by Derek Tangye
There was one year when we lost eighty per cent of our daffodils in this way, and the compost heaps were piled high with their stems. The previous year had been a bumper one. We had bought ten tons of bulbs and in two months had earned their capital outlay. Thus our expectations were high when the new season began; but instead, basket after basket brought in from the meadows had blooms which were unworthy of being despatched to market.
This dismal experience had a curious feature, a feature that only affected those daffodils within a half mile or so of the sea. First there was a brown mark on the petal, the next day it had turned green, and the third day there was a tiny hole in the same place as if it had been burnt by a red-hot pin. The experts were evasive. They could give us no exact explanation. ‘Looks like daffodil flu,’ was all they murmured.
Nor could they explain the unhappy events that followed. For two years the affected bulbs were sterile, scarcely a bloom to be found among them; and those of us who lived on the coast, as well as the Scilly Islanders, disconsolately stared at our meadows of green foliage while growers inland were rushing their blooms to market.
Jeannie had her own interpretation of what happened. Shortly before the daffodils were attacked, canisters of atomic waste were dumped off Land’s End; and one of the canisters, it was reported, burst during the dumping. Jeannie blames our misfortunes on its contents being blown back on to the coast mingled in spray. It is as good an explanation as any provided by the experts.
Few people pass Minack at any time of the year, and even at the height of the summer when conventional places are awash with humanity, a figure on the landscape cries out for our comment. ‘Somebody’s on the Carn!’ I’ll call to Jeannie . . . Or we will shout the absurd alarm of Alan Herbert: ‘White men! White men!’
The occasional hikers plod by, some delighting in the untamed nature of their walk, some indignant that a highway through the undergrowth along the coast is not maintained for their benefit; some stimulated by the need for initiative, some at a loss. ‘I’ve never had my legs so scratched in all my years of walking,’ said one furious lady . . . then, as if it were my fault, flinging the threat at me, ‘I’m going to write to The Times!’
Sometimes we have seen strangers who have had a menacing air about them, as if belonging to the mechanism of progress from which we sought to remain free. Men who have come to survey the district, men walking by who were too well dressed to be hikers, two or three who have spent their days hammering holes in the rocks; and there was one threatening week when an aeroplane flew up and down each section of the coast towing a box-like contraption behind it. On such occasions we bristled with suspicion. Others in beautiful, lonely places have watched such activities, waited and wondered, then found themselves faced with the roar of a motorway, or on the site of some other monument to progress.
One day a man called at the cottage and said he was studying rock conditions in our area on behalf of a certain Ministry. He asked for permission to study those on our land.
‘Of course you can,’ I said, then added suspiciously, remembering the other activities, ‘if you’re looking for uranium I hope you won’t find it.’
The man stared at me. ‘But my dear sir,’ he said loftily, ‘if I found uranium just think how rich you would be!’
Jeannie was with me at the time and it was she who answered him. ‘Had we the choice,’ she said, ‘between a uranium mine and Minack, I can assure you we would choose Minack.’ The man retreated to his duties and Jeannie and I set off to weed the anemones.
We know now there is no possibility of any part of this area being exploited. Buildings and caravans are forbidden, there is no place for a motorway to go, it is too inaccessible even to fear the prospect of an atomic power station; and the scientists have announced the region is bare of uranium. Perhaps I am being overconfident. Such remoteness will always tempt someone to plot its destruction.
But today we can go out of the cottage and shout to the heavens and no one will hear; or lie on the rocks with only cormorants, oyster catchers and gulls as companions; or stroll in the wood with Charlie hopping from branch to branch above our heads, or pause to talk to Tim, or say to each other: ‘The gannets are passing along the coast early this year’ . . . ‘I saw the first whitethroat this morning’ . . . ‘If you look to the left of those quickthorns you will see a fox sunning itself in the bracken’ . . . ‘The Seven Stone lightship was towed past this morning’ . . . ‘We’ll have lunch on the rocks and watch the seal in the bay’ . . .
These belong to the pleasures which have pleased since the beginning of time. They await in remoteness, hiding their secret in solitude, unhurt by man-made glitter and away from his intrigue, seemingly insignificant moments which enrich the soul. They live with us at Minack so that whatever material disappointments we may have, however hard may be the consequences of a failed harvest, they take us forward again. It is a way of life which belongs to the ages instead of ourselves.
Monty was fifteen years old when he began to ail. There was nothing sudden about his illness, and as the weeks went by there were times when we made ourselves believe that we were worrying unnecessarily. Sometimes he was his old jaunty self, following us in our walks round Minack, then sitting purring on my knees in the evening. We made the customary remarks that are made by those who watch the sick. ‘I think the medicine has done him a lot of good’ . . . ‘He really enjoyed his walk this morning.’ And then quite suddenly the sickness within him began to hurry.
He died on a May morning, a morning that was soft and warm and full of sweet scents, the sort of morning Jeannie would have said to me: ‘Let’s take Monty for a walk before breakfast.’ As I was dressing he had begun to cry, and I knew instinctively there was nothing more that we could do. I went away to telephone the vet and when I returned I found Jeannie had carried him out into the sun. He was lying, breathing gently, stretched out on the grass; and, strangely, Charlie was on the ground within a yard of him, Tim was perched on a rosebush two feet from his head, and Hubert was up there on the roof. All were silent.
Monty was the only cat I had ever known and my loyalty was to him and not to his breed. One day during his illness I was telling him that I would never have another to replace him. I was in fact thinking of those sympathetic-meaning people who hasten to replace an old friend with a substitute. ‘The only exception,’ I said, and this I wrote down in my diary, ‘is if a black cat whose home could never be traced cried outside the door in a storm.’
At the beginning of March the following year, Jeannie and I became aware of a black cat running wild on our land. We scarcely took notice of it except to observe, after a time, that it was always on our land and never on that of our neighbours. But it was so wild that it was only a black dash in the distance.
One evening, at the beginning of April, Jeannie was sitting after dinner talking of Monty. A gale was blowing and rain lashed the cottage. Suddenly I said: ‘Did you hear a cry?’ And without waiting for Jeannie to answer I went and opened the door.
In came the black cat. She is beside me now as I end this story.