by Tot Taylor
At first, of course, neither John had the faintest clue how to go about it. Although a decision had been made to specialise in exotics, and in the most unusual, out-there varieties they could track down, all they really knew about was cannas; between them, they knew all there was to know about cannas. By the end of the second growing season the two Johns could grow cannas in their fingernails. So, for the first couple of months, RCN spent all of his time visiting local garden centres and horticultural shows, picking up information and buying slips and cuttings where he could find them.
It was important that both of them got round to some of the larger public gardens in the area – there were sixty-seven listed on the National Gardens Register – in order to get a general sense of things and discover how a large plot should be professionally laid out and worked. These trips would never be planned because it was impossible to know how ‘confident’ John would be feeling from one day to the next; and if he didn’t feel confident, there was no way he was going anywhere. On a non-confident day John Nightly would walk straight out of his kitchen outhouse into Sunhouse 5 – his favourite, as it had a panoramic view out onto the ocean. There he would remain the whole day long. With his cup of tea, and a sandwich prepared by Mrs Peed the night before, he’d sit gazing out at the waves, hypnotised by their swill and flow, their crescendos and cascades reminding him of a set of sea interludes, or a rolling Bach fugue, bothering to get up every now and then to open the skylight so that he could smell the salt and listen to the chafing gulls, until he would suddenly feel a draught and close it again. The only thing that would bring him back into the house was the creeping damp and, as darkness approached, the promise of Mrs Peed’s hot cooked dinner.
John Nightly was always cold. No matter how much heating, natural or otherwise, was turned on in whatever room he happened to be. Ironic, of course, given that one of his schoolboy ambitions had been to develop the means to conserve and reuse heat and energy produced by natural resources – not to waste massive amounts of expensive manmade fuel on plants.
John insisted on the heating at Trewin being turned up full at all times. As with life in general, everything had to be full on. All his life he desired only intensity; the extremes of things – the rind of the cheese, the pith of the lemon, the spikiest cacti. The quadraphonic system he’d had at Queen Square produced ear-shattering volume that drove visitors away. In the brief period during which he used a car, he was stopped for speeding three times in twelve months and never sat behind the wheel (legally) again. He courted the most troubled and troublesome women and conceived of the most unrealistic, unreliable schemes, all the time popping pills as if they were Polo mints.
There was never anything at all subtle or moderate about the man or his actions. John would wander through the house accompanied by a small convector heater that he would plug in whenever he sat down, even for a moment or two, and angle directly towards his feet. Heating bills at Trewin were astronomical. £900 last quarter for the house and cottage alone, with a massive £2,200-odd every three months to heat the sunlounges and outhouses. The bill from South West Water was also exorbitant, around £3,000 to £5,000 a quarter. Watering the community properly was expensive. Financially it was daft, but ecologically it was completely immoral. Nothing less than a sin.
The industrial rearing of exotics, both specimen plants and difficult-to-look-after seedlings, isn’t exactly a stand-alone activity. Apart from the problems of importing them in the first place – many require special licences and stamped government papers: ‘plant visas’ you might say – the massive amounts of soil, fertiliser, drainage material, fibre and compost and the endless pallets of food that must be regularly purchased in order for them to grow and thrive, there is endless administration and bureaucracy to be dealt with in registering each cutting and slip for National Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBR).
In retrospect, this turned out to be a very good thing. It meant that every cutting propagated at Trewin Farm, mainly John’s Canna ‘Luxor’, ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Mortada’ varieties, would be subject to a royalty when sold on, just like records, of around 15p per slip.
The payments soon accumulated and by the final accounts quarter of 1994 songwriting income wasn’t the only seasonal distribution to land on Trewin’s welcome mat. The two Johns re-cultivated and highly improved strains of Canna ‘Luxor’, with their longer-lasting flowering cycle, strong colours and swan-like necks were suddenly in huge demand from the German and Dutch cut-flower importers.
Every night of the year, flowers from Zimbabwe, the Cayman Islands, Israel, Brazil, Chile and Cornwall are flown into Amsterdam and Rotterdam for the Dutch flower markets. During the twelve weeks of these floral superstars’ continual flowering, John RCN would open the gates at the bottom meadow every evening, trampling the bindweed and twitch, to let in four noisy, articulated trucks. Just one hour later, variegated gold CL1 (PBR reg. 131190) – Trewin’s best seller; their biggest hit – along with several other strains, would begin their journey back down the B3306 all the way up the A30 to the tiny airport at RAF St Mawgan near Newquay, where they would be quickly laid in ice caskets and shipped to the ex-army base at Hinszels or Aalsmeer* flower auctions in Holland for cleaning, stripping, trimming and spraying before being laid out in long white cardboard boxes. Here they would be carefully labelled and counted for British Association Representing Breeders (BARB), the whole operation taking less than 24 hours, before they appeared in the covered flower markets of Strasbourg or Stuttgart. Maybe one of Trewin’s graceful stems of peach or gold would be trimmed and cut again before being placed on the conference tables of the European Parliament in Brussels or outside a hillside café in St Paul de Vence.
By June 2000, some 894,000 CL1, CL2 and CM1 stems had been dispatched. At 15p a head this amounted to a good profit. The agreement being that as John Nightly drew his income from songwriting and record royalties, John Daly would be able to take his not-inconsiderable salary from the sales of this now highly profitable enterprise.
But flowers and plants mean insects – and at any one time there would be hundreds of mites, motes, baby spiders and athletic daddy longlegs, some visible, some invisible, crawling over the Nightly property. Spiders were necessary, feeding as they do on tiny creatures you could easily live without as well as some you didn’t even know existed. By the end of summer John Nightly’s bedroom would be literally crawling with ming spiders, daddies and fireflies. When the situation got out of hand he would announce that a clear-out was due, at which point Mrs Peed, the housekeeper (now living at Trewin full time following the death of her sister), would come in and have a general clean and vacuum. Mrs Peed announced that her being able to identify more than one or two different species making their way across the boss’s bedroom carpet meant that enough was most certainly enough and she would get out the Hoover and do her thing. But John himself didn’t at all seem to mind sleeping in a room alive with, as Mawgan so characteristically put it, ‘a bunch of gizzies and spids’.
Though there was no way John Nightly was ever going to bump off the native insect population, apart from those threatening the cultivated flowers, things did once or twice get out of hand.
Sitting in the kitchen one day, his head in the Cornishman, RCN noticed a small puddle of black flying ants in the scissor of light between the larder and the back door. Bending over nonchalantly to take a closer look, he was greeted by the sight of a festering, velvet-black wall, previously Dulux white, suddenly covered in a carpet of swarming ant. Somehow the heap had been disturbed, probably overnight by an inquisitive badger or fox, so that the whole family and their thousands of relatives were embarked on a mission to first camouflage then obliterate the house. Even Alexandre became anxious as he stood, back arched in defensive position, barking at the top of his lungs at the layers of reflective, scaly bodies until Robert calmed him and led him away to safety.
Although RCN and Mrs Peed made some headway with rose sprinklers, hosing down the creatures before stunning
them with a sluice of water from the outdoor tap, an emergency call was put in to Penwith Pest Control, who responded immediately when their on-site infestation team dealt with the problem by administering Forax DDT in battery-operated sprayguns to the entire outer shell of the property. An hour later, the former vicarage was covered in a silvery glaze, organic household gloss, a mixture of aticexicide, quavaporous fluid and melted ant, which glistened in the harsh late-afternoon sun.
Next day the cement pathways, the steppes and rockeries surrounding the farmhouse were jet black and dripping with dead Antiphibus Anticus. Robert Kemp then disposed of the vanquished invaders by once again spraying down the whole surrounding area, flushing the goo along the concrete gutters until it filtered out into the wildflower meadows and beyond.
The two Johns next big thought was to finding some way of harnessing all this sun – which was full-on most of the day from March to October – and, if possible, in the process, the immense energy of the super-powerful, Atlantic-driven waves.
Ten years previously, they’d had Jean-Claude Marx from the Ondaaron Institute, the leading researchers into renewable natural resources, come over to take a look. JC and his team agreed that what the Johns were describing could be achieved but that it would indeed be a long job, involving taking re-plumbed seawater from the area beneath the inner coves so it could be re-piped and circulated around the house and outbuildings. Ideally, some kind of very large well, a huge underground vat, would need to be built beneath the heather fields, the midway point between the ocean and the farm; but, after reading the report, both RCN and Robert were convinced that Penwith would never give planning permission for something as disruptive as this.
Jean-Claude, the great solar-energy pioneer of the ’70s and one-time lighting designer for the Pink Fairies and the Pretty Things, as well as of course the Nightly band, also suggested erecting wind-power mills that would build up and recycle the volume of energy they needed over the course of 24-hours. He produced a preliminary report in which he advised that, given a long-term period of careful management and investment – say fifteen to twenty summers – the project could achieve everything they had outlined to him. What’s more, could become established as one of the most sustainable, renewable, solar/wind-based projects in the UK. A shining example to both local and national government as well as to public-and private-sector enterprises everywhere in showing how natural resources could be harnessed in order to generate a whole lot of recyclable power, particularly in such an idyllic setting. Trewin could be an example, a kind of paradigm, where others could come to learn about sustainable power, its very name a byword for carefully planned long-term energy renewal. A place of pilgrimage for those interested in ecology, regeneration, exotic plants, and, as JC added with a glint in his eye, dysfunctional ex-pop stars.
It was this last thought that persuaded the Johns to drop the project like a lead weight. That and the time factor: fifteen to twenty years? RCN doubted either of them had that much time left; and if not, well, what was the point? So, it was decided to dump the whole idea and instead use whatever means they already had at their disposal. With a bit of extra plumbing and pipe-laying they reckoned they could probably more or less achieve their aim. So the project, like so many others, was put on the back burner as something that would be ‘nice to do at some point in the future’. A point both men knew would never come.
Speaker: Jean-Claude Marx, director, Ondaaron Institute (FRAS, SFS, GSR), at ‘Renewable World’: a conference on wave power and wind systems, Trinity College, Cambridge. 4–9 August 1984.
The future in terms of energy rests on going back rather than forward. Wave power and wind generation must take up at least 75 per cent of our energy systems rather than the 2 per cent they currently occupy if we are to be able to both renew and sustain. The work of John R. Pierce, and long before that of Charles Wheathouse, did much to show us the way, but modern man has forgotten to plug in his brain as far as this issue is concerned. Waves and wind are already with us. They’re free, they cost us nothing and there also happens to be an inexhaustible supply of them. All we have to do is to figure out how to utilise their enormous power in a much more ecological way than has been tried so far. To achieve that, we need governments to initiate and then co-ordinate it, and the public to embrace it. It is my belief that if we do not turn our attention to this concern immediately, then we are doomed.
* * *
* Aalsmeer flower market near Amsterdam is officially the largest room in the world.
The Who at Tiles Club, Oxford Street, London, W1. Tuesday, 29 April 1966.
‘But Monika goes to see them all the time, don’t you, darling?’
‘Ah yeah… I always goes there. Marquee, Tuesday night… Every people know that! Scene Crub last time… first time I come London. I go Jack of Crub, see Davy Jones, friendly man, very friendly man – very like man, this one – and his group Buzz, friendly group, good group, and good prace. Nice, good prace, Iona.’
Monika searched her bag for lipstick as she took a nostalgic look back at last year.
‘But now they change name Lower Third… ah yeah! What your zodiac, John?’
The girl wittered away as she applied another layer of grease-paint to her candy-coated lips. ‘I can go Ricky Tick… see Who… Guildford… Engrish countryside… nice prace.’
John thought he might make a stab at conversation. ‘So you’re… quite a… fan of… music, Monika…’
‘Music? Ah yeah! Love music, John… every people know that. But love groups best. Noisy one best… Artwoods, Georgie Fame – see him Framingo crub. Action… this good one,’ she sighed, as if remembering a very special occasion. ‘Manfred Mann… this very noisy mann. Very noisy! We very like singer…’
The girl tousled her hair as she peered into the club’s filthy wall mirror and made the necessary adjustments. A bouffanted mod, his ensemble complemented by a pair of goat-skin gloves, came towards Monika; and throwing her a slightly menacing smile, placed a folded tissue in her hand. ‘We very like Paul. And Pretty Thing – he’s good! “Hey, Rosalyn! Tell me where you bin!”’
Monika zipped the lipstick into her bag, carefully removed three tablets from the tissue pouch and looked around to see if she could spot anyone worth talking to.
‘What your star, John?’
But John couldn’t hear a thing above the cavernous echo of Phil Spector’s soundwall. Every inch of the sprawling underground arcade rattled either in excitement or protest at Spector’s tin-can symphony. The club was crawling with Grade Ones: teenage disciples confident about both their sartorial and musical requirements, as each attempted to out-cool the other. At the closed-off end of the ballroom narcissistic gangs fired requests at the hapless DJ – ‘Get this crud off !!!’ ‘Play Otis, man!’ ‘Ska, geeza!’ – as the threesome found themselves surrounded by a coterie of worshippers.
The Japanese doll fixed on another two-toned mod holding court close by. She had no trouble at all attracting his eye as she smiled, feigned indifference, then began to twist and grind suggestively in the confines of the self-imposed anteroom while (amazingly to John) Iona began to join in.
‘What about the other song, Monika? “Don’t Bring Me Down”?’
‘That good one, ’ona.’
John, a hopeless dancer and lip-reader, and therefore unable to make out very much at all, could respond only by using his eyes. Conversation was abandoned as the boy continued to try to adapt and fit in with his companions’ state of mind in order to remain a part of the proceedings and not become separated from them.
“C’mon, little babee, don’t bring me down…”
He cupped his hands to his mouth, as the girls sang along to the record, still trying to eliminate the thunderous racket drowning out the DJ’s announcement about undercover police officers in the crowd.
‘Thing is…’ John shouted as loud as he possibly could. ‘In Cambridge… you would never see these people…’
‘What is it? Which
people, ’ona?’
Monika was at best only half concentrating on the girls’ new acquaintance.
‘in Cambridge…’
‘Ah yeah… very prace also… very old one. But now you come London, we take you, and your nice scarf, to see groups very soon now. C’mon, Iona!’
The girls grabbed hold of the ends of John’s scarf as they pretended to strangle their guest.
‘…uuuuuurrrh!’ The boy struggled to disengage himself and, feeling rather out of place in his Cambridge togs – mail-order windcheater, cords and sandals – considered a future of being escorted around London’s most happening nightspots by two of the best-looking girlfriends he could ever imagine having set eyes on, let alone actually being seen with.
‘Tonight we go Poubelle after here prace… or Limbo crub, Wardour Mew, this one close here…’
Iona grabbed Monika’s arm, struggling to make herself heard.
‘Can’t do that, darling. Got a shoot tomorrow… early morning, unfortunately.’
The news received her friend’s full attention. ‘Is it good clothes one, ’ona?’
Iona pulled the girl towards her and looked across at John, making sure not to exclude him. ‘Biba!’ she shouted with glee. ‘Biba tomorrow…!’
‘Ooo… can you get me some this clothes now time?’ Monika placed a small blue tablet into the palm of Iona’s hand.
‘I’ll try, darling, but… you know they always ask for them back.’
‘You know I love Biba type, Iona. I have go there Saturday every time… You know I have. Saturday, every day… this my drug.’
‘Maybe John can go with you next Saturday, darling – can’t you, John? I do think you need to get some… some… London-type clothes…’ Iona trod carefully. ‘Maybe we ask your manager give you your “clothes money”.’ Monika nodded in agreement as both girls looked John up and down.