reading: A Drake at the Door

late February 2023

I have owned this book since a trip to the UK in 1990, where I bought three of them but had never read them. I had realized they were a series and am always determined to read a series in order. They were hard to find here before internet buying and so had languished on a shelf. Now, reminded of the series while reading the Cornish setting of The Salt Path, I had read the first two books, A Gull on the Roof and A Cat in the Window and could finally read this one that I had owned for decades, one of the most beloved of the series that delves deep into the workings of Derek and Jeannie’s daffodil farm and off-the-grid life in 1950s coastal Cornwall. They had left a high society life in the city for country seclusion, without even a road to their cottage. Jeannie had been a publicity director at the very fine Savoy Hotel; Derek had been a journalist and a member of MI5. In the books, he always give her credit for giving him the courage to keep working their rural flower farm even when it seemed that it might not succeed.

Derek’s wife, Jeannie, and their helper, a teenager named Jane, were tadpole rescuers.

This was twenty years before the Coast Path walked by Raynor and Moth Winn and Mark Wallington. (When the path did appear, Derek and Jeannie were supporters of the idea, as long as cliff farmers were asked which route would be best to pass their cultivated fields.)

Thoughts of Monty, their beloved orange cat who had turned Derek into a cat lover (although at that time, he thought he would never have another, that Monty was the pinnacle of catdom and none other would do.)

Meanwhile, Skooter and the Greys snoozed away the reading day on a comfy chair.

Derek’s thoughts about animals were exemplary, something that increased in him after he moved to Minack (and had learned to like cats as well as dogs). Boris is the drake of the title.

The passage below reminded me of the infuriating moment when a drone flew over my head while I was turning my compost.

I liked the idea that Jane had of how to deal with such problems (in this case, Dutch bulb sellers who had sold them daffodils that were not good sellers in the flower markets).

(…an imaginary bow and arrow). That might be the only violent (imaginary) scene in the entire series, other than some real life memories of World War II.

I appreciate the candor with which Derek ponders his flaws. This was a continuing theme throughout the series, as was, in the early books, the financial difficulty of depending on flowers and veg to make their living, while at the mercy of coastal storms. They never regretted having left their glittering city life even during the early years when, as he revealed in later books, they didn’t even have money for enough petrol to go anywhere else.

Imagine picking daffodils for market while bent over in a gale..

It makes my job look easy.

Having now read three Minack books, I was entranced and eager to begin the next one. I couldn’t stop then to make a blog post about how much I loved the latest book because I couldn’t leave the feeling of being at Minack while reading. Even though I did stop for some telly with dinner in the evenings, the rest of the time was reading. Because each book is about 180 pages, I could sometimes read two a day, and as I read, I could hear the coast wind and imagine how it would feel to be picking the daffodils.