A Gull on the Roof by Derek Tangye

How many of us living in large cities, doing jobs we don't like, have had dreams of leaving it all behind and moving to the country? Or how about living in a cottage on a cliff overlooking the sea and growing food and flowers?  

That is exactly what Derek Tangye and his wife Jeannie did in the 1950s when they moved from London to Cornwall.  Turning their backs on paid employment and a lifestyle that saw them rubbing shoulders with the likes of Danny Kaye and Gertrude Lawrence, they (along with their beloved ginger cat Monty) moved into a derelict cottage on six acres of land.  Their challenge: to make their living as market gardeners.  A Gull on the Roof is the tale of what they did and what happened to them in the first five years on their farm at Minack, near St Buryan.

Tangye's story is a pleasing mixture of human interactions, wild landscapes and the secret world of animals.  On the human side, there are the disbelieving friends in London, the practical and flawed people of the districts around St Buryan; and caught in the middle are the Tangyes, who risk making complete fools of themselves in the eyes of both groups should their dream turn into a failure.  On the animal side, there is Monty and his country cousins: foxes, badgers, robins and finches.  And the wild coast of Cornwall and its boisterous weather provide equal measures of beauty and peril.

Tangye, in addition to being a perceptive judge of character, is capable of turning a phrase.  There are many places in the book were he describes his thoughts and feelings about the very unorthodox thing he and Jeannie have chosen to do.  He often compares it to their old life in London.  A brief visit to his friends in London provoked the following:

There is no freedom in twentieth-century achievement for the individual is  controlled not by his own deep thinking processes but by the plankton of shibboleths which are currently in fleeting fashion; and by his [sic] own desperate need to maintain financial survival in the glittering world he has found himself. 

I wonder what he would have made of the twenty-first century?  

Anyway, if you like James Herriot, then you will probably enjoy Derek Tangye too.