Chapter Two: We Stay

My wife swears that our next-door neighbor is Superman. A Cornish, octogenarian Superman.

As my wife and I began to pull the first round of luggage out of our car, we were welcomed by an elderly gentleman with cap, coat, cane and cocker spaniel, who marched briskly up the road towards us through some magic portal, right out of the nineteenth century. I wanted to paint him immediately. Having lived on the farm since he was a boy, he authoritatively answered any questions we had, and then told us about his eight mile walk to Penzance and back the night before. Can you imagine? A brief comparison. My father: 85, New Yorker, nursing home, barely mobile, barely talks. SuperCornishman: 83, cuts down trees with handsaw and hauls them uphill in wheelbarrow with flat tire, while singing heart out. Is there something in the air here?

He lives in the 1,200 year-old thatched cottage adjoining ours, so we see (and hear) him often. Two days ago, we caught sight of him standing atop a tall ladder with an electric trimmer, decapitating the eight-foot hedges alongside our cottage, yodeling beautifully at the top of his lungs.

The upshot of this is, of course, that to my wife who adores him, I look lazy and unproductive in comparison. And, of course, not having any work at present just makes me look even worse. To appease her, I applied for work at a fried chicken restaurant. During the job interview, I foolishly attempted to educate the manager about the differing English and American notions of what a “biscuit” is (in the US biscuits are lovely, huge, buttery affairs, always served with fried chicken) and wondered why his restaurant did not serve them.  Needless to say, I was not hired.

That same first day, as my wife and I were puttering around the cottage, three rays of light materialized in the form of two young teen-aged girls, and a teensy four year-old mite of a girl, who knocked on the door of our conservatory and let themselves in.  Two of these sprites were the nieces of our landlady; the oldest was her daughter, and she had come by proxy with her two cousins to welcome us to the cottage which, after her whole life living there, she had just vacated. 

So there my wife and I stood, two forty-something adults speaking with a sweet Cornish welcoming committee of three girls who had all the information and wisdom about our new cottage, the farm we were on, and the rest of Penzance, of any seasoned, local curmudgeon. We were totally charmed. So was our four-year old daughter, who, when she finally met the littlest elf-maiden, shrieked excitedly, grabbed her little hand and ran off playing with her.  The older girls have told our daughter: “We love your cool American accent!” (On that note, we have noticed after some days of playing with them that our little girl has distinctly changed the way she pronounces certain words.  As an example, she has replaced her big, round American “no” with a much more delicate, English-sounding “neh-oo.”)

Our landlady made her appearance after this to meet us and offer herself to us if needed.  She and my wife gabbed for ages about the Aga in the kitchen.  I pretty much just as well might not have been there.  By the way, Americans have no clue what an Aga is. We have never heard of them.  My first question was: “what is an ogger?”  After my wife corrected me, my second was: “what do the A, G, and A in AGA stand for?”  And after combing the four or five Aga cookbooks that our landlady left us, I still don’t know.  It would not surprise me if the authors of those books do not know either.

Our kitchen has a gloriously high ceiling, skylights, and lots of counter space.  We have plenty of doors to the outside with ancient looking keys and brass door handles. We have lots of snails ( I’ve never seen so many!) and slugs, and spiders.  Spiders are everywhere, in fact.  I’m a bit irritated by this because my wife assured me that there are fewer insects in England than in the US.  In the US we have biting, stinging, sucking insects in spades.  But, she tells me, it’s because of all the spiders that there are so few of the other pesky insects. 

A bit more about our cottage. One-hundred years old, slate roof, thick stone walls, which means lots of recessed windows and window seats.  It also means very low, beamed ceilings on the first floor.  I still worry about cranial damage when walking through doorways. I also nearly brained my poor infant boy when I gave him a good toss upwards the other day.  These low ceilings would make sense to me if, by and large, the English were a short people.  But they are not.  No one has this kind of ceiling in America, at least not for real.  A friend of mine had similar beams running across his ceiling, although slightly higher, and when I touched them (I could not resist!), I found they were styrofoam.  

So we have stayed.  We have been properly welcomed.  My little girl has a playmate. She will begin school shortly and find many more.  My landlady’s daughter will babysit for us, and probably pose for a painting for me.  Our cat is happy and our home is beautiful.  We are still living out of suitcases, and will be for a fortnight.  And we still have no work.

To be continued.

Copyright 2012, Cameron Bennett

Chapter One: Penzance Without the Zed

Some people are born British.  Others achieve British-ness.  Still others…well, I would be one of those.

You see: I have just had British-ness thrust upon me. I am an American who has just ten days ago settled in Cornwall. Settled. Why in Cornwall?  My wife, who is most definitely of the born-British variety, had, after the birth of our second child, wanted to be nearer to her family in the UK. Honestly, though, I think it had less to do with family and more to do with Doc Martin, of which she had been watching a lot just recently. 

I basically do whatever my wife says. Don’t ask. Some of you might not need to. As an artist, my wife reasoned, life would be sweet for me in an artistic haven like Penzance.  She had been offered a job there already.  She would earn the bread and butter until I had re-established myself. So we changed countries.  Just like that.

My wife works in…let’s not give too much away, but rest assured that it is perfectly legal…oh, let’s just say “economics”…and had been painstakingly cultivating her prospective Cornish employers from the US via Skype, and with great success, too. 

The job offer had been made, so we signed a lease on a lovely cottage, site unseen, one with plenty of space for my things (I have a lot…I am an American after all, and a painter, as you know by now), these things for which we would have to wait from four to six weeks to arrive.  But we did not care about that.  Living like vagabonds out of suitcases for a month would be sort of fun, knowing that we, in fact, were anything but vagabonds.  Kim had a job; she would support us until I had established myself in the area and begun generating income. Penzance looked rosy and gorgeously inviting. Things appeared to have fallen neatly into place for us. 

Or so we believed.  You know, you can plan and plan and be very careful, and things can still go horribly awry.  So, just ten days ago, I struggled out of my Vauxhall Astra with my peppy four year-old daughter, groggy nine month-old son, ecstatic wife (whose months will not be revealed) and beleaguered cat (whose months vary, depending upon whether or not you count them in cat or human) to find myself in the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen outside of a Peter Jackson film. I half-expected elves or hobbits to step out of the foliage to welcome us.  The scenery had been so breath-takingly lovely on the drive out that my wife and I had quickly run out of adjectives to describe it, endlessly murmuring the same, tired “beautiful!”  We could not help ourselves.

We had arrived. The very day we signed the lease for the cottage and occupied it, that very day, my wife drove off to find a stronger signal for her mobile phone.  I remained in the cottage with my children and asked my daughter:

“Do you know who lives here in this cottage?”

“We do, Daddy.”

“Where are we going to live tomorrow?”

“In this house, Daddy.”

“Where are we going to live the day after that?”

“Here, Daddy.”

“And the day after that?”

“In this house, Daddy.”

“Do you like this house?”

“Yes, Daddy!”

And I believe she meant it.

A few moments after that, my wife returned, stepped out of the car, pale and upset, and announced that she had gotten a voicemail from her employers, who, having rethought their own ability to pay out a new salary, had changed their minds and dissolved her position. How they came to this decision so late in the game is a mystery to us.  Nevertheless, in an instant, the friendly fairyland of Penzance was changed into a bleak, alien, and threatening place.  We were in shock. We could not even have squeezed back into the car and headed for home at that point, even if we had wanted to; we had signed a lease and made the payments.

Take the zed out of Penzance and what do you get?  Our first twenty-four hours here.

We were devastated, and we agonized over whether it would be better to cut our losses and look for a new place to live closer to London, where finding employment would be easier, or to stay here and hope for something to materialize.  And no gradual entry for me, the artist.  I would have to find something immediately, too.

Yet, there was something about this part of the country which truly made us want to stay. So, after a full day of panic and gnashing of teeth, we decided to gird our loins, to remain in Penzance, and try to make a life for ourselves here in spite of this harrowing beginning.