A Drake at the Door (24 page)

And yet I wonder sometimes whether I had an intuition there was danger ahead, and which I did not recognise except in my subconscious. Jeannie, too, feels that she had this intuition. Certainly the two of us acted in a strangely protective way towards her, a way that was not inspired by any awareness that something might be wrong.

I, for instance, found myself steering her away from work which tested her strength. She had, of course, baskets of flowers to carry, but I found myself always turning to Jane when I was needing help with my manual labour. My choice was not deliberately made. I just knew instinctively that Jane was the stronger.

Thus it was Jane who used to accompany me as I struggled with trimming hedges and cutting the grass of the daffodil meadows. I had two instruments which I used, a hedge cutter and a motor scythe; and both of them, while leaving me exhausted after an hour or two of using them, also required considerable stamina on the part of my helper. I also required Jane’s patience and humour; for both hedge cutter and scythe were my enemies.

The hedge cutter, as long as a fishing rod and as heavy as a sack of potatoes, was fastened to me by a strap across my shoulders; and I used to advance along the chosen hedge, my hands clasping the handles of the hedge cutter, my arms bringing the fast-moving blade in a downward sweep, while Jane with a fork speedily swept the cuttings away. It was her speed which eased my labour. If my downward sweep was checked so that the blade was blocked by the debris it had cut, there would be a splutter and the engine would stop.

I would then swear. Jane, on the other hand, because she had grown accustomed to the inevitability that the engine would sometimes stop, appeared not to listen but continued to collect the cuttings into heaps. She also knew that a period of swearing was scheduled because the hedge cutter’s engine would almost certainly prove difficult to restart.

The performance was repeated with the motor scythe. I would lunge with a thin cord to get it started, and then career through a meadow, cutting a path while Jane pulled the grass quickly to one side. If she was not quick enough, the motor scythe would also get blocked and the engine stall; and my swearing would begin as before.

It is odd, but engines seldom have operated at Minack in a normal fashion. Engineers called to make them go again have repeatedly remarked that the engine fault has never been known before. One firm lightheartedly suggested they should put up a tent so that their engineer could regularly be on the premises to mend one particular rotovator. On another occasion, after a brand new rotovator, specially delivered, remained obstinately silent, the sales manager made the journey from the Midlands to see what was wrong. And as usual his comment was: ‘Never known it before.’

Jane maintained that the pixies were at work. They resent the noise, she alleged, and so at night silenced the engines. It was all wrong, and futile, that mechanisation should reign on these ancient cliffs; the ghosts were angry, for their values were being challenged; the values which had stood for a horizon of time. Challenged by instruments impervious to loyalty.

There was one tractor, the big one which we sold, that excelled in obstinacy while at Minack; yet as soon as it was taken away and put to work somewhere else, it behaved with perfection. While we had it, for instance, the hydraulic system which lifted the plough would only operate when it was in the mood; and this was seldom. Thus we were always asking for mechanics, and the mechanics were always saying, after two or three hours’ hard work, that they had never known the fault before. I used to become distraught.

‘Jeannie,’ I would cry, after a mechanic’s visit, ‘you won’t believe what he said . . .’ Jeannie did not have to pause; ‘I know, I know. . .’

When the day came that I sold this particularly large tractor, the purchaser explained that he would send a lorry to collect it on the following day. I told Jane.

‘Well,’ she said, rubbing her hands together and answering me as if she were a conspirator, ‘what about getting up very early and ploughing that piece above the greenhouse we want?’

Her idea was an excellent one. It was a piece of ground bordered by ditches which had been dug by me because of the clinging wetness of the land. If I ploughed it myself I would not only save the expense of a contractor, but I would also speed the opportunity to begin using the land.

The lorry was expected at ten in the morning, so I got up at six; and by eight, when Jane arrived, I had almost completed the job. There is a clean, powerful sense of ambition achieved if you are ploughing a piece of land; and it is a beautiful morning, woodpeckers laughing, blackbirds singing, indeed all the birds you live with throughout the year, are exulting in a blue sky and a warm sun. Gulls were following my furrow, so too jackdaws that came from Pentewan cliffs opposite Jane’s cottage, and robins and chaffinches. As I went up and down the field I rejoiced I had sold the tractor. It was no longer a hulk of metal to worry about. By the evening I would have forgotten its existence.

And then, on this lovely morning with Jane now walking up and down behind the plough, turning over the furrows with her foot, the furrows which the plough itself had failed to turn over, I backed the tractor, and a wheel fell into one of my ditches.

‘Jane!’ I cried out in anguish, ‘I’m stuck. I can’t get out!’

It was the front right-hand wheel, a small wheel compared with one of the rear wheels; and it was lodged two feet in the ditch, tilting the tractor so that it looked from where Jane was standing as though it might turn over.

She was laughing at me, fair hair against rich brown earth, eight in the morning and a pagan rejoicing in a joke that might have been of her own making. The tractor stuck, me in a panic, the purchaser on his way with a lorry.

‘All right, all right, all right,’ I said, ‘it’s all jolly funny, but what are we going to do about it?’

I knew, better than she did, that it might be a major performance to get that wheel out of the ditch.

‘I’ll push.’

She pushed while I revved the engine, but the rear wheels, which the engine powered, revolved without any wish to grip the earth.

‘Push harder.’

Jane, in rubber boots for a change, was shoving at the tractor, a shoulder pressed to the mudguard, as if she were a female Hercules.

‘Give it a little bit more,’ and as I said this my foot was on the accelerator, the engine was roaring, and the time was nearing nine o’clock, ‘you look as if you can move a mountain . . . so do it!’

And she did.

The tractor suddenly gave a lurch, the wheel cleared the ditch, and I was out on the level ground again.

‘Jane, dear,’ I said, ‘well done!’

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied with mannered and humorous politeness, ‘but, if I may say so, you don’t put a tractor in the ditch two hours before the purchaser collects it!’

Jeannie’s intuition about Shelagh concerned her bicycle journeys. She was always saying to her that she should not embark on these marathon rides. And Shelagh just smiled and did not take any notice.

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ Shelagh would say, ‘you don’t have to worry about me.’

But Jeannie still worried, and as the winter grew fiercer, she continued to drive Shelagh home. Then in January it became obvious that life in a caravan on a Cornish hillside with gales rocking the caravan every night, torrential storms damping the inside, was scarcely suitable for a girl by herself who was not yet twenty. And so Shelagh decided to move into Penzance and live with her mother by adoption.

Again Jeannie experienced an intuitive sense of apprehension.

‘Now, Shelagh,’ she said, though of course it was not her duty to impose her views, ‘mind you use the bus and not your bicycle. It’s too far by bike.’

Shelagh smiled at her. The delicious smile we knew so well.

‘I’ll see,’ she said. And then, reminding us of what we already knew, ‘I always biked to and from St Buryan when I was working in Penzance.’

For a while she did as Jeannie had asked her, and at the day’s end we would drive her up the long lane to the bus stop. It was a sensible arrangement, and we were glad that she had agreed with us.

But one morning she arrived again by bicycle, and the next and the next. Spring was in the air, she explained, and she loved to feel the soft air in her face.

She never came by bus again.

When the three of them, Shelagh, Jane and Jeannie, were in the flower-house bunching, Boris would waddle at intervals to the open door.

He would stick out his long white neck, waggle his tail feathers, and peer at them with a beady eye.

‘Here you are, Boris.’

And one of them would throw him a broken biscuit.

There was always a supply of broken biscuits, cake and breadcrumbs on the flower-bench table. Jane and Shelagh made it their business to see that this larder was kept full, because it was not only Boris who expected to be fed. There was a constant coming and going of chaffinches, robins, bluetits and tomtits, a whirring of wings as the flowers were bunched.

There were, of course, favourites among them. Shelagh favoured the lady chaffinch that seemed to be Charlie’s wife, and Jeannie preferred Charlie, who was now just as noisy as the first Charlie, and we all loved Tim, the robin.

‘Where’s Tim?’

‘He’s in deep thought . . . up there on that jar of anemones.’

He would perch for an hour on end, quite still, looking down on the work in progress. Then suddenly he would treat us to a warble. A whispered warble. A warble so muted that we had to smile.

‘A little louder, please,’ would come Jane’s own quiet little voice. But Tim would continue to warble as softly as before.

He especially enjoyed standing on one leg on a thick black-painted beam which stretched across the flowerhouse; and it was here that I last saw him. It was a beam on which we used to staple the prize cards we had won at the Penzance Flower Shows; and this gave us an opportunity to make idle jokes about him.

‘Tim’s in a first prize mood today’ . . . because he was perched directly above that card. Or at another time: ‘Tim feels only like a third prize this morning.’

We never knew what happened. He just disappeared. For a few days we were unperturbed by his absence because there had been previous times when he had gone off; and then returned. On one occasion he even vanished for a month or two, and then to my joy I found him once again in the flower-house. This time four, six, eight, ten weeks passed by, and there was no sign of him. We were still hoping for his return when, just before Christmas, Jane at last left to join her mother in the Scilly Isles. Tim never came back, but Jane did.

She came back for the Penzance Flower Show.

This show, the Western Commercial Horticultural Spring Show to give it its full title, is the first mainland flower show of the year, and it takes place on two days in the first week or two of March. It is a beautiful show, for here you see daffodils and so many other kinds of flowers which provide the true herald of spring. They are not unnatural, forced flowers. They are flowers from the Cornish cliffs and the Scilly Isles. Flowers that last longer in the home, because they are not sickened by man-made efforts to bring them into bloom before their time.

As the date of each Show approached there used to be much excitement at Minack. We would be in the middle of the flower harvest, a hectic period of rush in which there was paramount necessity to send away to market as many flowers as possible, as quickly as possible. I was consumed by my urge to do this; and as a result I was placed in mild conflict with Jeannie, Jane and Shelagh. True enough they pursued their work as diligently as ever, but there was a hint in their manner that suggested that their minds were on the following week.

Their talk in the flower-house would dwell on our entries in the various classes. Instead of concentrating their attention on picking and bunching as quickly as possible, I would realise they were keeping a constant look-out for prospective prize-winning blooms. I would find, for instance, superb wallflowers or forget-me-nots or violets hidden away in jam jars in dark corners.

‘Jeannie,’ I would exclaim in exasperation, ‘we simply cannot afford to go into the Show this year. You must tell the girls to forget about it. They must be made to realise their wages depend on the speed we get our flowers away.’

No notice was taken of me. Every year I reacted in the same way. Every year I relented. Every year I was as delighted as the rest to see our entries displayed. Thus they tolerated my initial poor humour.

‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ said Jeannie goodnaturedly, after I had raged over a glorious collection of freesias I had found in the dark of the stables. Jane had thought I would never find them.

Both Jane and Shelagh adored this pre-excitement to the Show. It added spice to their day. My attitude made them feel conspirators; and I, looking from the outside, aware that I was displaying tantrums which were not really tantrums, was touched by the intangible love and understanding between them and Jeannie. They all mocked me.

Up there on the beam were the prize cards Minack flowers had won. First for wallflowers, first in successive years for freesias, first for lettuces; and there were the firsts for one of the gems of the Show, the packed box of mixed commercial flowers grown by the exhibitor. Jeannie won this two years running, and then it was decided to allow bought flowers to be included in the box. Yet Jeannie, despite the bought flowers, again won first prize and the cup with Minack-grown flowers.

Jane was always an ardent exhibitor, and she did so from the sheer joy she derived from placing on show something as near perfect as she could make it. When she was only sixteen she won the first prize in the Floral Art class.

Her exhibit was a small sandwich tin in which was placed a little nest of dried grass lined with gleanings of Monty’s fur. In the nest were three tiny blue Easter eggs which she had bought at Woolworths. Around the nest she had built up a mossy bank in which were primroses, violets, forget-me-nots and behind these, miniature daffodils. It was beautiful.