A Drake at the Door (16 page)

‘Has the picker-up gone home?’ I would ask.

An endearing feature of both Jane and Shelagh was the loyalty they had for the crop. Thus, even when we had a poor day’s digging, they would report in the evening that we had had an exceptionally good one. There was, of course, fun in doing this. At potato time the parish used to seethe with rumours about the quantities, quality and price of the crop on the various stretches of the cliff. Jane and Shelagh liked to stimulate the belief that Minack cliff was doing particularly well. Jane, for instance, had a malicious pleasure in teasing her mother’s boss.

This farmer had grown early potatoes for years on the cliff not far away, and he prided himself on always being the first to send them to market. He was a taciturn chap who took life very seriously; and it was easy for Jane to spread in his mind alarm and despondency. Thus she would naughtily tell him at a stage when he had not sent away anything, that I had sent away a twelve-pound chip basket; when, in fact, Jeannie and I had only eaten our first plateful of new potatoes. And then, as soon as the season got under way and he regularly asked her how we were doing, she used to double, even treble, the amount of the day’s digging. She would also add salt to the wound by exaggerating the price.

‘We dug twenty-two bags yesterday,’ she would tell him cheerfully.

‘You did?’

‘Yes, and we’re getting a shilling a pound.’

‘You are?’

The farmer would lugubriously look at her, fumbling in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes. Then he would turn away, ruefully wondering whether she was speaking the truth; and next morning she would tell me gleefully what had happened.

Shelagh was too shy ever to be so bold; and in any case, as she was a new hand at picking up potatoes on the cliff she was not conversant with our brand of potato wit. She would hurry on with her work, never pausing, and if she talked it would be about her previous evening’s bicycle ride, or Russ Conway; she was mad about Russ Conway.

Her bicycle rides were phenomenal journeys in view of the fact she had already done a day’s work; and at weekends she would go on marathon trips with her girlfriend Pat, who worked in Penzance. Twenty miles in an evening, forty miles on a Sunday. And on Saturday afternoons she always had a long session at the cinema, two complete shows for the price of one ticket was her aim, and it did not matter how fine was the weather. This, in fact, became a joke.

‘Well, Shelagh,’ one of us would say on a Saturday morning when the sun was burning us all, ‘a really wonderful day for the pictures!’

‘Yes,’ she would reply, grinning, and delighted we had made a joke of it, ‘a really hot day to spend in the dark.’

All through the time we were digging the potatoes it was blazing hot. Jane’s hair got fairer and fairer and her skin browner and browner. When a meadow was too small for the three of them to be behind me picking up, Shelagh and Jeannie would stay with me while Jane went off on her own to another meadow. She took the spare shovel which was as tall as herself, and then would vigorously plunge it under the plants. She would get very hot and dirty, smudges of soil all over her face, and then at lunchtime she would suggest to Shelagh that they go down to the rocks to bathe. But Shelagh, who incidentally was always as spruce at the end of the day as she was at the beginning, would be shy at the prospect.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ said Jane to Jeannie the first time, ‘Shelagh was quite shocked when I took off my clothes to bathe.’ Jane, I do not suppose, had ever owned a bathing suit in her life.

The wonder of these two, each in a different way, was that they were untamed; and they belonged to the cliffs as the badgers and foxes and the birds belonged. They had no edges carved by sophistication, they had no brittle rainbow ideas to lead them away from their happiness. Their eyes and minds were alert for pleasures which, one might say, did not belong to their time.

I remember the delight with which they heard my story, during that May, of how I saw a fox running along the rocks within a few feet of a lazy, lapping sea. I had gone down the cliff to bring up a few potato bags which we had left there the evening before, when I saw a fox stalking a gull at a spot a hundred yards away where the grey rocks met the green landscape. I had shouted soon enough to warn the gull, and it flew off, but the fox without hesitation dashed towards the sea and then, as I watched from above, skipped like a ballet dancer from rock to rock until it disappeared from my view behind a turn of the cliff.

There were also that May two litters of fox cubs all of us were able to watch grow up. One litter had an earth at the top of the cliff in a bank that sloped from the big field to the meadow where our Soleil d’Or bloomed in the early spring. There were three cubs and they used the sol meadow as their playground, flattening the dying leaves in their gambols. They were not easy to watch. A hedge hid them from the field side, and a stone wall from another. The only convenient point was to peer through the elderberry trees that divided the sol meadow from the one in which we grew Rembrandt daffodils. From here we used to watch their antics; and it was here that Shelagh used to come in her lunch hour, then tell us of the laughter they had given her.

The other litter salted our pleasure with constant concern. They were not on our land and so they were not safe from a gun like the others down the cliff. The earth was in the corner of a field across the shallow valley from the cottage, so placed that we could lie in bed and see it through the open window. There were five cubs and their parents had been obstinately foolish to dig the earth where they did. For they had been warned in previous years that their presence was not required. They would open up the earth and then, a few weeks later, the farmer would stop it. He quite rightly could not allow a valuable field to be used as a playground.

But this year the farmer had done nothing; and there were the cubs every day chasing each other all over the field while the proud parents sat side by side and watched. They could, of course, see us plainly and hear our voices, but they seemed to think there was some kind of magic to protect them from danger. I could shout at them and all they would do was prick their ears and stare in my direction. Fear did not exist; and the parents, who in normal times lived with fear daily, were so dazed by the happiness of possessing such cubs that they forgot to teach them the wisdom of fear. We had it instead, on their behalf.

The farmer kept a large number of chickens and he naturally had to keep guard over them. He had already taken steps to control the badgers, and one of our worries was that he might take the same kind of steps with our foxes. He had engaged the pest control officer to block up the holes of a large badger sett, and the badgers had thereupon been gassed. Such a method is perhaps merciful, though most countrymen will tell you that only rogue badgers kill chickens.

We now were concerned that the reason why this year the farmer had failed to stop up the earth was because he had decided to wipe out the litter. If he stopped the earth he knew about, they would only go to another he might not know about. So perhaps his idea was to let them be for a while, and then either gas them or shoot them one by one.

Thus every day we expected the wondrous sight of the cubs at play to end; and I was scared what Jeannie might do if she saw the slaughter taking place. She was certain to see it if it did. The cubs, as we watched them from the cottage, had become like pets. We had names for each, and each so clearly had a character of its own; as happens whenever you watch animals for long.

We began to fear every early morning and every early evening, for then it was that the shots would most likely ring out. And so we found ourselves looking at the gambolling cubs, while watching the undergrowth cover which surrounded the field . . . in case we saw a man with a gun.

Our anxiety became absurdly out of hand. We began to worry so much for the cubs that we forgot to enjoy the pleasure of watching them. And yet was our anxiety so absurd? Farmers are unpredictable because they act for the most part according to mood; and adjoining moods can be gentleness and violence. Farmers, in distant parts, can possess the sly instincts of a cornered animal; and thus their actions cannot be trusted. One moment they murmur good wishes, the next howl in distress, or perhaps what is more unsettling, they will nurse a grievance without giving you a clue what the grievance is about.

It was Jane who decided what we ought to do. It was unwise, we all agreed, to ask the farmer what his intentions might possibly be; for it would draw attention to what was happening, and there was still a chance, since the field was distant from his farm, that he did not know. So Jane decreed that we should subject the cubs, and their parents for that matter, to our particular brand of danger. If we took the right measures they would all shake off their halcyon confidence, and yet be saved.

And that is what happened. We imposed fear on them.

When they came out of the earth to play we banged dustbin lids together; and when they got used to this noise one of us used to run up to the gate of the field and clap our hands together. Slowly, by these methods, the cubs became aware of fear; and their parents remembered it.

It was during this period that I realised that Hubert, the gull on the roof, was ending his reign as king of the roof. He could no longer squawk for all other gulls to fly away. He, instead, would fly away himself at the screaming demand of an insolent stranger. I was perturbed.

And then one afternoon, an afternoon when we had a particularly good crop of potatoes, Jeannie came calling for me in anguish.

‘Hubert’s been shot . . . been shot.’

Derek holds Lama

I found Hubert on the cedarwood top of the coal shed where Jeannie always fed him. He was standing on one leg. The other was hanging limply, and blood covered the webbing of the foot. Every few seconds he staggered, hopping an inch or two, his wings unfurling and flapping, trying to keep his balance. He still looked as regal as ever and he was glaring at us; as if he were in the mood of one who was cursing himself for the mess he was in, like an old man who had at last lost his independence.

‘What have you done, old chap?’ I asked, ‘what’s happened?’

‘He’s been shot, I tell you,’ Jeannie answered for him angrily. ‘I was standing here when he came down and I saw quite clearly a bullet hole through the webbing of his foot.’

He had always been more Jeannie’s bird than mine. He tolerated me, he squawked at me when he saw me and when he was hungry, he had even come for walks with me, gliding up and down above and around me with the grace of a swallow, but he never awarded me the honour of feeding him by hand. He shied away when I proffered him a morsel. He was nervous of me.

But he was at ease with Jeannie. She used at first to feed him on the roof of the cottage and she soon learned that he required bacon rinds or her own homemade bread. So she would throw whatever it was up on the roof and if it fell short of him, he would slide down to it, using his feathered posterior as a toboggan. This was a comical sight.

Then, as his confidence grew, he decided that the coal shed with a top like a table and situated a few feet from the door, would be more convenient. It was here that Jeannie fed him by hand. She would come out of the cottage calling him, and he would swoop from the roof or the top of the great stone chimney where he had been ruminating, and seize what she was offering him. And when he had gobbled it, he would strut the small space, imperious, impelling his personality upon her so that she weakened, saying: ‘Hubert, you’ve had enough . . . but here’s one more small piece.’

Sometimes he was in such a hurry to come to her that, if the wind was blowing, he made an error of judgement in his landing. He hated it when he made such a fool of himself and, after recovering, he would sail into the sky like a flying god, majestic wings outstretched, with a symmetry of body that made our hearts beat in excitement. Here was the wild that linked the centuries, noble, remote, free and yet gloriously tempting us to believe we shared something with him. Here was a thing wiser than man, luckier perhaps because it was not fooled by greed. It was content with the splendour of living. It embraced the sky and the sea and the rocks, struggled with the storms and gloried in hot summer days; it was a speck against blue and a crying, swerving, rebellious being that pointed black clouds, shining them by its white, uttering far distant calls, telling us who were ready to listen that the gale was coming again; the same gale, the same gull, the same human beings since the beginning of time.

Yet Hubert also provided the moments of absurdity. There was one occasion when Jane was with us and Hubert got blown by a gust of wind so that he was poised for a second just above Jeannie’s head. It was a ludicrous sight. I was beside Jane and I knew why she burst into laughter. Jeannie, for that second, looked like a lady who had searched hard for an original hat; Jeannie who never wore hats.

‘You must go to a fête with Hubert as your hat, Mrs Tangye,’ laughed Jane, ‘you would be a sensation!’