reading: 3 books, life without Jeannie

9 March 2023

The Evening Gull begins with Derek driving to Jeannie’s funeral. Then Derek made a champion effort to be strong, to take care of himself and not let anyone see him falling apart.

Some passages and the thoughts they inspired…and would-be conversations with Derek. If I had been one of his neighbours, I would have asked if I could volunteer to help out with his garden during these last years.

It becomes even more clear how Derek and Jeannie’s experiences in World War II had influenced their decision to move to the Cornish coast. I am now reading Went the Day Well. his mid-war book of memorials of people who died in WWII, from soldiers to airmen to women volunteers in English cities, and it brings it home even more strongly.

From The Evening Gull: “…we were living in a vacuum. There were so many, much less fortunate than Jeannie and me, who felt the same. During the war, everyone had a worthwhile, selfless purpose, and our lives were virtually governed for us. The war had to be won. We were all together. Now we had become flotsam and jetsam, floating aimlessly along towards nowhere.”

And oh, how I wish someone would release Derek’s actual diaries. However, in The Minack Chronicles Revisited, John Nash wrote about how a trustee was charged with going through all of Derek and Jeannie’s papers after Derek died and destroying anything of a “personal or sensitive nature”. So I wonder if the diaries still exist. I would love a series like Christopher Isherwood’s diaries, which filled up a winter for me a few years ago.

I agree with Derek’s assessment of life. He would be so horrified by the cruelty of modern social media (especially since 2015).

He remained impassioned about the preservation of wildness and the character of Cornish villages. This was years before Walmart and Home Depot and other massive chains that we have in this side of the pond.

………….

When I first moved to the Long Beach Peninsula in 1992, a local literary journal called “From the Woods of the Lost Corner” well described the feeling here. I was told I should not move here unless I could entertain myself (not a problem!). There was plenty of cheap and shabby housing for artists and dreamers (and service workers!), and there were still some old-timers who, it was said, had never left the peninsula in their entire lives. We called ourselves eccentrics and “end of the roaders” who had gone as far west as possible and then settled here.

I fear the same thing has happened to our area as happened to Cornwall, but with one big difference. A lot of dreamers have moved here and want to change some of the anti-environmental traditions such as driving on the beach, which has now gone way beyond the old days of some trucks driving along to pick up driftwood for their wood stoves or to dig some clams. The beach is a busy thoroughfare of tire tracks now, and maybe the incomers can get it preserved for wildlife and nesting birds (like the threatened snowy plover).

John Nash’s biographical chapters in The Minack Chronicles Revisited reveal that Derek was remembered kindly by people who had worked for him. I like that he wanted to give one worker proper credit for his work:

There were some very interesting revelations about Jeannie and Derek’s relationship in the books published after she died. I remembered my former spouse, Robert, when we were working full time as gardeners, laughing about the idea of an open marriage, “When would we find the time?”

Derek wrote, “...our happiness had not been built on a placid life. We had our rows, our anxieties. We were not always virtuous in the conventional sense. We had learned…that frustration threatens happiness. Satisfy frustration, therefore, and happiness endures. We lived, therefore, dangerously and did so because deep, deep down we knew that we belonged totally to each other, and that we were each other’s harbour. We had learnt, too, that unsatisfied frustration can turn small incidents into major ones.“

Perhaps when I finally get the biography called Tangye, all will become clear. Allan ordered an affordable copy on eBay (like most of these books, it was out of print and some copies cost over $50). Its tracking number showed it arriving at our post office, where it simply disappeared and did not make it into our post office box. My frustration knew no bounds. We now have another, more expensive copy on the way…I HOPE it makes it all the way into my hands this time. [Update as of March 26th…the first copy never turned up, the second copy has been stuck for several days in New Jersey, and I have now ordered a THIRD copy which hasn’t even been packed yet!]

That olearia that I wanted, because Minack had it, did not make it through the winter after Jeannie’s death. (The Veronica bushes were hebes, perhaps.)

Quite to my surprise, Derek had decided that he hoped for a new relationship. He wrote of it in the way in which he had written of “men” and “girls” back during the war (girls being adult women), and he still had that habit in the late 1980s, when he was in his late 70s; he wrote that there might be a “girl” in his future. But, really, he meant “I was seeking a Jeannie. Now I could only look forward to steppingstones leading me nowhere. I was not, however, as despondent as I sound. The steppingstones might be delightful. Jeannie would be glad.”

Speaking of “men and girls”, AKA adult women, Derek wrote about Jeannie’s freedom from needing equal opportunity in Jeannie and does it again with this: “her laughter…sparkling fun…long dark hair, slim exquisite figure, her ability to enchant anyone who came to see her, operating in a man’s world without any need for Equal Opportunity laws to make her job secure, relying on her femininity, her common sense, her expertise, her sex appeal.”

Oh, Derek. Do women who could not simply enrapture their way through the working world the way Jeannie did not deserve equality? And the chef who “chased her around the tables”…he says Jeannie thought that was just a bit of fun, and sexual harassment was not a problematic thing. Yet in my world, going back to the mid-1970s, my friends and I were entering the traditionally male trades. I went to printing school, other women friends were electricians or welders or carpenters and faced intense hostility and harassment both sexual and life-threatening (deliberately caused would-be accidents to women workers). I went in 1977 for an interview for a printing job with the Environmental Protection Agency and the men stuck pornographic slides among the images in a slide show about the company. (I walked out of that darkened room while they laughed.) Printing jobs suddenly turned to receptionist jobs when I walked in the door. Those women I knew persevered and fought on to have successful careers at the top of their trades. Many women (like me) can’t “enchant” our way to equality and have to rely on skill and hard work. I couldn’t even enchant my way into a printing job.

I have a feeling that, despite the many ways that I like Derek for his eloquent love of animals and nature and gardens, he might not have liked me (“femininity” and “sparkling fun” are far from traits of mine and I am every bit as outspoken as Derek was), and that makes me sad, since the world of Minack does enchant me so very much.

10 March, 2023

Skooter and I read the next book.

Derek had visitors who had not heard of Jeannie’s death. Especially, I would imagine, Americans, because even now British books are published here months later, if at all. He had to break the news about Jeannie’s death to any visitors who came hoping to see her before they had read Jeannie. Biographer John Nash described it as the “agony” of telling them; sometimes, visitors would burst into tears (as I would have). He continued to be welcoming of visitors, who often said things like “I feel very nervous arriving here uninvited. I feel sure you must get tired of people calling and interrupting you.” He wrote, “I endeavour to be natural by saying what I truly feel… that it is an evergreen privilege to share Minack with those who, though living far, far away, have become involved, and are prepared to come nervously down the winding lane, and across Monty’s Leap.”

So I continue to come down the winding lane with conversations I so wish we could have had.

Derek remained insecure. He had gone to a posh school but had failed all his exams, he had two brothers who were successful at school, and even in his appearance some years before on Desert Island Discs, he remembered a schoolmaster telling him he was useless to society. He wrote, “…when I write about emotion, I feel inhibited. I have an irking sensation that someone is looking over my shoulder laughing at me….And it is a quirk in me that I vision the someone to be very clever, someone of high intellectual ability, who has the qualifications of …the influential elite.” Again, I feel so akin to Derek. This blog is full of passages that I have written and then deleted, although they secretly linger in earlier drafts. I don’t envision the laughing ones being intellectually elite as much as mean bullies, though, who scoff at sentiment and insecurity. A revelation: When I think “Derek wouldn’t like me!” it ties right in with my motto, borne from experience, of, “The more you know me, the less you’ll like me.”

Derek’s thoughts on the afterlife: “Our personal attitudes also shared the theory that for a departed one to tie themselves to earth life because those they left behind are wishing to remain in contact could be like the break-up of a love affair…the one who wants to break away, the other tries to maintain it.” (On the other hand, Jeannie said passionately that her spirit would stay at Minack and protect it, and they felt that the spirit of all their beloved, departed animals were there.). But about the afterlife, Derek “remains puzzled.” Letters from mediums saying they had been visited by Jeannie came from afar. He thought, smiling to himself, “What was Jeannie up to? What was she doing dropping in again on a complete stranger and discussing her private life? So unlike her.”

I just think that the Minack books were so compelling to people (like me) that the ones who fancied themselves to be mediums wanted for Jeannie to contact them.

Another topic: Derek had a canny understanding of how the news cycle works:

He had been a journalist in his thirties and had, in fact, quit a job when his editors wanted him to write acidic gossip about society figures. I remembered how my former spouse, Robert, told me about taking a photojournalism course. The teacher said if you see a truck with a big dog in it, you must walk up to the window and make the dog snarl and bark to get a good photo.

Like Derek, I find it a huge relief in recent years to not have to do anything for holidays. Pre-pandemic, social occasions called, and I always wished I could just be at home: “I was happy on my own on Christmas Day. I enjoy being solitary. I did not have to make a jovial effort, wear a paper hat, pull crackers, all very happy-making for most people, but not for me. I instead had the soothing pleasure of Creation around me. I walked around, saw the first green bud of a daffodil, heard curlews calling….smelt the sweet scent of the heliotrope, listening to the dancing gull on the porch roof, no man-made sounds…peace.”

After the cat Ambrose had died, his only steady companion was little Cherry, whom he describes so beautifully here.

I now had the very last book to read, my second book of the day. I did not want it to be over.

The Confusion Room had even more repetition that previous books and was somewhat longer, revealing, I think, that even though Derek refused outside editing on his books, Jeannie must have been an editor. He had described in a previous volume how she didn’t like his original ending of The Cherry Tree and he had changed it for the better. There is one social problem that he goes on a tangent about twice in this last book that I think she would have completely kiboshed, at least the second time, so I do think she had a gentling influence. [I read later in a biography that his editor did remove a couple of political passages from this last book, so I am wrong about no editing.]

The title refers to a room in the stables where Derek stored all his old papers and letters and documents, which he hoped to get all sorted out. In the early days of the flower farm, it was where Jeannie and Jane and Shelagh bunched the flowers, so many different kinds. I can just picture in my mind the Cornish posies and wish I had been one of the women bunching them.

As he braves The Confusion Room, I can relate to his thought of “How was I to secure order out of chaos?” I have only six boxes and a filing cabinet to sort through and have been putting it off for years.

That is what I will do. Next winter. I swear.

Here comes another of those mysterious revelations of Jeannie and Derek’s relationship….to which I wonder, living in deepest Cornwall, when did they…find the time?? In my distant past, in the anonymity of city life, and with more free time, I had a couple of relationships like that, so I am intrigued. Just one more thing I would love to have had a conversation about in his later years.

He goes on for a couple of pages without really explaining what he means. Of course, I am nosy. I can’t help it, after having read 15 memoirs out of 18 that said nothing of outside “casual friendships”. I am emotionally invested by now. I can only hope that Derek would be pleased to know he made me so curious.

And not longer after, he quotes one of Jeannie’s favourite sayings (which would be perfect for the inside of my front gate, since I prefer to not leave my property): “To be happy, never go beyond the garden gate.” Or as Prunella Scales said in the wonderful telly series, Great Canal Journeys, she “didn’t like to open the front door to put the milk out!” Who would want to leave this:

And then the end of the book came…which caused me a strong emotional pain and recurrent tears for two days. And even now, thinking about it, I truly can hardly stand how sad it makes me feel. I also think it is such a shame that most of these books are out of print and, one biographer suggests, are increasingly hard to find.

Derek did not intend The Confusion Room to be his last book. When he died a couple of years later, without leaving Minack even at the end, he was already making notes for a book called Shadows. Somewhere I read that it was to be a memoir about his time in MI5, now that the story could be told. Later in Echoes from a Cornish Cliff by Pauline Ruffles, I read that it was to be about the circle of life and “the spirits of Minack”, his loved and lost animal companions and Jeannie. There is so much more I want to know. Were his last two years contented ones? Did he have a cat with him or was it just him and the donkeys, and how could a cat lover stand to live alone without a cat? This question bothers me, and I hope that biography that I am STILL waiting for answers it. [In Echoes from a Cornish Cliff, read from March 21-23, I learned that he only had one catless year after Cherry died. And he did manage to die at Minack, resisting all efforts to convince him to move to a nearby care home. [As of March 26, I am still waiting for the biography simply called Tangye. When I finally read it, I will likely write one more book post about the three biographies, two of which I have read by now.]

Meanwhile, I comfort myself that Jeannie and Derek had over thirty years together at Minack Cottage, and as she often said, they were so very lucky in that. The beginning…from A Gull on the Roof…