Free A Gull on the Roof by Derek Tangye Page B

shout: ‘Lovely samples here, Tommy!’
    Tommy’s mood varied according to the meadow he was in. If it were large enough for Jeannie to follow behind him, she in blue shorts thrusting her hands in the soil and dropping the very small ones in one chip, the rest in another, and he shirtless in patched brown trousers and wearing a sun-drenched Panama hat, he would treat her to endless dissertations on the problems of the world and his theories on their solution: and from the meadow I was in I would hear the drone of his talk with the gentle voice of Jeannie interrupting every now and again. If he were happy and in a meadow by himself I would suddenly hear the roar of his bass voice, startling the placid cliff with the fragment of a hymn. ‘When I start singing in Chapel,’ he once told me, ‘the congregation stops singing so that they can listen to me solo.’ The
Scillonian
was always subjected to close scrutiny. ‘Got a tractor on board,’ he would say severely, as if it had no right to be there. Or he would spy through his telescope a group in the stern: ‘Look to me like Indian students.’ And this remark would provide the excuse for a monologue on British policy in India.
    Sometimes this telescope annoyed me, for there were days when it seemed more a part of him than his shovel. ‘Every time I look at Tommy,’ I would say to Jeannie, ‘he’s staring out to sea.’ And Tommy, unaware of my annoyance, would call out: ‘That’s a Frenchy coming in,’ or ‘Never seen that white crabber before,’ or, if there was a liner on the horizon, ‘That’s the
Mauretania
bound for Cherbourg.’ His diet came from tins and when Jeannie, sickened by the jellified mess of meat he ate for dinner day after day, offered to warm the tin in the oven, he replied, ‘It’s proper as it is, thanks very much.’ There were occasions when he would work for nothing. ‘I know what your expenses are,’ he would say to me, ‘but I want to break the back of this meadow and I won’t charge you.’
    He did not seem to be happy working for John. ‘Mark my words,’ he warned, ‘I don’t think I’ll be with him for long.’ And sure enough a couple of weeks later Tommy came raging into the cottage. ‘It’s all over between me and him,’ he shouted, and poured out a torrent of detail which was difficult to follow. From then on he worked for us full-time, but the row which parted him from John seemed to irritate. He proceeded to carry on a pinpricking feud with John, sometimes to my embarrassment. One morning I found him planting a clump of lilies in a piece of ground in front of the cottage. ‘Where on earth did you get those from, Tommy?’ I asked. ‘They came from the wood,’ he replied without looking up, ‘and they belonged to my sister.’ Tommy’s sister had been married to the man who had the farm before John – and he had been killed in his barn by a falling bale of straw. ‘I like to think they are hers.’ This same line of reasoning governed a later occasion at the time of the flower season when I saw Tommy climb over our boundary hedge and pick a bunch of wild daffodils on the other side. ‘You can’t do that,’ I shouted. ‘Oh, yes, I can,’ he shouted back – and then I caught sight of John a little way off, silently watching, his cloth cap on the back of his head, a grass stalk in the corner of his mouth like a pipe. I strolled up the field to him, anxious to disclaim any part in the affair. ‘I’m very sorry about this, John,’ I said, ‘Tommy was over the hedge before I could stop him . . . here,’ I began to fumble in my pocket, ‘here, you’d better have 1s. 6d. for the bunch.’ I held out the money and John, like a magistrate’s clerk accepting a fine, thrust it in his pocket. ‘As you like,’ he said, and then turned away.
    Tommy’s roughness was balanced by his tenderness for birds and animals, and I have seen his eyes soften in wonderment at the sight of a young robin being fed by