A Drake at the Door [antikvár]

1 heard one day that my neighbour was leaving. We had been neighbours for seven years and, in view of the manner of our coming, conflict between us was perhaps inevitable. The neighbour represented the hard-working peasant, Jeannie and I the up-country interlopers. Minack and our six acres of land belonged to his farm, although in reality it was not his farm. In the years before the last war, farms in West Cornwall were difficult to let and landowners were thankful to dispose of them under any conditions; and the conditions were sometimes these: A prosperous farmer would rent an unwanted farm, stock it with cows, put a man of his own choosing called a dairyman into the farm-house, charge him rent for each cow, and then let him run the farm as he wished. My neighbour was a dairyman. Both of us, then, paid rent to the same absentee farmer; my neighbour for twelve cows, myself for the primitive cottage and the derelict land I was allowed to have with it. On a practical basis I had the worst of the bargain. It was a whim that led us to Minack; an emotion that made us beUeve the broken-down cottage edged by a wood and looking out on Mount's Bay between Penzance and Land's End, could become our personal paradise. And after seven years I still did not possess a scrap of paper which proved our legal right to the tenancy. The reason for this dilatoriness was fear on our part. When in the beginning we pleaded for Minack, the absentee farmer clearly did not mind whether we had it or not. We had to nudge our way into his good humour. We had to be as careful as a ship in a minefield. One false move, a word too thrusting, a suggestion too bold, and we would have been retreating from his presence without a hope of return. This was an occasion, we both felt, which logic or the legal mind would be a hindrance. It was not the moment to bargain