A Drake at the Door, page 5
It was particularly dirty among the tomato plants, and so Jane was an inevitable victim. Tomato plants ooze a green stain-like dye. I had only to walk the length of the greenhouse between two rows for my shirt to be touched with green. And so Jane, who spent the whole day there, would finish up with green hands, a green face and, for that matter, green hair.
She had an unreliable sense of time. Both her mother and herself had a strange effect on watches. I believe this sometimes happens when people have a surfeit of electricity in their bodies; but whatever the reason no watch would keep correct time for these two. Hence Jane would occasionally arrive for work at unconventional hours. Sometimes very early, sometimes very late.
Of course, it did not matter her being late because she could make up the time at the end of the day. Indeed, she was never a clock-watcher. She always stayed on until the job was finished. But in the beginning, when she was late, when she did not know what our reaction might be, she used to creep along like a Red Indian, keeping out of sight behind hedges, reaching Minack by a roundabout route; and hoping that she could begin work without her absence having been noted. She did it out of adventure, not out of guile. She always told us in the end.
At first we used to water the tomato plants in the old-fashioned way with a hose; and it was Jane’s job to spend hour after hour dragging the length of the hose down the path behind her, thrusting the nozzle towards the base of the plants on either side. Jane performed the boring task without complaint but when I, at weekends, took her place, I soon found myself wondering why I should waste my time in such a way. My time, and Jane’s, could be better employed doing something else.
So here was the old evergreen problem. Money had to be spent to save money. Sense seemed to be on the side of extravagance for if the watering was made automatic not only would hours be saved, but also it would be distributed more accurately. The arguments seemed wonderfully convincing. My only hesitation sprang from my impatience that the price of efficiency should be a bottomless pit.
I always hesitate. I have never bought a piece of horticultural equipment with the élan that others, for instance, buy a car they cannot afford. I never enjoy that feeling of wild abandon that comes to people who have had a burst of extravagance. I have been extravagant, I have spent money I cannot spare, but the equipment which is the result gives me no joy. Its only attraction is its necessity.
Salesmen are quickly aware of my lack of enthusiasm so they tempt me by the hook of sound sense. As I am not buying for pleasure, as I look as if I am the gloomiest buyer imaginable, they set out to pierce my resistance by likening the piece of offered equipment to someone I might be employing. It is a persuasive trick.
‘Now if you pay £12 a month for this tractor you can’t say that’s an agricultural wage,’ a salesman will say to me, ‘and yet you’ll have a machine doing five times an ordinary man’s work in a week. Five times? . . . I should have said twenty times!
‘And the money paid to a workman is gone . . . you’ll never see it again. Look at it this way . . . you pay the hire-purchase as if it’s a wage. Then . . .’ and this was always the telling moment in the sales talk . . . ‘then in twelve months you’ve got a workman for free!’
I have fallen so often for this patter. It subtly appeals to my progressive ambitions. It even suggests that I am getting something for nothing. So I yield. And as a result I have had many an inanimate workman at Minack on hire-purchase pay rolls. The automatic irrigation was to be another.
It consisted of rubber tubing, the thickness of my forefinger, which ran the length of the greenhouse alongside the base of each row of plants. Opposite each plant was a nozzle and, when the tap was turned on, all the plants began to receive by drips an equal amount of water.
It had a still further advantage. The top end of the tubes was connected to a larger tube which, in turn, was hitched to the water tap; but, and this was the cunning part, the tube on its way to the tap was fastened to a contraption in a two-gallon glass jar. In this jar was tomato feed concentrate, and by turning the dial on the contraption, one could control the feed for the plants as soon as the tap was turned on. It could be a strong feed or a weak feed, and all the plants got the same.
Such standardised feeding naturally contains certain snags. Not all the plants have the same appetites, nor do they desire identical meals; some want more nitrogen than others, some more potash. But I have learned now to forget the odd men out. If the bulk is all right, and I now grow thousands of plants, I am only too thankful that I have an inanimate workman to look after them.
The water came from the well up the lane, a surface well that now belonged to us. This water was unsuitable, as far as we were concerned, for human consumption; and so we continued to use the well above the cottage, which we sank ourselves, for domestic purposes.
This well remains a shining example of how expensive it can be if you set out to do a thing cheaply. I had been assured that the spring lay so near the surface that it would cost only £30 to reach it. I watched the £30 disappear, and saw no sign that the hole was even damp. I should, of course, have cut my losses and fetched the firm who find water by boring a hole. But their charges at the time seemed enormous. I was not impressed by their guarantee of a huge column of water. I could not afford to be.
Instead I urged the two miners I had engaged from the mines at St Just to dig on. And on and on they dug. It was a beautiful hole, if a hole in the ground can be beautiful, the sides plumb straight, the granite sliced like a knife by their skilful hand-drilling and dynamiting; but never a sign of water. The hole was so deep that I dared not stop. So much of my money was now down the hole that it was too late to seek the help of the others. Perhaps another foot, or another, or another . . .
My persistency never gained its true reward. The miners got thirty feet down then a man with a compressor and special drilling equipment tried drilling twenty-foot holes. Water was found in the end; but it was a lazy trickle of water taking its time to fill the bottom of the well. It still takes its time. And in October, when springs fall low, it can only pump seventy gallons before it is dry.
Our tomatoes, therefore, were dependent on the well up the lane; and we were lucky to secure the water without the expense of pumping for it. The reason was simple, though, to my kind of mind, it was difficult to understand. It was a question of gravity. The well up the lane was so much higher than the level of the greenhouse that, having dropped a copper pipe with perforated holes in the well and then, patiently filled the alkathene pipe between the well and the greenhouse with water, a stream came out of the tap by the greenhouse like a main.
It was not, however, always as clean as a main. This did not matter because part of the equipment for the automatic irrigation was a filter and this prevented even the smallest build-up of dirt from blocking the nozzles attending each plant. But the filter, of course, had periodically to be cleaned.
I noticed, however, in late June of this particular summer, that Jane was spending an inordinate amount of time attending to this filter. I could not feel such attention was justified; I liked Jane very much but I could not allow her to dally. I was particularly irked when I saw she was emptying the dirt from the filter into the pail. This was really foolish. I could not understand how she could justify her time in doing this. The filter needed only be rinsed. There was nothing more to it than that.
It was not so important that I had to make a fuss. Indeed it was only when I was in a worrying mood that I thought anything about it. She worked hard enough. If she slipped up by being slow on the filter, it balanced all the other good work she did. It was trivial. It was one of those small situations which only erupt when a boss seeks a quarrel.
‘What are you doing, Jane?’
It was just before the lunch hour, and I happened to pass Jane as she, barefooted, was bending earnestly over both filter and pail. She looked up at me so freshly, having noticed no note in my voice to suggest that, in reality, I was vexed with her, and said:
‘I’m rescuing the tadpoles.’
Then, of course, I saw what was happening. The suction of the pipe in the well up the lane was sucking the tadpoles, which abounded at that time of the year in the well, into the pipe which led to the greenhouse; and quickly, they were blocking the filter. Jane, having discovered what was happening, served both the tomato plants by cleaning the filter and the tadpoles by returning them to the well.
‘I take them up in my lunch hour back to the well,’ she said timidly, yet with a tiny note of defiance, ‘or at the end of the day.’ She had put them, of course, in the pail. That was how she was spending her time when she prompted my doubt about her. What could I say?
I was down on my knees beside her before I spoke. A tadpole, still alive, was clutched to the face of the filter, and Jane, with a stalk of couch grass, was easing it away. It was flabby. A tiny piece of flabbiness that, to rescue, would make all the clever people laugh. It was a thing alive, but why help it? What a strange waste of time to find pleasure in an object so unproductive. And yet this was the kind of pleasure that was the pulse of mankind, the creed of those who prefer to face the present rather than scurry away.
‘My dear Jane,’ I said in a very practical manner, ‘I’m all in favour of you helping the tadpoles . . . but they’ll only come back again through the pipe.’
She glanced up at me, just a flash, as if I were an ignorant man.
‘Only a few,’ she said, ‘the others will be safe.’ Then she grinned, looking up at me as if she had known all the time what I had been thinking, making me feel foolish, ‘I’ll be working an extra half-hour today!’
We had a wonderful crop of tomatoes that summer, and Jeannie and I were quick to realise that the success was a signpost to the future. We still grew potatoes on a large scale, but here was an alternative for a summer income which did not suffer the everlasting threat of obliteration by the elements. I saw too another particular advantage. Tomatoes and potatoes are of the same family, and if our district was noted for the earliness of the potatoes, it could also be noted for the earliness of the tomatoes; and earliness, of course, meant a chance of higher prices. Furthermore there was not the expense of sending the crop to distant markets. We could sell every tomato we picked in Penzance. The vast influx of holiday-makers were waiting to eat them.
We put in the plants, that first year, in the beginning of April, and by the middle of June they were a festoon of ripening fruit. We began to have visitors. Word had got around among neighbouring farmers of our good fortune and, although they would never grow a tomato themselves, they could not forbear to investigate the extent of our success. It was a relief to us that we had something so pleasant to show them. It was a change. Instead of insecurely seeking their advice I was able to talk to them on a subject they knew nothing about. Of course, I knew little myself, and I am not much wiser even now; but I have learned certain principles which now set the pace of our growing at Minack.
It is no use growing our own plants from seed because too much time and labour are involved. Seedlings require the art of the expert and in my case, as far as we were concerned, they take up space in a greenhouse just at the period when we need that space for the winter flower crop. It is more profitable, therefore, to collect cash for the flowers and pay out cash for the plants.
But this policy is not as straightforward as it sounds. If we grew our own plants they would be there on the premises to plant out in their permanent positions whenever it happened to suit us. We could delay or hasten the planting out according to the progress of the winter flowers; if the flowers, freesias, for instance, were still blooming and fetching a good price, we could hold back the tomatoes for a week or so. If, because of a warm spring, the flowers finished early, the tomatoes could be planted early. We would, in fact, be independent.
As it is we are at the mercy of whoever it is we have asked to supply us. We order the plants before Christmas, state a guesswork of a date when we will want them, then are ready to accept the panic which is sure to beset us. It is not only the progress of our flowers that we have to worry about; we can also expect the supplier suddenly to disrupt our carefully laid plans by saying he is delivering the plants a week early, or for that matter, it could equally be a week later.
Thus from the middle of March to the beginning of April every year I am generally in a state of high excitement. I am not alone. Tomato growers all over the country are also yelping cries of distress. Shall we scrap the flowers, which are still earning us money? If we don’t, where can we put the tomatoes in the meantime? Don’t you realise they’ll get leggy if we put the soil blocks too close? Surely it’s wiser to look after the tomatoes from the beginning?
When the turmoil is over and the plants are in the ground, there begins a pleasant period of observation. The period in which the little plants create pleasure by the sturdy way they show they accept their new quarters. It is now that Jeannie and I will waste time together in the greenhouse, staring fixedly at the plants and making remarks to each other such as:
‘They’re an awfully good colour.’
‘That one over there has a flower already.’
‘Hello, there’s one with stem rot.’
‘Don’t tell me that’s a Moneymaker. It’s a rogue.’
As they develop, as they progress from the innocent stage of lining the greenhouse in straight rows like guardsmen on parade, both Jeannie and I become more suspicious.
‘Am I imagining it? But some look like missing their first truss.’
‘Why is it that every year that patch on the left, halfway down, has such a pale green?’
‘I don’t know, Jeannie, but some of these stems seem a little thin. I’ll start feeding.’
It is wonderful the various ways that one can be advised how to grow a good crop of tomatoes. So many experts, never lacking assurance, pronounce what the grower ought to do. Some, for example, say you should begin feeding as soon as the plants have been planted. Others, that you must let a plant struggle to establish itself; a kind of test of character suggesting that plants are like students. The diet is equally perplexing.
As a matter of convenience we fed the tomatoes that first year with a concoction having the title of Orange Ring. We read, however, in an article in the trade press, that this was a lazy way of feeding; and as we were amateurs desperately anxious to grow the right way we duly took note of what we ought to have done. At successive stages of growth we should have given them Red Ring, Orange Ring, Blue Ring, and finished up with Green Ring; and technically speaking this meant that they begin with a high amount of potash and ended with a high amount of nitrogen. Can you imagine our confusion then, when the following year the pontification was reversed? And that we were right in the first place? That Orange Ring fed all the way through the season had now been proved to give the best results?
But now it is the end of June and we are beginning to pick; and Jane has emerged from the green forest with a basket of tomatoes in either hand and with the news that she has only picked a single row.
‘There are masses in there,’ she says excitedly, ‘absolutely masses.’
It is a sweet moment when a long-awaited harvest awakes. It shares the common denominator of pleasure which embraces all endeavours that have taken a long time to plan, to nurture, and then suddenly bursts before your eyes in achievement. You are no longer an onlooker waiting impatiently. The harvest is there to give you your reward; the fact of it destroys your worries and galvanises you into action. I know of few things so evergreen sweet as the first picking of a new crop.
But mine, as far as the tomatoes were concerned, was only a token picking. It was Jeannie and Jane who disappeared into the greenhouse twice a week; and then Shelagh too when she came to work for us and we had the additional greenhouses. I was considered too clumsy. It was alleged that I carelessly knocked the trusses as I passed down the rows, knocking off tomatoes before they were ripe, stepping on and squashing them as they lay on the soil. It was pleasant for them to have a butt.
‘He’s an elephant, isn’t he, Mrs Tangye?’
‘Elephants should be more careful.’
A pause for a few moments as the picking continued. Then a small voice and a giggle.
‘Oh, well, some jobs men will never do as well as women.’
I was, therefore, in charge of taking the tomatoes to the packing shed, grading and packing them, then driving the chips to Penzance. Each full chip, of course, weighed twelve pounds and I separated them into two grades; normal-sized tomatoes, then misshapen and small ones together. Such straightforward grading is, however, considered a sin. The cry is for perfect uniformity. The perfect chip of tomatoes, in the opinion of the leaders of the industry, is one that contains fruit of exactly the same shape, as if the contents have been churned out of a machine.
Flavour, it seems, does not matter; the tomato can taste of nothing at all and still win the laurels. Perfect shape, perfect size, but it can taste of soap; and this campaign of artificial standards is considered essential if the needs of the housewife are to be met. Who is this palateless housewife? No doubt a computer-produced automaton.
Thus I continue to grade on the basis that people still want tasty tomatoes and therefore, within reason, the shape and size are unimportant. And yet how much longer will I be able to do this? I grow a tomato variety which is bred to have flavour. The thousands and thousands of tons of tomatoes which are shipped into this country every year have only shape as their merit. These varieties produce more tomatoes per plant and can be sold cheaper. It therefore may be only a question of time before, I too, sell tasteless tomatoes.
