Growing Season

by Seni Glaister

  Diana smiled. ‘The pansophist. The general practitioner of deities.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And if I were Artemis, then do you know what that would make you?’

  Sam closed her eyes tightly and rifled methodically through her entire education, beginning with the illustrated encyclopaedias of myths she devoured as a child and leafing through the pages of her brain in chronological order, desperately trying to find some nugget of intelligent response. She gave up and shook her head. ‘I give up.’

  ‘My she-bear.’

  ‘I like the sound of that,’ Sam said happily but felt the foreboding of Diana’s silence in response, so allowed her chair to drop forwards so she could face her. ‘Is that good?’

  Diana shrugged. ‘For the time being. It doesn’t end so well.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But that’s fine. I’m not Artemis. I’m barely Diana. I should have taken the name Peg.’

  ‘Peg?’

  ‘A mythical old hag, “Churn Milk Peg”. Lived in the woods. Hung out in hazelnut thickets.’ Diana motioned with her head to the hundreds of hazel stems surrounding the clearing. ‘Peg’s job was to stop children picking the unripe nuts. A nice, simple, well-defined role. I expect that, as crones in the woods go, she wasn’t too bad. Unripe nuts give you stomach cramps so perhaps she was doing it to save the children some discomfort.’

  ‘Or,’ said Sam, ‘she just really didn’t like kids and didn’t want to lose her hazelnut crop to them.’

  ‘Sounds more likely, doesn’t it?’ agreed Diana. ‘Churn Milk Peg doesn’t sound like she got her name for being some sort of guardian angel.’

  ‘Peg. I like it. And it suits you.’ She looked at Diana’s serious frown. ‘I mean, so does Diana obviously.’

  ‘The villagers see me as more of a Churn Milk Peg than a Diana, I fear.’ Diana said this with a hint of pride. Sam studied her carefully while remembering the first time she’d been told about Diana. She’d been described as mad, a thief, perhaps even a witch. Somebody to fear and avoid.

  Sam lifted the bacon off the pan and onto a tin plate. ‘The bacon’s done. Bacon butties are about thirty seconds off. I don’t suppose you have tomato ketchup in the caravan, do you?’

  Diana looked at Sam with a withering combination of contempt and outrage. ‘Tomato ketchup? Are you mad?’ Sam recoiled, embarrassed, and started to stammer an apology. It was hard to reconcile this erudite, capable woman with somebody who had reneged upon all modern comforts.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was insensitive. Of course you don’t.’

  Diana tutted, exasperated. ‘I expect I do, if you insist, but brown sauce is far superior. Ketchup’s for heathens in this scenario.’ She pushed herself upright from her kneeling position and went to the caravan, returning with a couple of tin plates, some butter and a bottle of brown sauce.

  Smiling to herself, Sam buttered the bread, and dropped the sizzling bacon on to it. ‘Do you remember if you ever came across a villager called Bea Burdess?’ Sam asked, feigning nonchalance.

  Diana took a big bite of sandwich, chewing slowly and happily before answering. ‘Absolutely. How could I forget her? I came across her far more than I’d have liked but I got rid of her eventually. That meddling fool in the village, she’s always into everyone else’s business.’ Diana was about to take another bite of her sandwich but instead looked up sharply at Sam. ‘Why? Did something happen to her?’

  Sam eyed Diana carefully, looking for traces of knowledge. ‘You didn’t hear, did you?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘She died,’ said Sam, continuing with her matter of fact tone. ‘A massive heart attack.’

  Sam expected some sort of shocked reaction from Diana but instead Diana took a leisurely sip of tea, savouring it before responding. ‘Well, that was a heart attack that was simply waiting to happen. No heart could sustain that amount of righteous indignation for very long without imploding.’ Diana took another mouthful of bacon sandwich.

  ‘They blamed you!’ said Sam, apologetically, still looking at Diana carefully to gauge her reaction.

  ‘Oh well, I was most certainly to blame then,’ said Diana, rather too breezily.

  ‘Did you curse her?’

  ‘Curse her?’ Diana laughed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course I didn’t curse her. I wouldn’t know how to curse somebody if I wanted to. But I certainly got under her collar. That’s for sure.’

  Diana looked rather pleased at the memory, and Sam couldn’t detect any outrage.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Gosh. It started a while back. She used to walk her dog on the path, which is fine. Really, I don’t mind the dogs at all, but sometimes the dog walkers can be a bit of a nuisance. Her dog was a black Labrador, harmless enough, I think, though not particularly memorable. The owner, though, Bea Burdess. She was memorable. She had the most extraordinary habit. Her dog would do its business, and Bea would make a right old fuss of cleaning up after it, as if every other dog walker that didn’t clean up their mess was a scourge on society. She’d do this loudly, commentating on her own actions as if she were the subject of an important nature documentary. She’d bundle the dog dirt into a little blue plastic bag. So far, quite normal, responsible dog owners are encouraged to do exactly that, I believe, and I don’t have any problem with it. But then she’d leave the bag right here in the woods! Sometimes, she’d sort of make an effort to disguise it by hiding it under a few leaves but more often than not she’d tie it on to the fence post. Can you believe it? Why on earth would somebody do that? What goes through a mind that comes to the conclusion that parcelling up dog poop and hanging it on a fence post is rational or responsible? Apart from anything else, if she’d left the dog mess in the woods it would have disappeared in a matter of days. Instead, she took something that is biodegradable and turned it into something that was going to hang there looking just a little bit disgusting like some vile little faeces flag. People are weird, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are,’ said Sam. She’d too noticed the little plastic bags dotting the countryside. They always made her think far more about the dogs and their owners than she wanted to.

  ‘So, for a little while I just tidied up after her. It’s not like the little blue beacons were hard to spot, you could see them a mile off. I’d pick them up with a stick and dispose of them. There’s a bin for the purpose just where the footpath meets the road. Bea Burdess must have passed it every day. As caretaking jobs go, it wasn’t pleasant, but it can’t have been pleasant for other walkers to come across these little parcels either, so I was quite resigned to picking them up. But this carried on for a few weeks and it suddenly occurred to me that she wasn’t really getting the message. Perhaps, worse, she was thinking that the poo bags were sort of magically decomposing overnight and that therefore her behaviour was exemplary. So, one day I decided to gather a whole week’s worth. I strung them along the length of a stick and I walked them down to her house in the village.’

  ‘You didn’t!’ said Sam, transfixed but gleefully horrified.

  ‘I did. I rang her bell and she answered the door. Before she even saw what I was holding she looked at me like I was something the cat had brought in. Like I might bring down the value of her property just by walking up her garden path or something. And then when she saw what I was holding – honestly, her face was a picture. This was a while back, but I remember it like it were yesterday. I said to her very nicely, very calmly, “I believe you might have left these behind, they are yours, aren’t they?” And then I said, equally calmly, “You went to such great trouble to put them into these pretty blue bags that I imagine you must have left them accidentally, so I thought I would be a good neighbour and return them to you.” I then tilted the stick and let them all sort of slide down on to her doorstep.’ Diana grinned, looking absolutely delighted at the memory.

  Sam burst out laughing. ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She screamed and said she was going to call the
police. Which is laughable really, as there was nothing there on her doorstep that was any more disgusting than she’d left on the path. It was her dog poo, not mine so I don’t really know what was quite so horrific about me returning it to her.’

  Diana went quiet while she finished her sandwich before carrying on with the story. ‘I didn’t see much of her after that, but I knew what she was up to, and it was about then that she waged war on me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Just that; war. She began a campaign, a rather vicious campaign with the sole purpose of getting me evicted from here. She distributed a letter that said I was a menace to the village – I remember very distinctly that she called me a menace and a vagrant and she got everyone in the village to sign a petition to have me removed. I know because she put the petition through everyone’s door – including Rebecca’s so I saw it with my own eyes.’

  ‘And did they sign the petition, the villagers?’

  Diana looked at Sam sadly and shook her head. ‘At the time there were 1,647 registered voters in the village. And more than 1,400 names signed it! Can you believe she managed to engage with the villagers so emphatically? What a triumph that must have been, a landslide victory for Bea Burdess. She was very active in the village and she’d lived there for a long time, so I suppose it was a mark of her power and her influence, but still, it’s quite hard to get people involved in activism. Even if people care about an issue, they won’t necessarily put their name to it in case there are later ramifications or just because they don’t quite feel strongly enough to take a position. And yet, there I was, minding my own business, living in the middle of the woods, doing absolutely no harm whatsoever and eighty-five per cent of the entire adult population cared strongly enough to sign a petition to get me moved from here.’

  Sam tried to imagine herself in Bea’s position. She had certainly enjoyed the feeling of influence that came with engaging with her audience, but she also knew she would never have to meet her readers, they existed in another paradigm altogether. She wasn’t sure she would have the courage to take on such a local cause, where you might run in to your supporters or detractors every time you popped to the shops. Or maybe, Sam wondered, it wasn’t courage but fear, sometimes the two were very hard to tell apart. ‘Perhaps, Diana, she might have found the whole dog poo incident a bit threatening? I expect that gave her the motivation to get behind the campaign so effectively.’

  ‘Oh, I have no doubt. But I bet she didn’t come clean as to why I gave her that visit. I bet her petition failed to mention those little plastic-wrapped details.’ Diana went quiet for a while and then nodded in agreement. ‘I imagine she was mortified. If your whole purpose is to be righteously indignant, you don’t want somebody pointing out your own bad habits. But even so, eighty-five per cent is pretty conclusive. At least there was no ambivalence. I do so hate ambivalence.’

  Diana laughed and shook her head nostalgically, as if this unequivocal failure to get any support in the village was something to be proud of and then she continued, pragmatically. ‘It wasn’t a fair campaign. If we’d been head to head in a debate in the village hall and I’d had a chance to tell my story then I might have had a few more people on my side but she was on the council, so she had a huge advantage. She knew her way around the system and had it working for her. It was rather a shame she didn’t use her power for something more useful, don’t you think? Can you imagine how that sort of commitment could have moved things forward for the good of all – so misguided, poor old thing. I’m rather sorry to hear she dropped dead, I can only imagine what an extra few years would have done for her zeal.’

  Sam looked around her admiringly. Both Diana and the caravan looked entrenched, welded to the earth by a combination of roots and gumption. ‘But you’re still here. That’s the main thing. So, what happened to her petition? How on earth did you persuade them to let you stay?’

  ‘Now let me get the chronology right. Let’s see. The police came to see me here first of all, and I sent them away with a flea in their ear. That was a delightful moment.’

  ‘Weren’t you frightened? That must have been horrid. Didn’t they have the power to move you?’

  ‘No, not at all. Rather, it was a moment of watershed for me. Two policemen, sitting right in there, sitting at my table and listening to my side of the story for the first time. I felt substantial. And when I told them where I stood, legally speaking, my goodness, they really were very polite. We drank some coffee, we actually had a bit of a laugh about the whole thing. They promised to keep an eye out for me and they left. But before they went I made quite sure they knew of my rights under the privacy laws and made it absolutely clear they were not in a position to divulge the details of our conversation. I wasn’t ready to share my legal position with all and sundry.’

  ‘What was your legal position?’

  ‘I’ll come to that.’

  ‘And was that the end of your run-in with Bea?’

  ‘Not exactly. We met once more. She’d wound herself into a right old lather, I’m afraid. She went to the police to see when I was going to be removed from the woods, and they told her they had no grounds to evict me and sent her away. She had a bit of a tantrum, not quite used to not getting her own way, you can imagine how that happens with somebody as frequently right as Bea Burdess. I believe they then told her they’d arrest her for causing a nuisance.’

  Diana looked into the distance, her blue eyes shining happily. ‘Oh my, she was incensed!’

  ‘Then what happened?’ asked Sam, leaning forward in her chair now.

  ‘What was her next move? Yes. That’s right. She convened a special meeting of the council, to decide my fate. She hand-delivered a letter to tell me this was going to happen. She didn’t have the courage to knock on my door, she just pinned it to a tree like I was some kind of outlaw.’

  ‘Which you were, sort of,’ said Sam, admiringly.

  ‘I was nothing of the sort!’

  ‘Well, knocking on your door wasn’t easy. Look at it,’ Sam said, gesturing to the thicket all around them.

  ‘It was easier back then, I coppiced the hazel when I first arrived, so these trees have grown up around me in the last couple of years but back then there was nothing very much stopping her knocking on my door and talking to me like a reasonable human being. I read her notice and decided to pay her another visit.’

  ‘Did you hurt her?’

  ‘Of course not, but I wasn’t a stranger to confrontational situations so I wore a body-cam.’

  ‘A body-cam? Are you serious?’

  ‘Absolutely. I didn’t want her falsely accusing me of harassing her. I know how these things can escalate. I filmed the whole thing.’

  ‘But, a body-cam? Where on earth did you get a body-cam?’

  ‘I was somebody once, you know,’ Diana said obliquely. ‘I never had to use the footage, it was a straightforward enough exchange. But I have to admit that when I left her she was exceedingly upset. I remember her face, it was puce. She was so angry, she was spitting. I thought she might explode.’

  ‘And apparently she did.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sad to hear that, I must say, but that really was quite out of my control. I simply told her the truth.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That she couldn’t evict me, that these woods are mine. And that every time she comes to visit me and pins a notice on my trees she is trespassing.’

  ‘The woods were yours?’

  ‘The woods are mine.’

  ‘You own them?’

  ‘Yup. And quite a few of the surrounding fields too. Most of them. All of them by now perhaps. There’s a public footpath that runs right past here, but every time you step off that path and wander through the woods, you are technically trespassing. If I were less neighbourly I’d put up signs telling people to keep their dogs on leads, but I don’t really mind them having a nose around.’

  Sam was still trying to digest the news. ‘So you obviously co
uldn’t be evicted from your own property. That was your legal case.’

  ‘Exactly, it’s not complex legal precedence. And I certainly wasn’t breaking the law by living in a caravan. This woodland is attached to my main residence, Willow’s Fortune. This caravan is technically just an outbuilding. Village life has got pretty draconian recently but there’s no law against living in a caravan in your garden yet. Had I built a permanent home then somebody might have been able to report me for planning infringement but they couldn’t even get me there. The caravan has been here for a while, it was once the home of the woodsman but of course that sort of job doesn’t really exist anymore. I’m the woodsman these days. The caravan was already here when I bought the woods and had originally been installed with all the correct permissions in place and all I’d done is make some improvements internally so nobody had a leg to stand on.’

  ‘No wonder she was angry. She must have been livid. But you could probably get planning permission now to live here permanently, couldn’t you? I mean you could build something a bit more substantial surely? If you own the land?’

  ‘Oh of course. These days, I actually have a very civil relationship with the council, they are respectful of my rights and I pay my dues, so to speak. I think, in terms of removing what is considered an eyesore from the local environment, they would almost certainly allow me to build a small dwelling but I rather like this one.’

  ‘I mean from the inside, yes, I can see that. It’s quite idyllic.’

  ‘But from the outside too,’ Diana insisted. ‘I love the fact that the habitat is reclaiming it. This caravan must have been bright white once but is now almost completely green. I sometimes imagine I have built my own comfortable coffin, like the sarcophagus of some sort of extravagant Egyptian queen and providing I time my own death carefully, I shall just snuggle up under the duvet and let the woods swallow me up entirely. Instead of jewels and a sacrificial servant I’d be found clutching a bag of first press coffee beans from Arabia and a Hermes shirt.’