A Gull on the Roof by Derek Tangye Page B

take a week to reach Newcastle by freight train and three days to Bristol. During a period when the price is swiftly falling day by day, such delays mean financial loss for which we can claim no recompense. It is, however, when our flowers are delayed that Jeannie and I are most enraged, and the fury is the more violent because one is impotent to do anything about it. We have pursued the arduous task of growing the flowers, then picked, bunched and admired their exquisite freshness in the packed box—only to learn later that they never reached the market in time for sale. There was the time, on a Tuesday, when we sent forty boxes of Wedgewood iris by the special flower train to Hull. The engine of this train broke down, the truck containing our flowers was put in a siding, and none were sold till the Thursday when a shipload of Guernsey iris swamped the market and brought the Wednesday price of twenty-five shillings a box down to five shillings. Thus we had lost £40 through no fault of our own and, as usual, we could claim no compensation – for British Railways absolve themselves from blame provided the flower boxes reach the station of destination within thirty-six hours of the original arrival time. The fact that the scheduled service has failed to deliver them for the next day’s market is immaterial.
    Such frustrations, however, lay ahead, for during that first summer we had beginner’s luck; and when the potato season was all over and the meadows were strewn with the withering tops of the plants which a month previously had looked so green, with a broken chip lying here and there, an unused sack and the crows poking in the soil among the untidy desolation for the potatoes which had been left behind, we estimated we had made over £200 profit. This figure, minute against the background of a year, inflated our expectations owing to the comparative ease with which it had been gathered. If, with so little land yet under cultivation, with only thirty hundredweight of seed, we could make that sum of money, surely in another year we would have room for four times the seed and make four times as much.
    My mother, who had rejoined us for the last week of the potato season, was delighted with these calculations: she had spent most of each day standing in the field holding open the sacks for us to fill, making the professionals smile by her ardour, but saving time and temper for Jeannie and myself who had not yet mastered the knack of tipping a basket without spilling the potatoes. Her gaiety, however, was tempered by increasing concern over our water supply. There had been no rain for a month, the water butt was empty, a pencil-sized trickle was all that was left of the stream, and Jeannie had been forced to discover that soap does not really lather in sea water. My mother, naturally, was unable to adjust herself to the situation, and I used to drive to the village tap at St Buryan, fill up a milk churn I had bought and bring it back for her use. It was inevitable that sooner or later we would have to sink a well, and in view of the drought it seemed best not to waste any time.
    ‘Tommy,’ I said one morning, ‘we’re going to dig a well. What do we do?’ Tommy, of course, rejoiced in a question which gave an opportunity for a display of his knowledge and he proceeded to inform me of his personal theory that all spring water in the Land’s End peninsula came from Switzerland, that the snow in the Alps melted through the crevices to deep underground, and then slowly crept during the course of hundreds of years across Europe and under the Channel to Cornwall. As often happened, he spiced his imaginative discourse with a practical point. ‘You can get a subsidy for sinking a well, I fancy,’ and so, at his suggestion, Jeannie and I paid a call at the dingy Penzance offices of the local branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. We had been there once before.
    It was shortly before we came to live at Minack and we wanted to