Seagulls in the Attic Read online

  SEAGULLS IN

  THE ATTIC

  Tessa Hainsworth

  preface

  publishing

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Tessa Hainsworth

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409051473

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Preface Publishing 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Tessa Hainsworth 2010

  Tessa Hainsworth has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Preface Publishing 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA

  An imprint of The Random House Group Limited

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84809 263 1

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  Still Giddy on Cornwall’s champagne air . . .

  To Richard, Tom and Georgie – I count my

  blessings everyday!

  Thank you to all my family and friends.

  Special thanks to Karen Hayes and Jane Turnbull.

  To Uther, Tom, Marley,

  and their parents, uncles and aunts,

  with love as always.

  Also by Tessa Hainsworth

  Up With the Larks

  Prologue

  The beach is empty; only I and Jake, my liver and white spaniel, are making footprints in the pure white sand. It’s early spring, just after sunrise, and the sky is the colour of apricots on the horizon. The sea is perfectly still; the tide is nearly full out and the rock pools and formations that disappear when the tide is in have appeared again. I love the way the coves and beaches transform themselves unrecognisably with each tidal event: stones, rocks and tiny inlets come and go, creating a seascape that seems magically elusive.

  I stand watching the sea change from a deep indigo to emerald and back to blue, as the sun begins to lighten the day. Tiny waves sparkle like dewdrops and up above me high white clouds are turning amber and gold.

  Jake runs along the pristine sand, chasing the delicate waves lapping at my feet. Seagulls soar, greeting the morning with their joyful cries. The smell of salt, the birdsong, the primeval thrumming of the ocean makes me feel at one with the sky and earth.

  Every morning now I can do this, tumble out of bed and take an early morning walk with Jake, long before anyone else is awake. The beach is near our house in Cornwall, so near that although I’m a postwoman and have to be at work early, I still have this time to myself to start the day.

  I stop walking, take deep breaths. Everything seems to be waking up on this spring morning; even the sea is swelling with promise. On my way here all my senses were buzzing with nature waking up: the scent of rich earth; the singing of robins, blackbirds, skylarks, thrushes; the richness of colour in the dazzling yellow of the wild daffodils and the rich creaminess of the lush magnolia.

  The smell of the sea is heady at this hour of the morning and almost intoxicating. Out of sheer exuberance I ruffle Jake’s damp fur then begin to run along the shore, the dog racing alongside me, delighted with our game of tag.

  I don’t stop until I’m at the rock pool at the edge of the beach. It’s half hidden by a massive outcrop and behind this and the pool is my secret spot, the place where I find cowrie shells. I love these tiny pinkish shells, no bigger than my little fingernail. They’re lucky shells, the Cornish equivalent to the Irish four-leaf clover. Crouching down and sifting my fingers through the wet sand, I know that today, this incredibly beautiful day, I’ll find one, and within minutes, I do. Not just one but two cowrie shells, pearly and perfect. It’s an omen, I think. Today I’m beginning work on my allotment, starting for the first time to grow vegetables to feed my family, taking the first step towards self-sufficiency. Finding the lucky shells is a fortuitous start to the venture.

  Clutching my shells I retrace my steps, watching the light strengthen, making the sea glow. I’m still not used to it, still can’t believe I’m here, even though it’s my second year of delivering the post in Cornwall. Sometimes I look around for the person I was not so long ago, the high-flying career woman, and I wonder how this barefoot postie making footprints in the untouched white sand, made such a metamorphosis. However it happened, I’m grateful for it.

  I take one more look at the sea, inhale another deep breath of the ozone and listen for a few moments more to the evocative cries of the herring gulls as they skim the water looking for fish. Then I call Jake and head for home – to my family, to work, and to the start of another magical Cornish day.

  Chapter 1

  How does my garden grow?

  The day is idyllic, perfect for what I plan to do. The March winds at the beginning of the month have died down, as have the squally showers of the last few days. The sun, as I leave the house, is beaming as brightly as I am as I skip down the lane; it’s like summer even though spring only officially begins today. I cross the short distance to the other side of the village, grinning and nodding at the occasional person – or dog or cat or bird – that I pass. What a day to start a garden!

  I’ve never grown vegetables before. We hadn’t the land in London, nor the time. I was trying to combine a managerial position with The Body Shop along with giving quality time to Ben, my husband, and our two children, Will and Amy aged eight and six. It didn’t leave much free time for things like growing your own food.

  Here in Cornwall, where we’ve lived for over a year now, I still don’t have any land for a vegetable garden, which is why I’m on my way to the other side of the village. There I’ve not only got an allotment, but a place to keep my six hens. We did kee
p the chickens in our back garden, but it was really not the right place for them, being much too near the house and attracting vermin of all kinds. The hens, and our allotment are now situated on land belonging to Edna and Hector Humphrey, a couple in their nineties. They both seem remarkably spry and fit despite being rather skinny and slight. The Humphreys have let me use some of their acreage in return for eggs and produce from the allotment, which is enormously kind of them. They live in a wonderfully massive house surrounded by what was once a beautiful garden now gone to rack and ruin. I’m using a plot between their front garden and an ancient apple orchard, a walled area less ramshackle than the rest of their land.

  My hens are delighted with the move, made only a few weeks ago. Instead of a basic run they can now grub about in most of the overgrown orchard, which we’ve partitioned off with chicken wire. I have a fabulous hen house for them on a tall stump, three feet off the ground so that no hungry predators can get at them. There is a plank leading up to it, rather like a bridge over a moat, a pitched roof with corrugated iron and a portcullis-type door. Inside are two sweet nesting boxes each with its own little roof.

  ‘Oh happy hens!’ I cried as I watched them coming out of their new house that first morning. They clucked and clacked back at me, agreeing I’m sure. They are quite used to my chatting to them and always answer back politely.

  Now that the mornings are lighter I can let them out of the hen house and feed them on my way to work as a postwoman. Edna and Hector insist on shutting them up in the evenings, saying it will put a spring in their steps, having chickens around the place again.

  ‘Reminds me of the old days,’ Hector had mused as the hens arrived at their new home.

  ‘Ah, to be sure,’ Edna had sighed and nodded her head. ‘We had all sorts of wayward creatures sharing our place in the old days.’

  Despite my eagerness to get started on my garden, I can’t help slowing down as I walk, stopping here and there to look and admire. The entire village is a rainbow of colour, the daffodils still determined to bloom on despite arriving here long before anywhere else. Primroses stare out from every hedgerow and garden, as do other wild flowers whose names I don’t know. Colours assail me: indigo blues, sunset pinks and oranges, wine reds. Last month the camellias were in full bloom and we were treated to a month-long carnival of pink, red and white petals floating through the air like confetti. That, plus the blissful scent of the magnolias beginning to stir, made February, usually the dreariest, most tiresome month in London, a joyful delight in south Cornwall.

  ‘Why are you sounding so bubbly?’ asked my best friend Annie in London during one of our frequent phone conversations. ‘It’s February. Cold, slushy, grey, dark, endless.’

  ‘Oh really?’ I replied. ‘Actually today I ate my lunch outside. I parked the post van on the estuary at Creek and sat on the sea wall with a seagull. Bliss.’ She nearly hung up on me.

  I forget about Annie, about London, as I cut through the churchyard on my way to the Humphreys’ place. The church squats in the centre of Treverny, like a great fat hen, with the houses surrounding it her little chicks. There are bouquets of fresh hothouse flowers on the tombstones but to my mind they are not a patch on the wild profusion of blooms and colour everywhere else in the village.

  Glutted with all these delights, I saunter past the Humphreys’ house, a large, rambling farmhouse which was originally medieval but with bits added on as parts of the old building disintegrated over the centuries. Most of it is now Victorian shabby, rather like Edna and Hector themselves who seem to live in layers of clothes bought decades ago on their many travels, or else dug out from musty, old trunks stored in their attic. Somehow they manage to look both bizarre and elegant in their odd assortment of clothing, which is especially interesting to me as I too am trying to manage on clothes from charity shops or hand-me-downs from friends and family. Since moving to Cornwall money has been scarce, and though I’m lucky enough to have a full-time job, the salary of a postal deliverer is not huge. With the debts we still have from the move, the work on the house, and all the expenses of those early days when neither Ben, my husband, nor I could find work, money is scarce. Things have eased a bit, as Ben, an actor, is ‘resting’ with several part-time jobs locally, but we still have to watch every penny.

  One thing I do have now that I didn’t have in London is peace of mind, tranquillity and time. When my post deliveries are finished, I don’t have to stress about my work as I did in London, I can totally forget about it. There’s also no more stressing about things I’ve left undone, no more worrying that the children aren’t getting enough quality time with their mother, no more tears because Ben and I seem never to have a chance to sit down and talk. My off-duty hours are mine alone, not the Royal Mail’s.

  And as an added bonus, my time actually at work is mine too. As long as the post gets delivered at more or less the usual hours, I’m free to stop for a moment or two and stare at a sunrise coming over the water when I deliver to one of the seaside villages, or wait until a blackbird has finished its song before moving on to my next delivery. I remember the crazy wonder of seeing newborn lambs in December and stopping to watch them play in the still green fields as I delivered van loads of Christmas cards and parcels. The milder weather of this part of the world jumbles the seasons in the best possible way, and still manages to spring delightful surprises on me every month.

  But today is my day off, it’s all mine. Though it’s not even ten o’clock the morning sun is strong. The name of the Humphreys’ house is still etched on a wooden plaque nailed onto the ancient oak tree at the entrance, looking as if it has been there for as many years as the owners. ‘Poet’s Tenement’ is what it says and when I first read it I got quite excited, loving the romantic idea that generations of poets had lived here in poetic squalor, existing on words alone as they penned their verses in this rural idyll.

  Hector put me right when I asked him about it. ‘Don’t be daft, maid,’ he said smiling kindly at me. ‘The deeds may say what they like but my father looked up the history when he bought this place as a young man. Seems decades ago some feller called Pote, or Poat lived here, and the name got corrupted through the generations.’

  ‘Oh. So no real poets then?’

  ‘Well, maid, not that I’ve heard tell. But my father’s brother used to tell limericks at the local in his day, so I suppose you could consider him a poet,’ he smiled enigmatically.

  ‘But Hector, what about the tenement part? It’s such a fantastic house, with such massive gardens. How could it ever be called a tenement?’

  Edna, who had joined us during this exchange, said, ‘It’s an old English word, used to mean a few acres, a smallholding, something like that. So hence the name, my dear. Someone called Pote, or Poot, or whatever owned a bit of farmland to go with his house and there you are.’

  I must have looked crestfallen for she added, ‘You’d have preferred a Cornish Wordsworth, wouldn’t you? I must say, so would I, once. Until I went to Japan with a poet many years ago.’

  As usual, Edna changed the subject after this cryptic remark, and I shall never know a thing more about her Japanese poet. Always curious about people, I’ve asked numerous folk in Treverny about the Humphreys, but no one seems to know much about them, even though they are certainly Cornish and have lived here off and on since they married. Hector was born in Poet’s Tenement and Edna came ‘from the north somewhere’, a local told me once, which I took to mean the north of England until I found out later that he meant north Cornwall. It’s taken me some time to realise that anywhere north of the Tamar River is referred to as ‘Up Country’, just as I thought an ‘emmett’ was some kind of Cornish insect until I realised that that was the local word for tourists.

  Hector is sitting on the bench outside Poet’s Tenement so I stop to say hello. He is totally bald, has been since he was young, according to those who knew him then. He usually wears an assortment of hats but today he’s got his shiny head exposed to
the sun, ‘airing it out after the winter’, he chuckles to me as I sit beside him for a chat. His face is as wrinkly as dried fruit and as sweet; his smile, like Edna’s, is genuine and warm despite a missing tooth or two.

  Hector and I look out over the front garden as we chat. An ancient stone wall, crumbling in spots, surrounds the jumble of flowers and plants all crammed together every which way. The wild daffodils are mixed with heather and rosehips alongside a bit of gorse and all sorts of things whose name I couldn’t begin to even guess. Once a week a local man, Doug, comes out to clear the path which runs around the inside of the wall so that it doesn’t disappear beneath the foliage, but that’s all the help they have.

  After I’ve admired the colourful chaos of the garden, Hector says, ‘I see you’re all spruced up to start sowing.’ He’s noted my wellie boots, my gardening gloves, my basket full of seeds and some tiny plants.

  ‘Yes, I’m all set to go. Joe up the road brought his rotivator and prepared the ground for me. I’d never have been able to dig it all up, and nor would Ben with his bad back.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Oh much better and back at work, but he’s not supposed to do any heavy lifting for a while.’ Ben had been hurt in a fall down the stairs a month or so ago and had only just recovered, which is why I didn’t want him near the garden. He would try to do too much and injure himself again. Besides, the garden, for this year anyway, is my project. Ben is juggling such odd and long hours at his part-time jobs that he’s got no time to take on anything else.

  I ask Hector about Edna, worried that she might be ill. Usually the two sit together on the semi-rotten wooden bench in the front garden on a sunny morning, winter or summer.

  ‘Edna? Couldn’t be better. She’ll be out by and by. Had a spot of bother getting out of bed this morning. Says she wants to take her time getting dressed and I wasn’t to fuss but to warm the bench for her.’