A Drake at the Door (8 page)

‘Take my tip, get your tomatoes
early
.’

Periodically, as growers always do with their wholesalers, I would have a token row with them. I would find the dark, handsome Harold, who looked like a Guards officer, standing at the entrance of the warehouse that was close to the harbour. I would fume at him for some low price I had received, and he would reply by blinding me with figures as to why I was lucky to get any price at all. And if I were in the mood to be dispassionate I would see the truth of what he said.

‘Absolute glut of tomatoes, old man. Turning them away. What can one do when Jerseys are selling at sixpence a pound?’

It is at such moments that I have a despair that seems to freeze me with fear. There has to be behind any endeavour a façade of confidence which the individual concerned is aware is pretence. This make-believe confidence is the propulsion which drives you to the success you aim for. But it is a frail thing. If you talk loud enough, if nobody contradicts you so vehemently that you have to listen, if you meet with no unfair disaster, then you can nose this confidence until you reach a harbour.

But I was a long way from harbour. I could not fall back, shrugging my shoulders and saying to Jeannie, ‘Oh, well, it’s just one of those seasons.’

Because when Harold Jackson told me that day there was a glut, it happened to be our first summer of tomatoes. The greenhouse had been erected almost a year. First we had the failure of the sweet peas; and now the superb crop of tomatoes, clustering like huge grapes from the stems, had met a glut.

I was frightened at that moment in a base way. I wanted to give up. I felt that if after all the thought we had given to our future, if after all the strain of raising the money for our plans, if after all the denial of personal pleasures in order to consolidate our present, we were to be defeated again by circumstances beyond our control, surely it would be wisest to surrender.

This was an occasion when, if a partner of an enterprise snares the other into sharing his weakness, the brave hopes dissolve. I tried to ensnare Jeannie.

She would not allow me to.

I wonder sometimes which of the Walter Mittys in me I was looking for. It is easy to become so immersed in day-to-day events that you lose sight of yourself. It is a chronic disease. A daze of living. The twentieth century speeds faster and faster and the pace only allows you to live in perpetual disguise.

But I had time of my own. In the matter of motion it would seem I belonged to another age. I had the sumptuous daily experience of getting up in the morning when I wanted to get up, not because I feared a factory hooter or the punishing look of an office doorkeeper. I could lie on the rocks on a sunny winter’s day staring at the sea, while others could only peruse a brochure for next summer’s fortnight. I seemed to be as free as anyone can be in a brittle society; and yet I was looking for a Walter Mitty.

I still do not know which one it was I wanted to be. I do not believe it was ever clear in my mind. I had only the wish to survive, to preserve our way of life at Minack at any cost; and if this meant behaving in a manner utterly opposite to the intentions with which we began, it had to be accepted as the penalty of personal freedom.

Perhaps in my subconscious I have always wanted to be a tycoon, and a tycoon was my Walter Mitty. Certainly in my limited way I behaved like one. Within the next two years I had bought a tractor, a large number of daffodil bulbs, and four more greenhouses.

I was consumed by the conviction that our business could only be made successful by capital expenditure; and as that capital, like the capital of most businesses, could only be borrowed, the noose was tightening around my neck. The more I extended my plans, the more committed I became to responsibilities I wanted to avoid. I was pursuing the age-old formula of sacrificing the present for the ephemeral future. I had to spend in order to earn the turnover which would give us security.

Our fourteen acres stretched along the rim of Mount’s Bay, glorious meadows tilting towards the sea where we could stand and marvel at the beauty of the fishing boats below us as they hurried busily east to Newlyn and west towards Land’s End. And beyond were the cargo boats and Atlantic liners sailing aslant across the horizon from the Wolf Rock to the Lizard.

The gannets dived a half-mile out, sometimes singly, sometimes by the score, plummeting from the sky, hitting the water with a spit of a bullet. The gulls fluttered low, watching as if enviously. Cormorants sped on their mysterious missions. Curlews called their wistful cries. And sometimes as we stood there the sea looked so meek that it seemed there never would be a storm again; and sometimes its rage was so terrible that we held each other and were scared.

In olden days most of this land was cared for by hand labour. The meadows were too confined and steep for a plough, and so the shovels used to lurch through the soil. They were being used on this land when we first came to Minack, but I, thinking of myself as forward-looking, decided I could do the work both more cheaply and more efficiently by using machines. Hence I began using a rotovator.

It was a punishing instrument; and after three or four hours of hurtling up and down the meadows clutching its handlebars, I used to return to the cottage and lie down exhausted on the sofa. Nor did my muscles ever learn to accept the punishment, and for days following a rotovating session I would ache with muscular pains.

It was never a friendly machine. It was obstinate to start, drawing the fire of my temper even before the real task had begun. It broke down with frequency, as if it were a recalcitrant workman who pursued a policy of lightning strikes whenever he considered the work was too tough for him. It was dangerous. Once it turned over, a tine hooking my foot as it did so, and putting me to bed for a fortnight. I hated it, and although there would always be periods when it would be useful, I had to face up to the fact that it was too small for the job we now had in hand; and in any case, having suffered so much myself I could hardly expect Geoffrey, who now worked for me, to suffer as well.

We set about, therefore, searching for a tractor. It had to be small and easily manoeuvrable, and it most certainly had to be well balanced. Tractors are inclined to topple over on any hilly ground, but at Minack a tractor would face tests like those of a motorbike scramble. We perused the catalogues, Geoffrey and I, and decided that two might meet our requirements; and we asked for a demonstration. Each tractor came from rival firms. Both arrived at the same time.

It was a cold November afternoon and an east wind from the sea was chilling our fields. A cheerless day and its mood fitted that of the demonstrators. They were irritated they had chosen the same hour to show off their paces. They eyed each other, coat collars buttoned high, as if they were rival centurions waiting for the off in their chariots.

I sensed that both were apprehensive. This was no ordinary demonstration in which the trial tractor patrolled an inoffensive field, careering up and down like a new car on a highway. It was like the course for an obstacle race. Steep slopes, hidden rocks just below the surface of the ground, tablecloth spaces to turn upon . . . all these lay ahead. It amused me to observe Geoffrey, who had planned the course, wryly smiling in the background as the first tractor set out for the start.

It was a crawler. A small track-propelled tractor, based on a tank. It was also, as far as Geoffrey and I had secretly decided, the favourite. There was something secure about a tractor without wheels, crawling along with its whole body on the ground. A sudden bump could not upset it as a rock might upset a wheel. It moved relentlessly clasping the soil so that, if the chance were there, it would climb up a mountain. We had read these things in the catalogue. We watched it set off.

The demonstrator, perched in the seat, was accompanied by two city-dressed colleagues. The presence of these two served, perhaps, as a moral support; but they looked cold, and unsure of their duties, and I could not help feeling that within minutes of arriving at Minack they fervently wished they had never come.

It so happened that Jeannie, without my having to say anything, felt exactly the same; and she arrived just as the demonstration was about to begin with a jug of tea. I wonder how many jugs of tea Jeannie has brewed for no other reason than that she hoped to give somebody confidence. Anyhow, after the tea, the crawler set off on the first test set by Geoffrey, and the two city-dressed gentlemen walked along by its side offering directions.

Unfortunately these directions were necessary. I was aware within a few minutes of the operation beginning that the crawler had never been designed for such deceit of the earth as awaited it at Minack. The first test was a level piece of ground called from time immemorial the stable field; and Geoffrey had chosen it as a limber-up. It appeared so simple that he had considered it a kindness that the first trip of both machines should plough such a level surface.

After five yards the crawler came suddenly to a stop, as if it had been a yacht in full sail which had been jerked immovable by an anchor. The two gentlemen gathered round the demonstration; and I observed that the other, the rival demonstrator, showed his good manners by turning his back on them and walking away. There was a flurry of instructions and counter instructions, then the two gentlemen, their faces pink with cold, backed away as if they were the seconds of a boxer in the ring; and the crawler started off again. Another jerk. Another full stop.

As I watched, Geoffrey beside me, I had a strange premonition that it was I, not the tractor, who was running into trouble. I found myself thinking, affected no doubt by the bleakness of the afternoon, that it was unreal that the people present were dependent in some form on my patronage; the demonstrators who would have their reports to make, success or failure to explain; Geoffrey who would be passing on his observations over high tea at home; and even Jane, though not directly concerned, would go back across the fields at five and discuss the events of the afternoon with her mother. None of these people would have been at Minack were it not for Jeannie and me, and the dreams we had. And now they were leading me, almost dragging me along a route which frightened me.

For I could not pretend I had any lilt in deciding which tractor to buy. The acquisition would be a burden. There would be no prospect of some light-hearted compensation. It was not a foolish venture of frivolous intent. It was utilitarian. A lump of metal which would remind me day after day of the penalties of expansion. I was standing there, the wind sharp against my face, being courted by an object I did not want; which would prove irresistible. I was at a beginning that had no banners to welcome me. I had no feeling of faith, as I watched, that what I was doing, what I was prepared to gamble, what indeed were my secret hopes . . . that any of these things were justified. I was being driven by a force that did not belong to me, which I distrusted, yet obeyed.

I watched the crawler fail, and had this stupid, maddening premonition that it was the symbol of my own failure. I was trying to be too big, entering a realm in which my nature did not belong; as if I were thrusting myself on a social scene which did not intend to receive me. I was taking on the outward appearance of a go-getter without possessing the inward equipment, the standard of ruthlessness, the lack of sentiment, the greed masquerading in the guise of efficiency. I was trying to play a role for which I had no heart and to adopt characteristics which I had escaped to Minack to avoid. I felt frightened of myself on that unfriendly November afternoon. Yet I had to make a decision.

I bought the second tractor; and Geoffrey was as pleased as I was doubtful. It was an odd-looking machine, the diesel engine was behind the driving seat and the instruments were placed in the centre between the four wheels. These instruments, the plough, for instance, were controlled by hydraulic lifts with levers fixed to the steering-wheel column for the use of the driver. Thus, if you were ploughing, you unhitched a lever and the plough dropped to the ground and off it went turning its furrow as soon as you put the tractor in gear. Then you pulled the lever in the opposite direction and up came the plough clear of the ground. This system had for us great advantages. The driver could watch the plough at work below him, and so had an admirable chance to nose the plough without mishap over the numerous rocks which hid just beneath the surface of the soil. But there were rocks above the ground, and the steepness of the meadows; and from the beginning I was scared by the devil-may-care attitude that Geoffrey adopted to these hazards.

‘For heaven’s sake, Jeannie,’ I would shout, ‘look at Geoffrey!’ And Geoffrey would be careering over one of the larger meadows as if the tractor were a racing car.

Indeed from the beginning Geoffrey behaved to the tractor as if it were his own. He was for ever polishing, oiling, greasing, testing the tyres, and taking it out of the shelter where it was kept on any pretext he could devise. It was his toy, and I was not allowed to interfere.

‘What are you doing this morning, Geoffrey?’

‘Ploughing the sol meadow.’

I was stimulated to find him so keen. I was also apprehensive.

‘Be careful.’

I was apprehensive not only because he drove the tractor fast, but also because he seemed to have no fear in its handling. He would, for instance, be ready to plough a steep meadow
uphill;
and the engine being at the rear, the tractor was then poised to turn turtle. I used often to help balance the tractor on these occasions by sitting above the front wheels, thus countering the weight of the engine. But if I were not there Geoffrey would still pursue his self-appointed task; and then I would catch him by surprise, the noise of the engine hiding my arrival, and I would find him reaching the top of a meadow, clutching the steering wheel, and the front wheels of the tractor an inch or so free of the ground they were travelling over. Daylight between wheels and soil. Plough still in its furrow. A sight which suggested that at any instant there could be a tragedy.