A Gull on the Roof by Derek Tangye

its parents. Once I saw him halfway up a tall elm, climbing with one hand while the other held a tiny object. ‘A baby owl,’ he shouted down at me, ‘I won’t be a minute before I put it back in its nest. You look at the bottom and you’ll see two mice its mother must have brought it during the night.’ There was the incident of the fox cubs who chose one of our potato meadows as a playground, gambolling at night among the green plants and crushing flat the leaves and stalks. It was the custom in the neighbourhood when this sort of thing happened for the farmer to set traps; and I have seen of an early May morning four cubs each in a corner of a meadow with a leg caught in a gin. I remember how curious it seemed to me that they did not appear frightened, as if it were still part of the game they had started to play in the night; and they waited there as the sun rose until the farmer, in his own good time, arrived to knock them one by one on the head. We, however, were prepared to leave the playground as it was, losing the potatoes to the cubs, but Tommy, on the other hand, was more practical. ‘We can’t afford to lose the taties,’ said he, ‘and we mustn’t hurt the cubs. I know a way of persuading the vixen to move them to another earth. You leave it to me.’ He never told us what he did, though I can guess. In any case the meadow was never used as a playground again.
    An hour before Tommy was due to go home, he and I used to begin carrying the chips up the cliff. We carried them one in either hand, a hateful, exhausting, back-breaking task, forgivable when the price was high, but when it began to dip I used to mutter curses, as I climbed, against the city dwellers who had no notion of the endeavour that lay behind the potatoes on their plates. Jeannie and I were too tired to weigh them in the evening, and we would have a meal and go immediately to bed, falling into a revolving kaleidoscope of dreams – potatoes with human faces, crushed haulms served for lunch at the Savoy, the
Scillonian
in the guise of a whale, stinging nettles dancing like a chorus, running a cross-country race on a magic carpet that never moved, Tommy looming out of the sky like Mephistopheles. We awoke as tired as when we went to bed, limbs aching, our minds fogged by our dreams and the prospect of another day of chain-gang labour. I would get up and put the kettle on the paraffin stove and when it had boiled replace it with a saucepan for the eggs. Then, breakfast over, we would walk along the path to the top of the cliffs where the chips in neat rows awaited their weighing, and suddenly, as if an icepack had melted miraculously before our eyes, we became aware of the glory of the early morning. We looked down on to the sea, glittering from the sun which rose above the Lizard, spattered with fishing boats hurrying to the Newlyn fish market like office workers scurrying to town. A cuckoo flew past, topping the undergrowth, calling as she went. A cormorant perched on the rock that is called Gazell, its black wings extended, drying them against the softness of the breeze. High in the sky a wood pigeon courted another, clapping its wings, then swooping silently and up again, and another clap as sharp as a pistol shot. Around us bluebells brimmed the green grass and foxgloves pointed to the sky like sentinels. Meadow sweet and may blossom clung the air with their scent. A woodpecker laughed. And the sea, sweeping its cool tranquillity to the horizon, lapped its murmur against the rocks below us. Here was the heightened moment when the early morning, unspoilt like a child, is secure from passing time; and when a human being, sour with man-made pleasures, awakes to the sweet grace of freedom.
    I weighed, while Jeannie tied the cardboard tops to the chips with binder twine, and while we worked we worried where we would send them. ‘I think Birmingham,’ I would say, and then, a few minutes later: ‘Of course that Scots salesman did say