A Drake at the Door (21 page)

‘Surely you can take more than ten dozen?’

‘We can’t sell what we’ve got, old man. Honest we can’t.’

‘I’ve run out of crates, Fred.’

‘Hang on a moment, I’ll get you some.’

‘When shall I come in again?’

‘Make it Friday, early as possible, old man.’

This is the tedious part of growing. The part I do not envisage when the seeds are sown; then all my hopes and concern and endeavour dwell on the struggle to produce the crop. I am blind to the time when I have to sell, when the results of all the hard work depend on the unpredictable whim of the public. My cocoon of pleasure that is wrapped around the achievement of growing a fine crop is now torn to shreds. I am back again in the metallic world from which I sought to escape. I must be a businessman, and bargain and argue and flatter; and I must be prepared to face the fact that what has been produced is not wanted.

And then, perhaps the day after I have returned to Jeannie in gloom, I get a message from Jacksons’: ‘Bring in as many lettuces as you can.’ The public, overnight, have acquired a taste for lettuce. A miraculous force has gathered them together and marched them to the greengrocers. Nothing rational about it. Nothing that even the most experienced could foresee. Just a whim.

Sometimes on these summer mornings when the Jackson order was a big one, Shelagh would come in early too. And there were occasions when Julius would also proudly arrive.

‘A record walk this morning. Clipped a minute off my time.’

His was a wonderful walk. He was sleeping in a caravan in the woods of an estate a couple of miles away; and the route to Minack was across green fields that were raised like a plateau above the sea, then down into a valley where a stream rushed in haste, leaping the boulders, sheltered by a wood where foxes hid, bordered by lush vegetation in summer, and in winter welcoming snipe and woodcock giving them a home safe from the guns. Julius loved this walk. He crossed the valley, then up past Jane’s cottage and over the stone hedges to Minack.

‘Heavens, Julius, I didn’t expect to see you today.’

‘I thought I might be able to help.’

He would always quickly go and have a look at Boris because, I believe, he was proud that he had named him. There was, for always, a link between the two. It may not have been very important, but then I sometimes wonder how to gauge the degrees of importance. I have remembered many things, which at the time outsiders would have considered insignificant.

Julius was one of those people who, youthful though they may be, instinctively wish to help others. It is not just the question of practical help. It is the art of conversation, or of silence; the intuition when to continue a line of thought, or when to stop. There are no lessons to be given about these things; the sense of embarrassment which for a second may be hinted, or the flicker in eyes which give a clue to secret hurt, or the flavour of a moment which insists on a change of subject, none of these occasions can be dealt with by rule of thumb. Instinct is the king.

Thus Jeannie and I would be there with these three who had the promise of the years before them, each helping us, each so full of secret thoughts and hopes, puzzled, contradictory, timid and brave, obstinate and imaginative. I understood why Jeannie said to me one day that she was grateful for the necessity of cutting lettuces; a humble task, perhaps, but there was more to gain than the price received.

The promise of the years . . . how strange it was, in view of what was to happen, that it should be Shelagh living now in the same caravan a year later, who told us that Julius had died in a motor accident.

Boris in the greenhouse . . .

. . .
and outside the front door

A year later Geoffrey had left Minack and I had not replaced him.

The high hopes we had once possessed that our extra land and bold plans would materialise into productive success had not become fact. I sold the big tractor, decided to do the heavy work myself and to concentrate mainly on crops in the greenhouses.

Jeannie and I were sad about this apparently backward step. We would, of course, have preferred to have seen our production gathering momentum, but the weather had been consistently against us. In the old days growers used to rely on one good year in four, and that one year compensated them for the three bad ones. Such an attitude is out of the question today. High costs have defeated it.

We were prepared to face this step, however, because we were utterly content in our environment. We never had to wake up in the morning and say to each other that we wished to be somewhere else. We never had to daydream about the perfect home. We were in it.

In London we had known many people who displayed the outward pageantry of success; the power to demand homage from others, the money and its claim to buy pleasure, the headlines to flatter them, the gush of friends who were not friends, the illusion that to hurry was to go somewhere. We had seen all this, and known its emptiness. Thus, when we surveyed our disappointments, we took courage from our belief that they were trivial compared with the gain.

During April there had been a crisis in Shelagh’s life. Her mother by adoption had sold her house in St Buryan and had gone to live in Penzance. In Shelagh’s opinion, at that time, Penzance was too far from her work and she set about looking for somewhere else to live. It was a bad time to look. Those who had rooms to let were close to their summer harvest, and they did not relish a permanent guest even if it were Shelagh. By luck, however, we heard that the caravan where Julius had stayed was empty; and the owners, instead of grasping holiday visitors, offered it to Shelagh at a special rent.

How bright was her smile that day she heard the news! She was grown up. She was going to live on her own. She was trusted. And the very next day she brought Jeannie a present, a little cream jug. When she handed it to Jeannie she was blushing, a moment of great shyness, just a quiver of a smile, then a murmur: ‘Thank you.’

There were many ways in which Shelagh showed her affection for Jeannie. When she lived in the house at St Buryan she tended the small garden and was very earnest in her efforts. She and Jeannie used to discuss gardens at great length as they worked together, and periodically Shelagh would bring results from her efforts. She brought mint and parsley roots, and one day when Jeannie had expressed a liking for London Pride, Shelagh brought her some the following morning. Another time Jeannie was complaining of the way the west wind roared through a gap into the tiny front garden, and Shelagh replied she knew just the answer. She dug up a veronica bush from her own garden and planted it herself in the offending space. There was another occasion which was specially endearing. She had read in a magazine article how to make a miniature garden. She took great trouble to give it the semblance of Minack and one morning arrived with it in a box, waited until lunchtime and then presented it to Jeannie. It was tragic. The journey from St Buryan had knocked it to pieces and instead of a miniature garden, it was a jumble of tiny debris.

Shelagh had been brought up to be particularly house-proud and there was endless chatter between her and Jeannie on household matters; whether this detergent was better than the other, whether a new furniture polish was as good as it claimed to be; and endless discussions as to the best way to get a shiny black top to the stove. There was also much talk about recipes. Shelagh was constantly producing new ones from magazines and Jeannie would try them out while Shelagh would taste the result. Once, several months before her birthday, she had shown Jeannie a particularly luscious cake recipe and Jeannie, thinking ahead, said to herself that she would do nothing about it until the birthday was due. She told Jane of her plan, baked the cake, and Jane’s mother iced it expertly in two shades of blue. Then they gave it to her. For Shelagh it was a moment of sheer enchantment.

She had been trained to perform any house-decorating task with the efficiency of a professional. When Jeannie mentioned she thought it time the walls were painted and the ceiling papered, Shelagh quickly said she would do it. She had the gift, too, of being able to share Jeannie’s enthusiasm and they discussed together the colour of the paint and the pattern of the paper as if she, too, were living in the cottage.

Thus her arrival in the caravan did not only provide the delicious sense of the first freedom from continuous contact with older people, but also the chance to put her house-proud instinct and training into practical effect.

The caravan, fifteen minutes on a bicycle from Minack, was a cream utility one. It had long ago lost its wheels and it was raised above the ground by big blocks at its corners. There was an airy space underneath. When I saw this I thought that a westerly gale could pick the caravan up and blow it away with Shelagh inside. I said so.

‘Just think of the excitement,’ grinned Shelagh. As usual she was enjoying the prospect of drama.

I decided, however, to do something about it, so I got two wire ropes and threw them over the caravan roof, then lashed them to stakes I drove into the ground. Even so, when the westerlies blew, the caravan rocked. It amused Shelagh.

‘How did you get on last night?’ I would ask, in view of a particularly vicious gale.

‘Not bad. Might have been in a dinghy out at sea.’

The caravan did, however, have some special advantages. It had, for instance, a few yards away, a small outhouse in which there was running water, a washbasin and separate lavatory. These were advantages which did not belong to many farm cottages.

Then there was the site. One might not expect many girls to be thrilled about a caravan which was a mile away from a tarmac road; it was more suitable, perhaps, for an eccentric romantic. For the caravan was poised on a small plateau of a field which fell steeply to a wood and a sparkling stream; and this wood and stream shared a companionship until they fell together into the sea. You could see the spot where this happened when you sat in the caravan, down below you perhaps four hundred yards, at the beginning of the sweep of the wild bay with big boulders lining the shore. No sand. It had the tradition of being a beckoning bay which meant that without apparent reason it lured ships to their doom.

Such a notion delighted Shelagh. It appealed to her Grand Guignol romancing. It added spice to her excitement of living alone in such a place; and she ghoulishly suggested that she would play her own part in attracting the doomed ships. She laughingly described how, when the storms were raging, she would dangle a lamp outside her caravan in the tradition of Cornish wreckers.

Within a week of her arrival the utility aura of the caravan had been turned into the cosy atmosphere of a home. Jeannie gave her the blue gingham curtains, and Shelagh made covers for the settee and chair to match. She chose a pink, flower-patterned curtain to separate the little kitchen, where she had a Calor gas stove, from the bedroom. And on the dining table, as one would expect of Shelagh, there would be a bowl of flowers standing on a gaily coloured mat. All the time she was there she kept fresh flowers in that bowl, and if there were none to take back from Minack, she collected wild flowers from the wood in the valley.

The caravan was wired off from the rest of the field so that it was enclosed, together with the outhouse, in a sizeable compound. She promptly cleared up the debris which was lying around and set about turning a section into a kitchen garden. Shelagh was always practical. Behind the shyness, she was a determined person; she now had to buy her own food so she was sensibly taking the opportunity to save money on vegetables.

But this good sense was soon to be countered by an impulsive act which seemed to me to be endearing though foolish. I believed that as she had taken on the responsibility of running her own home for the first time, she ought to settle down and appreciate the problems involved. My attitude, of course, was patronising. It had nothing to do with me how she led her life, and I was reacting perhaps in the same way that a puzzled father is confused by the antics of a teenage daughter. He is near enough in mind to think he understands, but far enough in years to be ignorant.