The choices we make?
Linda Hartley
I saw a local advert a few weeks back from a chap who wants to rent somewhere quiet in order to write. It made me think about reasons why people come to live on Arran or any place that‘s ‘away from it all’.
Why people move to a place that is remote and away from the easy life of suburbia comes about for a variety of reasons. They say in life we make choices and that the choices we make lead our path to another set of decisions to be made and so on. It makes me think of the author Derek Tangye who made such a choice back in the 1940s. He moved from the glamorous life he lived in London with his wife, Jeannie Nicol Tangye, to live in the far west of Cornwall in a cottage with a dirt floor overlooking the cliffs. He came from a fairly privileged background and was a journalist working for The Daily Mail. At the time his food came from filling his pockets at debutante’s parties! Not very glamorous, perhaps – but then he met his wife, who was working as the publicity officer in the Savoy Hotel and was mixing with the stars of the day, such names as Danny Kaye and James Mason.
The Tangyes’ decision to be one of the early escapers from the rat race came about following a visit to Cornwall, where Derek originally came from. Like many others, they dreamed of starting a new life. For them it would be as flower farmers growing Cornish daffodils and selling them to Convent Garden, which they imagined would make them lots of money and a comfortable early retirement. They found a small cottage with no electricity, no running water, dirt floors and no roadway to the cottage, it being a mile down an unmade track and perched on a cliff above the Cornish seas. The years that followed taught them that life in such places is not always as it seems. Compromises must be made between the guiding principles of the original dream and as life unfolds you need to bend with it. Thank goodness it did!! For those early years resulted in the first book Derek wrote, called A Gull on the Roof. There were to be many more, and they are now thought of and affectionately referred to as the Minack Chronicles.
That first book, A Gull on the Roof, tells the story of how the Tangyes came to Cornwall, together with Monty, the ginger cat that Jeannie took home with her from the Savoy, and that Derek was threatening to get rid of. But through Monty his love of cats eventually grew, even though he swore all his life he was really a dog man! He wrote of their life with a succession of cats that followed Monty – Lama, Oliver and Ambrose and finally Cherry, together with donkeys called Penny and Fred.
I met Derek in 1992 and became a regular visitor to the place he and Jeannie made home, Dorminack. His writing refers to it as ‘Minack’, the same name at the open theatre also perched on a cliff in nearby Porthcurno, built by hand by a woman called Rowena Cade over a period of forty years. The people in the Tangyes’ lives were of all kinds; local people, family and friends, other authors such as Raleigh Trevelyan and David Cornwell, better known as John Le Carré, and politicians such as George Brown . They also had many hundreds of visitors who had read Derek’s books, and who came from across the world to see them. They were always made welcome and left knowing they had been adopted into ’the World of Minack’.
This year it is half a century since the first book was published and a group of fans called the Friends of Minack Society have worked hard at getting The Minack Chronicles Revisited printed. This has been made possible through generous donations from friends and members of the society, see http://friendsofminacksociety.org.uk for details. It retells the story of Derek and Jeannie Tangye and includes the full unabridged version of A Gull on the Roof.
I wonder if the man who advertised for a quiet place to write in has found somewhere on Arran. It may be that we benefit from his choice in years to come. I certainly did from Derek’s choice to go to Cornwall. I hope that we never lose that sense of adventure or the spirit to try something new, for with such a spirit we can make choices that help us gain new perspectives. Such insights are much harder to obtain when we are fearful of trying something new or of realising that change isn’t always something bad. It can open a whole new chapter on life.
