Free A Gull on the Roof by Derek Tangye Page A

lights of the pilchard fleet. I poised the long-handled shovel and cumbersomely jabbed it under a plant, lifting the bundle of earth and tossing it to where Jeannie was standing. She stooped, shook the sturdy leaves, and ran her hand through the soil. And there, gleaming bright in the dusk, were six potatoes, each the comfortable size of a baby’s fist.
    Jeannie and I were up at dawn the following morning and I drove the Land Rover over the shoulder of the cemetery field and down to the top of the cliff. It was a heavenly morning with a haze hiding the horizon, the first swallows skimming the landscape, the white parasols of the may trees pluming from the green bracken, and the scent of the bluebells mingling with the salt air of the sea. In the back of the car we had a spring balance weighing machine and a tripod on which to hang it, a bundle of chips and a ball of binder twine with which to tie the cardboard tops when the chips were full, a pair of scissors, the shovel, a box full of salesman’s labels with printed addresses of different markets. It was a lush moment of hope blissfully blinded from the realities the years would see.

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    During the days that followed, smoothly dressed salesmen appeared on the cliff, watching me dig and ache my way through a meadow, bantering me with news of prices better than their rivals.
    ‘We paid 8½d. home at Bristol,’ one would say, and then another two hours later would announce: ‘Manchester is strong. We expect 9d. tomorrow.’ They served too as the errand boys of news from other potato areas and I would clutter my worries over the prices with the threats that these areas, so much larger than our own, would soon be in production. These threats became progressively worse in their nature, beginning gently with: ‘Marazion starts next week,’ edging dangerously to ‘Gulval are opening up their fields,’ or the generalised black news that ‘the farmers begin Tuesday’: and growing to a climax with ‘Jersey are at their peak’ or ‘Pembroke has a bumper crop,’ and then, most disastrous of all: ‘Lincoln has begun.’ If you have not cleared the cliff by the time Lincoln stream their potato lorries to the markets, you might as well tip your potatoes in the sea. Nowadays these threats have become internationalised and one goes dizzy with the news that Covent Garden is flooded with Morocco, Birmingham with Cyprus, Liverpool with Malta; and it is only when you hear that France has Colorado beetle and has stopped sending that you have a glimmer of hope.
    Tommy Williams, during the three days of the week he worked for us, dug in one meadow while I struggled in another; and at the end of the day he would have forty full chips to my fifteen. The Cornish shovel has a long handle like that of a rake and, until one becomes accustomed to it, is a most unwieldy instrument to use. You do not dig as if it were a spade, but scoop under the potato plant using your leg just above the knee as a lever, the left if you are right-handed, on which you poise a section of the long handle. As I lunged away my mind rattled with the absurd game of guessing how many potatoes would be under each plant. A meadow of potato plants is seldom uniform, some have squat stems, some thin, some elongated as if they were trying to reach the sky instead of making potatoes among their roots. The ideal plant has a tall firm stem with the shine off the top leaves while the bottom ones are yellow – these are called ‘going back’ and the fattest, most numerous potatoes should be under them. But, as usual, the dogma of experts was frequently at fault, and I dug plants with squat foliage which had many fine potatoes, some with copy-book stems which had few, and some with green leaves and plenty of shine which had plenty. Sometimes I would be digging a meadow where the crop was light and it seemed to take an age to fill a chip. In another, where the crop was good, the chips seemed to fill on their own and I would