reading: A Cat Affair, Sun on the Lintel

late February 2023

While waiting for the next book in the Minack Chronicles, I read Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Wonderful, and my head got floaty when I suddenly figured out the whole premise of the book (after feeling confused). A reviewer correctly said that within the book is the best Blitz novel ever written.

And then the next Derek Tangye book arrived.

I loved every bit and will share my favourite parts. As always, he recaps the story of how he was won over to liking cats.

Derek and Jeannie left city life to be flower farmers on a Cornish cliff.

By the time he left college, he had “come to…

Of course, I identify with his awkwardness in groups. I have been hopeful at times but never succeeded.

The year in which he wrote A Cat Affair seems to be when pilgrims began to arrive at Minack Cottage, and it was the year when I was only a bit over a mile away one day at the Merry Maidens stone circle but didn’t know anything about the Tangyes.

I love the fondness for frogs, as the story of the tadpole in the tea is shared again and expanded.

Derek wrote again of his liberal grandfather…

…and in one of the books around the middle of the series, I found out why Derek would often surprise me by being adamantly anti-strikers: He and Jeannie relied on the early spring crop of daffodils to get them through the year, and often when they got to the nearby train station to ship them, there would be a strike which meant the daffodils would wilt unsold.

Based on what I have read of English history at the time, Derek would have understood, I think, if he knew more about working conditions that weren’t anything like what his grandfather provided.

If only David Kynaston would finish his next book in his history series, Tales of a New Jerusalem, which may travel into the 70s. I have been waiting…and waiting…and hope I (and he) live long enough to see it. Then I will know much more in scrupulous and personal detail (he often quotes the average citizen) about the strikes of that era.

Derek mentioned another local author, Marion Spring, and I have managed to order a book by her called Garden Memories (on its way). He describes giving her a sprig from the “verbena bush”, oft mentioned. I finally found out that it was a large hebe!

At the cottage, as Lama becomes elderly and is protected by Derek from being usurped, a young cat named Oliver is hanging around and Jeannie feeds him outdoors. Derek builds him a comfy outdoor home.

I was always pleased when Beverley Nichols came to visit (and I hope to be rereading his memoirs next winter.)

Lama was too dignified to accept such blandishments from visitors, much as Beverley tried.

In a later retelling of that story, Beverley says at the bedroom doorway, “We have had words.” (It occurs to me that when I read his memoirs years ago, I had the same sentimental tears as I do over Minack.)

Looking backward, Derek reminisces about the rocky start of the daffodil farm, and how when he and Jeannie were invited to Claridges in London to celebrate its 25th anniversary as special guests (because of Jeannie’s starlike former employment at the Savoy Hotel), “we were unable to accept. We had too many debts. We hadn’t the money to pay our fare to London and back.” So fie on snide amateur reviewers who have assumed that they were able to move to Cornwall because of wealth.

The following page and a bit about what noisy people fail to appreciate, reminds me of the horrible fireworks week or more here on the peninsula every July, and what it would be like without them.

About little black cat Lama, and their first cat, Monty, just one of the passages that makes me tear up so I cannot see the page, and, like Derek, I value that depth of emotion, even now when I read it again to share:

Due to rainy weather and the brevity of the Minack books being under 200 pages, I could sometimes read two a day. I took a brief moment to look out the door.

I could not make myself go out into the cold but potentially productive sunshine. I had to read on.

This next book tells more of the peaceful daily life at Minack with no greater suspense than whether or not Derek will keep his New Year resolutions. (He does part of the domestic work of the household but resolved, among other things, to do some cooking, which was Jeannie’s domain. As the years passed, he did more of it although…well, read and see if he succeeds on this particular year.)

He also tells Jeannie that he has resolved to sort out his “oceans of notes and letters and papers” that are kept in a big cupboard. “Jeannie was laughing.” I suspected he would have about as much success as I have had with my to do list item called “filing cabinet”.

He continued to resist the kind of sophisticated humour that makes fun of people and that ridicules the sentimentality that he treasured. It reminded me of in-person groups in my past and even of reading things nowadays among Facebook friends and wondering why people I like are spending their time making fun of what people wear or scoffing at mistakes celebrities have made.

When a close friend who is a deputy leader in the Labour Party visits, Derek has a discussion with him about Cornwall:

So true, and, since Derek was far from retired at that time, I appreciate that he as a middle-aged person had sympathy for older folk.

When Derek and Jeannie were struggling in the early years of the flower and produce farm, his mother helped them out. I would like to give credit to my mother for doing the same at one particularly critical juncture when Robert’s and my van broke down (on the way home from visiting her two hours away) and we had a huge towing bill and then a huge repair bill.

Again, thank you, mom.

Here is an astute description of cat behaviour:

They, and especially Jeannie, grew all sorts of flowers in their cottage garden…

…although by that time, they were, I think, no longer growing many flowers other than daffodils for the flower trade. In summer, they grew and shipped tomatoes. When they used to grow flowers, before larger farms with huge greenhouses started to compete with the cliff farms, among them were:

Beauty of Nice stock, Persian carpet wallflowers, Bournemouth gem and Governor Herrick (little scent)  and Princess of Wales (good scent) violets, Ascania, the original Cornish violet, and Wedgwood Iris. 

They grew and sold Pilot and Homeguard potatoes, also May Queen, Sharpe’s Express, and Duke of York Cornish new potatoes, but gave up the potato trade after several years of being blighted by storms.

They had purchased three greenhouses and grew and shipped Maascross tomatoes with a label extolling that they were “grown for flavour.”

Having been farming veg and flowers for twenty plus years, they were friends with the old timers.

I share with Derek this labelling problem.

I loved the art on the paperback versions that I was buying used. The hardbacks had photographs, and I particularly enjoyed this one of the book I had just finished, the view from Minack Cottage with Derek and Jeannie in the garden.

Reading weather was set to continue for another week or more. I had received a book that I was so eager to read that next, I was going to emerge from the world of Minack into the 1980s London life of a jobbing gardener.