable sight. The coaches, spilling out vast quantities of the human race, presented us with notions which would have even excited the manager of a Marks and Spencer’s. What potential sales! Six packs per coach and this first supply would be gone in a morning. And there were still all the other holiday centres of Cornwall.

‘Jeannie,’ I said, as we arrived at the Gift Shop, my voice firm with conviction, ‘
this
is the moment we have fought for.’

I do not know, even now, what went wrong. I think perhaps our idea was ahead of its time. More likely we did not possess the flair to exploit our opportunities. The art of salemanship requires a toughness that is not part of our characters. Neither of us can bargain, and we are too easily bruised if a stranger by his manner makes us feel we are living the role of a petitioner.

That summer we roamed Cornwall with our Packs. True we covered our expenses but the prairie fire we expected never materialised; and without the urge of instant success our enthusiasm flagged. The holiday-makers preferred Midland-made hardware to our bulbs, and not even the eye-appealing, cunningly designed front of our Pack could persuade them differently. Our friend the merchandise expert had been proved wrong.

We never saw or heard of him again. He had proved himself an excellent salesman and he had left us something to remember him by. It is still there in the packing shed. A huge cardboard packing case. Nineteen thousand empty Packs inside.

Shelagh left school the following year and went to work as a domestic help on a farm. We seldom saw her. A year or so later she left to join a number of girls on a large flower farm near Penzance; and, in order to save her money on the bus fare, she used to bicycle to and fro from St Buryan, up and down the hills, undeterred however bad the weather.

One day, as she was leaving work, her bicycle skidded and she fell off, so injuring her head that she was for ten days on the danger list. It was, of course, some weeks before she was fit again to work and by this time she had lost her job. One morning she arrived white-faced at our door. She looked as if a long period of convalescence was essential.

But I knew without her speaking why she had come. Jobs are difficult to find for girls in West Cornwall and so it was inevitable that she should think of us. She had walked the three miles from St Buryan; and if during this walk she had been reciting to herself the phrases she planned to use, all she now could blurt out was: ‘Have you got a job for me?’

There was no job. She was just too late.

‘You see,’ I explained, before driving her back to St Buryan in the Land Rover, ‘we have just taken on a young girl. Jane . . . Jane Wyllie.’

I wish I had known at that moment that these two were to become such close friends. The lost look on Shelagh’s face would not have been necessary.

Shelagh, Jane and Jeannie in a Minack daffodil meadow

The first task we gave Jane was looking after the sweet peas in the long greenhouse in front of the cottage. We had sown the seeds in September and transplanted the sturdy little plants in October. Now in January they were speedily climbing their supporting strings, and requiring the same persistent attention as painters give to the Forth Bridge.

They were scheduled to flower early in April; and we had chosen this crop, after earnest discussions with our horticultural advisers, because the greenhouse was unheated and sweet peas were certain to withstand the limited cold that might be expected in our area. We had not, however, foreseen the labour they would involve.

The shoots had endlessly to be pinched out, and when you have two thousand plants the extent of this mammoth task can become a nightmare. Not for Jane. She used to disappear into the greenhouse at eight o’clock in the morning and still be there at five in the evening, day after day. And when periodically I used to open the door and call for her, an answer would come from somewhere in the jungle of green like the squeak of a rabbit.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

I met her mother one day after a month of this and asked her how she thought Jane was enjoying herself. I felt sorry that her first task was proving so dull. It was very useful but dull.

‘Oh,’ said her mother, ‘you don’t have to worry. Do you know what she said to me yesterday? She said: “Mum, while I was among the sweet peas today I thought how lucky I was to be doing what I’ve wanted to do all my life.”’

I believe one of the salutary first lessons I had was when I discovered that a task painstakingly performed did not inevitably result in achievement. It was a depressing discovery. Even as a boy I felt that the years were too short; and so when I learned one can often work arduously without at the end having anything to show, I was deeply affected. Ever since I have been impatient for quick results.

I wonder, then, if Jane was affected by what happened to the sweet peas. I do not expect so. The first disappointment does not do any harm. Only a scratch on the hand. It is hardly to be noticed. One is safe if there is no quick repetition; and then, when this happens, a girl like Jane will remorselessly struggle on to the next time. No doubts for her. Or, if there are, they are quelled.

Not a single sweet pea flowered. Not a bud. Not even the prospect of a bloom, had we decided to continue nurturing the plants until Domesday. The leaves were a fine green and the stems thick as my little finger. No sign of disease. And Jane had attended to their wants, pinching the side shoots and performing the awkward, time-consuming, patience-testing task of layering . . . she had cared for them with the same diligence as she would have cared for pampered children in a kinder-garten. And now only foliage to gaze upon. Why?

I have had many inquests at Minack and doubtless will have many more. There is a macabre comfort in gathering together the specialists to stare at the doomed crop. One is paying court to the principle of learning from failure, and seeking reassurance that the catastrophe is not of one’s own making.

And yet it can be a sterile experience. The specialists, spared of any financial interest, sometimes have a sadistic relish in declaring that if such and such had been done at such and such a time, all would have been well. It is their dogmatism that irks me. It is their forgetfulness. I have often been guided by specialists along paths which, after failure, they have forgotten were their idea.

So here we were staring gloomily at the sweet peas with a specialist. The curriculum began, as usual, with a few moments’ silence, standing at the entrance of the greenhouse, the long lines of green offenders stretching in front of us. There followed a sudden movement, a few steps taken swiftly forward, a hand outstretched, a leaf rubbed between the fingers, a stem caressed, a finger poking at the soil around the roots; it was a ritual of cultural investigation I have witnessed many times before and since.

‘What do you think?’

I maintain always a note of optimism in this question. Perhaps it springs from some primitive belief in the power of the witch-doctor; more likely it is a leftover hope from my youth in which the magic of the expert was daily drummed into me