With the sea still calm next day William left the sanctuary of the pool and swam out into the swell of the ocean with the seal alongside him. There to welcome them as they neared the island were the bobbing heads of the entire seal colony. When they swam too fast for him it seemed the easiest, most natural thing in the world to throw his arms around the seal and hold on, riding him over the waves out towards the island. Once there he lay out on the rocks with them and was minutely inspected by each member of the colony. They came one by one and lay beside him, eyeing him wistfully before lumbering off to make room for the next. Each of them was different and he found he could tell at once the old from the young and the female from the male. Later, sitting cross-legged on the rocks and surrounded entirely by the inquisitive seals, William tasted raw fish for the first time, pulling away the flesh with his teeth as if he had been doing it all his life. He began to murmur seal noises in an attempt to thank them for their gift and they responded with great hoots of excitement and affection. By the time he was escorted back to the safety of the shore he could no longer doubt that he was one of them.
* * *
The notepad he left behind on his bed the next afternoon read simply: ‘Gone to sea, where I belong.’ His mother found it that evening when she came in from the fields at dusk. The Coastguard and the villagers were alerted and the search began. They searched the cliffs and the sea shore from Zennor Head to Wicca Pool and beyond, but in vain. An air-sea rescue helicopter flew low over the coast until the darkness drove it away. But the family returned to the search at first light and it was William’s father who found the bundle of clothes hidden in the rocks below Trevail Cliffs. The pain was deep enough already, so he decided to tell no one of his discovery, but buried them himself in a corner of the cornfield below the chapel. He wept as he did so, as much out of remorse as for his son’s lost life.
Some weeks later they held a memorial service in the church, attended by everyone in the village except Sam whom no one had seen since William’s disappearance. The Parochial Church Council was inspired to offer a space on the church wall for a memorial tablet for William, and they offered to finance it themselves. It should be left to the family they said, to word it as they wished.
Months later Sam was hauling in his nets off Wicca Pool. The fishing had been poor and he expected his nets to be empty once again. But as he began hauling it was clear he had struck it rich and his heart rose in anticipation of a full catch at last. It took all his strength to pull the net up through the water. His arms ached as he strained to find the reserves he would need to haul it in. He had stopped hauling for a moment to regain his strength, his feet braced on the deck against the pitch and toss of the boat, when he heard a voice behind him.
‘Sam,’ it said, quietly.
He turned instantly, a chill of fear creeping up his spine. It was William Tregerthen, his head and shoulders showing above the gunwale of the boat.
‘Billy?’ said Sam. ‘Billy Tregerthen? Is it you, dear lad? Are you real, Billy? Is it really you?’ William smiled at him to reassure him. ‘I’ve not had a drink since the day you died, Billy, honest I haven’t. Told myself I never would again, not after what I did to you.’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I must be dreaming. You’re dead and drowned. I know you are.’
‘I’m not dead and I’m not drowned, Sam,’ William said. ‘I’m living with the seals where I belong. You were right, Sam, right all along. I can swim like a seal, and I live like a seal. You can’t limp in the water, Sam.’
‘Are you really alive, dear lad?’ said Sam. ‘After all this time? You weren’t drowned like they said?’
‘I’m alive, Sam, and I want you to let your nets down,’ William said. ‘There’s one of my seals caught up in it and there’s no fish there I promise you. Let them down, Sam, please, before you hurt him.’
Sam let the nets go gently hand over hand until the weight was gone.
‘Thank you Sam,’ said William. ‘You’re a kind man, the only kind man I’ve ever known. Will you do something more for me?’ Sam nodded, quite unable to speak any more. ‘Will you tell my mother that I’m happy and well, that all her stories were true, and that she must never be sad. Tell her all is well with me. Promise?’
‘Course,’ Sam whispered. ‘Course I will, dear lad.’
And then as suddenly as he had appeared, William was gone. Sam called out to him again and again. He wanted confirmation, he wanted to be sure his eyes had not been deceiving him. But the sea around him was empty and he never saw him again.
William’s mother was feeding the hens as she did every morning after the men had left the house. She saw Sam coming down the lane towards the house and turned away. It would be more sympathy and she had had enough of that since William died. But Sam called after her and so she had to turn to face him. They spoke together for only a few minutes, Sam with his hands on her shoulders, before they parted leaving her alone again with her hens clucking impatiently around her feet. If Sam had turned as he walked away he would have seen that she was smiling through her tears.
The inscription on the tablet in the church reads:
WILLIAM TREGERTHEN
AGED 10
Gone to sea, where he belongs
MILK FOR THE CAT
OLD MAN BARBERY HAD BEEN FARMING below the Eagle’s Nest at Tremedda for as long as anyone in Zennor parish could remember. The wind and the years had gnarled his leathery face and bent his bones; but his sharp blue eyes, although watery with age, remained bright with joy until the end. He died as every man should die – in his sleep. He left no mark in the world except his son, and the farm at Tremedda which he had not altered in sixty years.
During the twilight of his life no one could understand how he remained so smiling and contented, when so far as anyone else could see his life was and had been one long round of hard labour on the land and of wretched tragedy at home. He had married very late in life and his young wife had died in childbirth leaving him, already an old man, with an only son to bring up.
He was the wise old man of the village, and when asked, as he often was, how he stayed so cheerful, his eyes would smile and he would say:
‘The secret is to be in tune with the land, to be in rhythm with the seasons, to rise with the sun and to go to bed as it sets. The land is like a god,’ he would say, wagging his crooked finger. ‘Love the land and it will love you in return.’
Thomas was still young when the old man died. For some years already he had worked on the land alongside his father, but always under his father’s direction. There was a small herd of sundry milking cows still milked by hand in the old parlour below the house. The suckling cows and bullocks wintered out in amongst the rocks and the dead bracken. The dozen sows were still housed in a piggery that was so ancient that it looked as if it had sprung from the ground a millennium before. They had nearly a hundred lambing ewes each year and countless bedraggled hens and muddy ducks that wandered at will and laid whenever and wherever they found it convenient. A few fields were put to oats and barley, and there was always one field of potatoes. They had the machinery they needed for ploughing and harvesting, but always fourth-hand and rusty. ‘Workable’, his father called it. He would allow no weedkiller and no pesticides to be sprayed on his land – his father referred to them as ‘damned blasphemies’.
Thomas had often pleaded with his old father to modernise, but the old man would always point out that they had money in the bank, didn’t they, and that the land looked well, didn’t it? ‘Put all your eggs in one basket Thomas,’ he would say, ‘and then tell me what happens if you drop the basket.’ There was no arguing with him, Thomas knew that and was a gentle enough person not to want to hurt an old man by persisting.
‘You’ll have your time, Thomas,’ he had whispered urgently the day before he died, ‘and when it comes you’ll do what you must do: but I warn you Thomas, do not hurry the land, do not upset the balance. And remember the story; remember to leave out the bowl
of milk each night as we have always done, and to leave the one row of potatoes in the ground every year. My father made them a promise and I’ve kept to it, and you must keep to it. Promise me that much.’
To others it might have sounded like the ramblings of a dying old man, but Thomas had grown up with the story and knew how important it was to his father.
‘I promise Father,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll keep the promise.’
But the promise was made only to comfort his father. Once made, it was forgotten. In everything but this Thomas respected the wisdom of his father, although he may not always have agreed with him.
He had been brought up with the story that had first fascinated him and then stretched his credulity as a growing child, but that had become quite ridiculous to him now that he was a grown man. The farm, so his father said, was inhabited by a family of strange little folk – his father called them ‘my little friends’. He himself had never seen one of them but his father before him had seen and spoken to them, indeed he had made a solemn bargain with them. On their part the little folk would guard the farm and all the animals, keeping them free from disease and misfortune; and on his part the farmer would treat the land with the love and respect it deserved; and to seal the bargain the family would supply the little folk with milk and potatoes for ever and ever. Accordingly, each evening after milking, for over a hundred years now a bowl of fresh warm milk had been put out on the rock in the meadow below the cowshed. And each year a long line of potatoes was left in the ground after harvest, and when it was ploughed up the next spring there was never a potato to be found.
As a child Thomas loved the story and longed for his father to set him on his knee by the stove and tell it to him again and again; and when he grew up he heard of other similar legends of strange little people on other farms and up on the moors by the Quoit – but by this time they were mere legends to be enjoyed, but not to be believed. He had long since stopped lying low in the grass to ambush one of the little folk. He no longer put his ear to the rocks to listen in on their conversations.
So with his father dead and buried, Thomas now began to make changes at Tremedda Farm. With the money so carefully saved up over the years by his father he built a magnificent herring-bone milking parlour and installed a huge silver bulk tank. He trebled the size of the milking herd in the first year and worked like a slave to himself to finance the modernisation of the piggery and the building of a covered yard for the bullocks and suckling cows. He bulldozed away the hedgerows, the boulders and the giant fuchsias to enlarge the fields so he could farm more efficiently. He began to spray the encroaching bracken instead of burning it as his father had done.
Within a few short years the farm was transformed out of all recognition. His hard work and his success were admired all over Penwith; and he soon found himself a wife and brought her back to live with him at Tremedda. She loved the peace of the place and the feeling of being at the end of the earth, and they were happy. Thomas wanted his first child to be a boy so that he could take on the farm after him, and sure enough the boy came, healthy and strong. The world seemed truly to have become his oyster, but in all that time he had not once put out the bowl of milk and he no longer even grew a field of potatoes. It was not economic to grow just a few potatoes, and anyway he needed all the land to supply the barley and the straw he needed for the cows. So there was no room any more for potatoes, but even if he had grown potatoes he certainly would never have left them to rot in the ground for the sake of a ridiculous legend.
One summer evening Thomas finished the milking as usual and drove the cows out into the fields. He stood for a moment in his waterproof apron surveying the cows as they meandered out towards the sunset that had turned the still sea into a lake of red gold. He was a completely happy and fulfilled man at that moment, proud of his smart black-and-white milkers. With a sense of deep satisfaction he surveyed his land that stretched from the moor to the sea and back along the fields towards the village, and then feeling considerably proprietary he undid his apron and made his way back to the milking parlour.
Had he not held on to the handle of the dairy door as he opened it he would certainly have fallen over in astonishment, for seated cross-legged on his silver bulk tank was a little wrinkled old man, with fly-away grey hair and wide wild eyes and twitching eyebrows.
‘Good evening, Thomas Barbery,’ he said in a strangely youthful voice that was as kind as his smile.
Thomas was not one to doubt the evidence of his eyes, nor was he by nature either fearful or nervous; but he was now shocked into a state of such disbelief that he could find no words to answer the apparition on the bulk tank.
‘I see you’ve lost your tongue. Thomas Barbery,’ the little old man went on, still smiling. ‘I won’t harm you – we’re not like that, not at all, not at all. You see, Thomas, we’re here to help you – we always have been only you didn’t want to believe it. All we want from you is a little consideration and kindness, so that we can live happily alongside each other.’
‘Who are you?’ Thomas asked, finally finding the nerve to speak out. ‘Who are you and what do you want from me?’
‘Questions must have answers,’ said the old man springing down lightly from the bulk tank to the ground and wiping his hands on the back of his serge trousers. He would not stop smiling. ‘Perhaps I should introduce myself – it’s only polite. I knew your grandfather and your grandfather knew me. I knew your father and your father knew me, even though he never met me. But I’m quite sure he told you about us, and about our little arrangement. Yes, I can see he did, and I can see you didn’t believe him, did you? We’re the little people – I believe you call us knockers or pixies or boggarts, or what have you. All we do is to look after the countryside, to make sure that farms are properly cared for and that the animals are happy. In return all we ask is a bowl of milk each evening and a line of potatoes each year – we love potatoes. You may not have seen us before but we live here just as you do and we need food. Thomas Barbery, you’ve given us no milk and no potatoes since the day your good father died. And we’ve been watching you, watching you tearing the heart out of the farm with all your new buildings and your bulldozers, punishing the land and sucking it dry. We can take just so much Thomas Barbery, but when we saw that you were beginning to poison the countryside with all your insecticides and your pesticides, and spraying the land with your weedkillers, well that was the final straw. You have broken the ancient agreement between your grandfather and the little people and I’ve come to ask you, to beg you to mend your ways before it is too late. In future Thomas Barbery, you must take from the land only as much as you put in. You must love the land. It’s what your father taught you. From now on you must restore our daily bowl of milk from the dairy and our line of potatoes – it’s not much to ask is it?’
During this speech which was delivered with great passion and with expansive gestures, Thomas had regained his composure. Perhaps it was because he could now look down on the little old man who stood after all no higher than his knees, or perhaps it was the permanent, gentle smile on his wizened face that reassured Thomas and gave him the confidence to speak out boldly.
There was anger and resentment in his voice.
‘You may have frightened my grandfather into this agreement,’ he said, ‘but you’ll not frighten me. I am master of my own land. It is my land. No one, no one tells me how to run my own farm. It is mine and I shall do with it as I wish. As for the milk and potatoes – you can sing for them, for you’ll have none of mine.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ said the old man, walking slowly towards the door, shaking his head all the while. ‘You don’t understand do you, do you Thomas Barbery? The land belongs to no one. Not to you and not to me. We borrow it for a lifetime – that’s all – and then we hand it on to those who come after us.’
He turned and faced Thomas and looked hard into his eyes.
‘I don’t wish to harm you, you must believe that. But
if you will not keep to our ancient agreement, then we on our part will no longer protect your farm and your animals, and you’ll be on your own.’
‘Go away old man,’ Thomas shouted, pointing to the door and advancing towards him. ‘I don’t need you. Go home and tell your little friends that there’s no place here for redundant knockers.’
‘That’s a pity, Thomas Barbery,’ said the little old man, pulling up the collar of his tattered jacket, his face wreathed in the same kindly smile. ‘A terrible pity. I’ll be back.’
And he went out into the evening light.
‘Getting colder; autumn’s on the way again,’ he said almost to himself. ‘Goodbye Thomas Barbery.’
And he was gone.
Of course Thomas never spoke of this meeting to anyone for fear of being ridiculed; he even kept it a secret from his wife, and after a few weeks had gone he barely believed his own memory of it. He was soon wrapped up again in the daily routine of work on the farm and had little time to reflect on this strange encounter. He made a conscious effort too to forget the incident, for deep down it troubled him greatly and he did not want to think of it.