Seagulls in the Attic (15 page)

It takes a while to get the picture of what has happened. All the people whose post usually was delivered early in the morning had called to ask why it wasn’t there. All of a sudden everyone seemed to be waiting in for some important missive or something, and wanted to know why the post hadn’t come yet. ‘Always here by this time,’ was the most common refrain, ‘but not a sign of any postie yet.’

‘What about those on the hill that got their post early?’ I finally ask. ‘At least they must have been satisfied.’

Margaret shakes her head impatiently. ‘You must be joking. I got complaints that the post came before they had time to put their dogs in, or open the latch of the front porch where the post usually goes. Or they had a letter they wanted to give you but you came and went too early.’

I look over at Harry who winks at me. Deflated, I say to Margaret, ‘Well, they’ll get used to it, won’t they? It’s so much easier not just for me but for any of us, doing the round this way.’

Susie chimes in before Margaret can answer, ‘No, m’bird, they won’t get used to it. Best carry on the way it’s been done for years. Feels more comfortable that way for everyone.’

Margaret agrees. I throw my hands up in the air with an exaggerated gesture of defeat. ‘I give up.’

‘You’ll learn,’ Susie says as I go out the door, patting me on the shoulder as if I were a child being taught a gentle lesson. ‘Don’t fret about it.’

Harry whisks me off for a coffee, this time to the Sunflower Café as the sky is threatening rain and we need to be indoors. Ben is in there, serving coffee and food, but he’s too busy to sit with us and say more than hello. We find a small table in the corner by the big picture window, looking out at the sea. It’s a deep navy blue-black today and the surface is pocked with raindrops as the threatened deluge begins, the boats in the harbour securely moored but bobbing about in the swell. The café is soon filled with people sheltering from the storm.

Over coffee Harry says. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. You know, about changing the postie round.’

‘Harry, this is me you’re talking to. Your ears were flapping away, taking in every word. You loved it.’

He grins, ‘OK, I admit it, I was openly eavesdropping. And yes I love it – I love your naivety sometimes. It’s very endearing.’

‘What do you mean, naïve?’

‘Oh, about rural life. You’ve done a brilliant job adjusting to it, fitting in, and everyone loves you for it. But now and again you haven’t a clue.’

‘Well, what did I do wrong this time? I was only trying to help out.’

‘That kind of help is neither wanted nor needed here. People get used to their routines, they live their lives by the simple, ordinary rhythms of life. The time the post is delivered, the hour
for walking the dog, those sort of things. It’s the frame around which they live their lives. Changing the framework makes them jumpy, as if the picture inside has turned crooked.’

I grimace at him, ‘You’re getting poetic all of a sudden. Anyway, how do you know all these things?’

He laughs. ‘I made the same mistakes you did. Tried to organise the sleepy little firm of accountants I work for, make it more efficient like the one I worked for in London. Did the whole managerial bit. No one wanted to know.’

‘Like no one wants an easier, more efficient postal service.’

‘Not if it interferes with life as it’s been lived for ages.’

Before we say anything else, Ben has a chance to come by for a few minutes between customers. He says hi to Harry and then, to me, ‘I think Google Gull has learned to fly. He was gone from the chicken run this morning.’

Before I can reply, a half dozen wet soggy customers come through the door and he has to leap up and sort out the rush for tables and service.

Harry looks at me quizzically. I’ve not told him about Google. ‘So
what
has just learned to fly? You’re not breeding canaries to feed to Elvis, are you?’

‘Elvis eats baby mice, not birds. I’m sure I told you that.’ Harry says, ‘C’mon, confess. What or who is Google? And what’s the relationship to the Internet?’

Honestly, you’re really not allowed to have secrets here. ‘Google Gull is a seagull.’

‘A seagull?’

I tell Harry how we found him, how we’ve managed to keep him alive in spite of all the odds. ‘In fact Google is quite sweet. He’s getting very tame and follows me around the hen compound.’

Harry doesn’t say anything but rolls his eyes and shakes his head. I can read body language all right and what he’s saying
is, oh no, here she goes again, the whacky postie. I’m starting to feel quite defensive.

‘Google is a very sweet seagull and it’s a miracle he didn’t die. Most baby birds do when they fall out of their nests. He’s very affectionate and we’re all very fond of him. Besides, Ben has just said he’s learned to fly. So no doubt he’ll be off soon and we’ll never see him again.’

I lapse into a brooding silence, thinking that I’m going to miss our little bird when he flies away. Not that he’s particularly little anymore. He’s grown enormously, with glossy grey feathers, a long yellowish beak and pink legs.

Harry says, ‘Well, good luck to you. Just don’t tell any of the shopkeepers around St Geraint and the other seaside villages that you’re rearing another seagull to join the others driving them berserk in the summer months.’

‘Don’t
you
tell them,’ I say as we get up. ‘Anyway, Google’s not like that. He’s a very civilised seagull.’

Before I go I try to catch a few words with Ben but he’s too busy to talk so I only whisper, ‘See you at home.’

I’m eager to get back now, to see for myself if Google is flying. But when I get there, the old chicken pen is still empty. Has he flown away already? I thought he’d at least have had the decency to hang around and say goodbye. I walk dejectedly to the back door of the house. I’m about to go inside the kitchen door when a loud cawing makes me jump a mile. I whirl around and find myself eyeball to eyeball with Google. He’s perched on the old picnic table in the lean-to outside the kitchen, looking perky and pleased with himself. ‘Google,’ I shout. I go inside to find a bit of food for him and when I turn around, there he is right at my feet. Jake sees him and hares over, barking wildly, and I pull him away, shutting him in the living room for a minute while I sort out the bird.

‘Hey Google, you can’t come in. You know that.’ He flaps
his wings and makes argumentative seagull noises. It’s like having a teenager in the house. ‘C’mon, I’ve got some leftover tuna fish for you but you have to have it outside.’

I put the food on the outdoor table and he flies onto it then devours the tuna ravenously. I’m so impressed by his newly acquired flying skills that I watch him rapturously.

When the others come home, we all go outside to watch him fly, but our seagull has a stubborn streak and won’t perform on demand. Instead, he stands on one leg, tucks his head under his wing and stands there immobile on the outdoor table, waiting for us all to go away so that he can have a little snooze in peace. Despite this stubbornness we’re immensely proud of him. Our baby has grown out of the nest, but he’s still happy to come back to us. How satisfying life is.

Well, perhaps not all the time. A few days later when it’s time to muck out the hen house again, I start to feel itchy and when I lift the roof off their perches I see a rash of bright red everywhere. There seem to be some horrid tiny insect lurking in the hen house, thousands of them. They’re on my chickens too, which I notice are also scratching themselves and acting restless and unhappy.

A consultation with Edna and Hector informs me that I’ve got red mites, or rather the hens do. This is a particularly nasty parasite that gets onto a chicken’s skin and sucks their blood. In haste I phone Pete who brings me a supply of anti-red-mite powder which I have to put on all the hens, rubbing it onto their feathers and underneath them as best I can. I’m itching myself the whole time I do it and, of course, the hen house has to be cleaned thoroughly and powdered everywhere. It’s a huge job and I’ve got to do it on my own. It’s half term, Ben is working triple time at the café and the children have gone away for a few days with some friends and their parents.

When the work is done I feel as bedraggled as my sweet
hens, who are scratching indignantly after being covered with the powder. They didn’t like it one bit. That’s the trouble with creatures whose language we don’t speak, I think as I finish clearing up after the awful job – you can’t explain that what you’re doing to them is for their own good.

When the mites have gone and the hens are clean again, I tell them they have a wonderful surprise in store. I’ve at last found them a cockerel, through an advert in the local weekly gazette. He’s a little strutting Ancona cockerel, black with white spots, and he makes himself at home quickly amongst the other chickens. We’ve called him Pavarotti because he’s like a little Italian opera singer. Already he’s bossing the hens about the place and I love the way they let him, although you can see they’re merely humouring him and that they are the ones who truly rule the roost.

I’m spending more time than I should sitting on my lawn chair watching the antics in the chicken orchard and communicating with the birds. It’s marvellous to watch how they follow the sun around their enclosure, grouping together on one side to get the morning beams and then gravitating like the earth itself to bask in the afternoon light. In fact I’m so mesmerised by the chickens that one evening at the end of the month when Ben is working, the children are still away and I’ve had a satisfying afternoon in the allotment, I take a half bottle of chilled white wine left in the fridge, and a glass, and drink it in the garden to enjoy every moment of this long day, this fantastic light. The sky is cloudless and the blue is deepening as I take my first sip, though the sun is still far from setting. There’s something about the quality of the light that tells you night is approaching, though it’s coming slow and lazily, as befits this warm, perfect day. The hens and the cockerel are still out but you can sense, by the way their busy scratching has slightly slowed, that they’ll be thinking of going in soon
and hunkering down for the short night. In the distance the sea changes colour with each passing moment. Until we moved here I never knew that there could be so many shades of green and blue.

I sit for ages, drinking wine, watching the hens, the lowering sun and the sea in the distance. I’m thinking, as I often do these days, that life really can’t get any better than this.

I’m out on my rounds on an early June morning when I’m confronted by a customer I hardly know, not only talking to himself but punching his fist into his hand so hard that I’m afraid he’s going to break a finger or two. As my van pulls up a short distance from him, he turns and sees me. Now he looks embarrassed rather than raving mad and I smile and wave at him in relief.

I grab my bag of post and we walk towards each other. Mr Armstrong is one of the newcomers who have taken over Trescatho. When I first began delivering here, this isolated village, set in a cul-de-sac at the end of a rickety narrow road a couple of miles from the nearest amenities, was a sleepy Cornish village, tiny and rural. I used to fantasise that Trescatho was another Brigadoon, a hidden place frozen in time that only appeared every hundred years. But sadly not any more. In the last year nearly the entire village has been taken over by holiday
homes and the old stone houses have been repaired, renovated and painted up like an illustration for country living in a stylish Sunday supplement. The result is disquieting. I can’t help remembering the lovely old village as it was.

Now the place is bustling back to life again, after the early months of the year when it looked not sleepy but completely dead. Even at this early hour, I can see people at windows, or outside staring over their back gardens across a lush field to the sea beyond. But Mr Armstrong, normally a happy sort of man, does not seem to be enjoying either the beautiful morning or the view.

He and his wife, both retired civil servants, are one of the few people in Trescatho who actually live here all year long. Most of the local inhabitants have succumbed to the temptation of the ludicrously high prices being paid for property in Cornwall and have sold up and moved away to less salubrious towns and villages inland, though even these now are beyond the reach of most of the Cornish. It’s good to see permanent residents like the Armstrongs settling here, making Cornwall their first home not their second.

Mr Armstrong looks deeply troubled. ‘Are you all right?’ I ask.

He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, I don’t usually talk to myself. But I was so furious I had to get out of the house, as I didn’t want to worry my wife unduly. She’s been so happy here; it’s been a dream we’ve had all our married lives, moving to Cornwall. And now—’ This normally placid man suddenly makes a fist with his right hand and plunges it again into his left.

‘Has something happened?’ It’s a daft question.

He unclenches his fist and sighs. ‘It’s our neighbours again. The Carsons. At 7.30 a.m. this man is phoning me from London, ranting on about his wall.’ Mr Armstrong points to
a low stone wall next to the driveway that goes to his garage. On the other side is the Carson’s drive.