A Drake at the Door (5 page)

‘Get an expert’s advice,’ some relation would say to me comfortably. It is always a comfort to push a decision on to somebody else. It is pleasant to believe that there is
someone
who can answer your conundrum. It is security in an insecure world. It is the twentieth-century version of an aborigine’s faith in an idol.

But there was, of course, nothing we could do about the sweet peas. Everyone agreed they were magnificent plants. Never before had it been known for such healthy specimens to be without flowers. It was extraordinary. It was worth making a special report. It was an example of what makes a specialist’s life so interesting, a crop failure which defies interpretation. A crop failure. It happened to be the first crop we had grown in our splendid new greenhouse. And therein lay the clue to what had happened.

The site of the greenhouse was in the dip of the land in front of the cottage, and we had chosen it because we had no alternative. Our neighbour was still in possession of the flat fields which were more suitable; and we had no idea he was soon to leave and that we were to gain control of them. The site of the greenhouse had been a bog.

The bog had provided us with our first challenge at Minack. It had coaxed us into action because of the closely growing elm trees on three sides and the willow hedge, bordering the lane, on the other. Here was a haven for flowers, once we had succeeded in draining the water away.

It took three seasons to achieve. We began, in our foolishness, with a broken cup and a trowel, cutting little channels which had no effect on the bog whatsoever; and we ended up with hundreds of feet of earthenware drainpipes in three-foot-deep trenches and a deep gulley to rush the water away to the sea. Our reward was a good crop of violets one year, of anemones the next, of potatoes the third. And then we set our hearts on the greenhouse.

We were prompted, of course, by material reasons. We could not afford the capital expenditure, but we also could not afford to do without the income such capital expenditure might bring in. An old story. The lure that carefully planned extravagance reimburses the sacrifice it demands. The sheer necessity of adding to one’s commitments in order to survive. The urge to lasso a future that only has optimism to guarantee success. Surely we are right to spend the money. Surely a greenhouse will be a fine investment.

We had drained the ground of surface water, but there was still the obstacle of three huge elms standing exactly in the middle of where the greenhouse would be. Why not a smaller greenhouse which would not interfere with the trees? Even the greenhouse salesman suggested it might be wiser if we were not so ambitious. It was chilling to hear him trying to persuade us not to be so bold. We did not want to be bold ourselves. We would have preferred to change our minds; and yet there persisted a relentless gnawing inside us that we were on the right road. The rest of our lives was to be spent at Minack and nothing mattered, nothing at all, so long as we had the foundations which enabled us to exist. A small greenhouse demanded the same emotion to erect as a big one. The same worry. And as we could not even afford a small greenhouse, we would lose nothing by having a big one; irrational reasoning perhaps, but to us it made sense. For at least a big one would earn more money.

So instead of a fifty-foot house only ten foot wide, we ordered a hundred-foot house which was twenty foot wide; and the elms had to be removed.

I find it a little awesome when one puts in motion a large plan from which there is no turning back, and I was in this mood when I watched the end of the elms. It made me sensitive to the sadness of losing the trees. They had welcomed us when first we came to Minack, and I was now their executioner. I could not treat them briskly as inanimate objects which happened to bar my progress. They were entities of our life. I could not watch their end without sentiment. They had received our fresh eyes of enthusiasm and now were the victims of inescapable reality.

They were reluctant to go. I had engaged a young man to do the job who had arrived one day with a very old tractor and a saw. First the main branches were cut off each tree, then the main trunk just above the base; and it was now that the elms became obstinate. A wire rope was lashed around the remains of the trunk and hitched to the tractor; and then the tractor was driven in short, quick bursts, so that the violence of its motion loosened the roots clinging deep to the soil. They were slow to loosen. I watched from the cottage window and was aware that any profit to the young man from the arrangement we had made together was likely to be dissipated by the break-up of his tractor.

‘Listen,’ I said to him, while he was having a particularly obstinate session with the last of the elms, ‘let me find someone with a bulldozer.’

Such a foolish suggestion. The young man was a Cornishman who had intense belief in the value of being independent. Nobody was going to suggest he could not do a job. This was the kind of insult which reared angrily in a Cornishman’s mind and remained there simmering long after everyone else had forgotten it. I had made a mistake and knew it as soon as I had spoken.

He and his tractor again attacked the old elm with venom, successfully removed it, and then he came politely to inform me that his activities had unearthed four large rocks exactly where the foundations of the new greenhouse would be.

‘I’ll remove them for you,’ he said, looking at me carefully, ‘if you want me to.’

I could not possibly say no; and as I gave him the go-ahead I had the coward’s thought of wishing I had never embarked on the enterprise. I had started a chain of events which would carry me steadily forward, relentlessly as if I were an object on a conveyor belt. This greenhouse would be only a beginning. I would want more greenhouses. I was a man whose personal freedom depended upon twining more and more responsibilities around himself. I could not avoid them. If I were to maintain the momentum of our happiness at Minack, the fear of material failure had to accompany me and I had to learn to accept it. It was obvious I would be frightened when it was my nature to do nothing; but Jeannie and I were not a rich couple in their South of France villa lolling on the terrace wondering how to fill the day. We were escapists, but we were not escapists to idleness. We had to earn a living out of our personal endeavours; and I had to be prepared to brace myself against such fleeting fears as beset me that morning when I waited for the rocks to be jerked out of the places where they had been since the beginning of time.

I was helped by the attitude of the young man. I have often found that individuals who formed no part of my life have influenced me at crucial moments. I do not mean they have been aware that they have done so, nor that their influence has been on matters of much importance. But something they say or do reflects, it seems to me at the time, a part of me that I am searching for. I suddenly realise what it is I need.

For as I expected, the tractor broke down; but instead of bemoaning the fact, using it as an excuse to cease his task, the young man cheerfully said he would go off to find a spare part and would be back as quickly as possible. He had already snapped a wire rope, a rope which to this day lies on the hedge as a rusty memento of his efforts; and there were still two rocks to move. But back he came, and the tractor began roaring again, lunging angrily, anchored by the rock which moved only an inch at a time. I know now he was foolhardy and that the strain he imposed on the tractor was quite unnecessary; for a stone cutter would have split the rocks and they could have been dragged away easily in pieces. But at the time there was for me a shine in his obstinacy. I had someone to share my own.

The greenhouse, except for the foundations of cement and breeze blocks, arrived altogether on a lorry that edged down the lane with its cargo peering high above the hedge, the glass in vast packing cases, the cedarwood structure in numerous bundles. It was a terrifying sight. The lorry crept down the hill stopping every few yards halted by boulders on the edge of the lane which caught the wide wheels. It would back, the driver would twist his steering wheel, and then forward again, bumping and slithering towards Minack. It turned the last corner, straightened up for the last two hundred yards, and then I knew the really dangerous moment had arrived. A stretch lay ahead like a miniature causeway with a ditch on either side. Was it wide enough? Had we made a mistake when we built this part of the lane?

For this lorry, in a fashion, was making a maiden voyage. Only a few weeks before, the lane had been changed from the appearance of the dried-up bed of a turbulent river, into a surface fit for a limousine. Up until then we had called it our chastity belt. It had been impassable for private cars and rough enough for the Land Rover to make us hesitate to go out on trivial errands. We had been contained in a world of our own choosing, voluntary prisoners whose object was to be screened from the kind of life we had left.

The idea of building the lane did not mean our attitude had changed. We were as immune from gregariousness as when we first arrived. We saw no gain in transferring ourselves from a city social life of which we had grown tired into a countrified version with its added drawbacks. At least in a city your attendance at a party is mitigated by the probable proximity of your hosts; in the country you have to develop the habit of driving forty miles there and back. Our life was too full for such waste of time. We were content in each other’s company.

We decided to build the lane because we realised it was necessary for our business. We could hardly expect to be treated seriously by salesmen who had to leave their cars a quarter of a mile away from us. We could sense in their manner on arrival at the cottage that they labelled us as amateurs; which we were, of course, but not in the way that they inferred. We were not playing at growing as they hinted. We were so painfully serious that we were touchy.

This touchiness came to boiling point one day when an official called on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture to investigate our qualifications for a road-building grant. This grant, which meant that fifty per cent of the cost would be paid for by the Ministry, was obviously vital to our plans; and when, through the sitting room window, I saw the official arrive, I determined to be on my best behaviour. Here was an occasion when I must not display my allergy to officialdom.

He wore a smart tweed cap, a check flannel shirt, a bow tie, and a loosely cut country suit, the uniform of a prosperous farmer on market day. He was indeed a farmer, one who was engaged by the Ministry to serve on Agricultural Committees that watched over the affairs of fellow farmers. An unpaid job. An overworked one. But one which carried with it the pleasures of prestige.

I came out of the cottage and down the sloping path to where he was standing, a smile on my face and my hand outstretched.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said warmly, ‘it’s very nice of you to come.’

I had scarcely uttered these words when I sensed he did not wish to notice my arrival. He was gazing round at the broken-down walls, the shells of disused buildings of long ago. He threw a glance at the cottage. He stared across the untidy moorland to the sea. He looked at some boulders heaped on one side of the path. It was obvious he was performing an act for my benefit.

‘Gosh,’ he suddenly said, ‘What a place!’ And had I looked close enough I would have seen him shudder.

I knew at once what he was up to. The Ministry quite rightly had to guard against unwarranted claims as there were, in any case, enough genuine claims to soak up the grant allocations. Hence it was perhaps inevitable that people like ourselves were looked upon with suspicion; for we might be pretending to have a market garden in order to gain the advantage of the grant.

‘Good afternoon,’ I repeated. But I no longer offered my hand. Whatever his suspicions he had no need to be tough.

‘Don’t tell me you live here all the year round?’

He had addressed me for the first time, looking me up and down as he did so, as if he were judging the points of a steer. I felt uncomfortable.

‘Yes, indeed,’ I said, keeping my voice calm, ‘it is the most wonderful place in the world.’

I was rather like a father whose child has been unfairly criticised. Here was our beloved Minack receiving the scorn of a stranger. Our life was being questioned. Someone who did not know anything about us was daring to suggest to my face that Minack was not a fit place to live in. My touchiness was awake. His attitude could not have been better calculated to make me lose my temper.

‘You had better show me round,’ he said.

It was February and in Minack fields the green shoots of the early potatoes were breaking through the ground. Down the cliff the haulms were already beginning to cover the rows; and over at Pentewan the two acres of meadows we rented were a picture of possible prosperity. Facing due south and earlier than Minack they had long rows of youthful potato tops, a foot apart, lines of healthy, dark green; and we were very proud of them.

‘I don’t see how you can expect to get a potato crop from
this
meadow.’

The tour, I had expected, would prove to the official that we were, after all, serious growers. We had seven tons of seed potatoes. We were one of the largest growers of cliff early potatoes west of Penzance. And I confidently felt, as we set out, that the official would quench his asperity as soon as he took stock of our efforts. Now he was criticising the condition of a meadow; and the maddening thing was he was right. We had happened to pass the one meadow at Pentewan of which I was not proud. It was patchy. It needed weeding. But what was it to do with him?

I am one of those who have never felt comfortable in the possession of power over a fellow human being. It is my weakness of character that I can never give an order or attempt to impose my will without a wavering doubt. I do not want to hurt. I do not want to exploit the weakness of another because I am aware of the weakness in myself. I could never become a tin god because I have never believed that the pursuit of power is an end in itself.