Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  ‘That one,’ I replied, without hesitation.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Brooksbank. There was a note of wistfulness in her voice. ‘That’s my son.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. I’m not sure about the likeness, but I always said that I would know that it was my son by his hands.’

  I felt that it was a sad thing to say, and as I looked at her I could see that her eyes were filled with tears. She had left me now and was with him for a few moments. Up on that patch of Yorkshire moorland over which he was gazing. Downstairs, her husband and daughter were entertaining the choirboys for Christmas. There was no sign of her son. I did not like to ask if he had died, or why he was not with her at Christmas. It didn’t seem the right time.

  I stood still and waited. Mrs Brooksbank reached out and ran her finger down the boy’s hand. ‘Perfect hands.’ Then she cleared her throat and said, ‘Shall we go down now? You must be very thirsty.’

  From the moors, the centre of town is clearly visible. There are several churches: the tall spire of ‘The Congs’ – the Congregational church – lately renamed Christ Church, and the dumpy Norman tower of All Saints where I sang as a choirboy. I can see the outdoor swimming pool where I swam my first length and earned a clockwork tugboat, the station from which the trains took us to Leeds to shop and, in the other direction, to Morecambe on choir trips, the rugby club where I had my twenty-first birthday party (the only time I’ve ever been there) and cricket fields and football fields on the other side of the river.

  The view from the Cow and Calf changes as you look beyond the town to the east. Ben Rhydding is the name given to the residential area that was built at the time when spas were at the height of their popularity – the name invented for its bucolic ring. I suppose Ben Rhydding sounds to strangers like the lower slopes of a Scottish mountain, simply reeking of heather and bilberries and drenched in health-giving air.

  Directly opposite, on the North side of the valley, are Middleton Woods – among the finest bluebell woods in Britain and a place where a young lad with an interest in nature can find all kinds of birds and wild flowers, small mammals and fungi.

  Back to Nature

  Mum said she thought Peter Scott looked like a duck. It wasn’t meant to be an unkind remark. It was his furrowed brow she meant, rather than his lack of height. There was a picture of a mallard in one of my nature books and once she’d made the comparison I found it hard to ignore. Many years later I met Sir Peter Scott at Slimbridge when he launched a fund-raising appeal called ‘Doodle-a-duck’. I hadn’t the nerve to tell him.

  The urge to be out with wildlife was fostered from the moment we got the television. It was not one of those bulky pieces of furniture, the size of a radiogram, with a small screen in the top. Our neat cabinet stood on a table in the corner of the front room. It was a Pye, with a sloping front and two knobs – one for volume, the other for brightness. Somewhere round the back, there was a ‘horizontal hold’ and a ‘vertical hold’, which always sounded to me like wrestling moves. Dad would fiddle with one of them when the picture started to slip from side to side or up and down. The tuner was another knob on the side of the mahogany casing, but as we only had one BBC channel for a few years after we got it, the knob was seldom twiddled.

  The programmes I watched were all to do with nature. Apart from Out of Doors, I was allowed to stay up for Peter Scott’s Look and for On Safari with Armand and Michaela Denis. The Denises were a strange couple, clearly foreign. They both wore safari suits, which I assumed you had to do when roaming around anywhere warmer than Yorkshire. She had blonde hair and appeared younger than him. Armand had a toothbrush moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, and his voice sounded as though he was speaking through a kazoo. I remember them riding a rhinoceros and speaking very earnestly about the experience.

  Any programme to do with the sea was presented either by Jacques Cousteau or by another husband and wife team, Hans and Lotte Hass. I began to get used to naturalists with strong foreign accents, though coupled with the sound of bubbles from their diving equipment, Hans and Lotte’s commentary was not always easy to understand.

  I was on safer ground with the more youthful, and English, David Attenborough, whose Zoo Quest seemed to take him all over the globe in search of rare animals that could be brought back to Regent’s Park or Whipsnade.

  David had a safari suit, too, but his did not look nearly so ridiculous as that of Armand Denis. He was young and dashing – a great role model for any aspiring naturalist – and the hushed and confidential tones he used even then seemed directed especially at me, as he revealed some secret about the three-toed sloth, or tried to avoid being strangled by chimpanzees.

  I moved on to David, intellectually speaking, from Johnny Morris, whose home patch was Bristol Zoo. Johnny would give the animals he was commenting on funny voices. They were always appropriate, and at first I wondered why David Attenborough didn’t do the same. Perhaps he couldn’t do voices.

  It didn’t matter. I was hooked on these programmes, along with Gardening Club on a Friday night, when Percy Thrower, in a three-piece suit and tie, would wander through the studio garden into the greenhouse that clearly had no glass. Here, he would take off his jacket, hang it on a hook behind the door, roll up his sleeves and get stuck into a bit of potting or pricking out on the bench.

  Once the credits of these programmes rolled, I would be up and out of the house, pretending to be either a naturalist or a gardener, depending on the programme’s content. Hans and Lottie Hass were hard to emulate, but David and Johnny were easier. Peter Scott was way too clever for me to even approach.

  Sometimes, in Children’s Hour, George Cansdale would be brought in to talk about snakes or bushbabies. Cansdale looked like a bank manager in a grey suit, and he had iron-grey hair and the same sort of toothbrush moustache as Armand Denis.

  On one occasion he came to talk to the Wharfedale Naturalists’ Society and I sat in the front row, eager to see in real life a man whom I had only ever glimpsed on the television. He was taller, and the suit and hair even greyer, but he did bring his snakes with him. They were in cloth drawstring bags, just like the bag I took to school with my pumps in.

  Cansdale pulled out the snakes one by one, and asked for volunteers to come and hold them. I was out of my seat like a shot, and found the warm, dry feel of the python quite a surprise when he draped it round my neck like a scarf. I mused on keeping one in my pump bag. But not for long. I don’t think Mum could have coped with that. What she didn’t seem to mind was that I wanted to take over the garden.

  There was no thought at this time of anything so ambitious as ‘design’. The shape of the garden didn’t cross my mind. It didn’t seem to cross anybody’s. In our street, you had a bit of grass in the middle and a narrow border running round the edge. Up the posher end of town, they might have had a bit of crazy paving and a fish pond, but it never occurred to me that we should have them. What I did want was a greenhouse.

  Buying one was out of the question. What if I made one? Just behind the stone-built midden at the end of the garden nearest the house was a patch of ground perhaps six feet by three that was sheltered by its wall. It seemed to catch the early-morning sun, and I could sneak a homemade greenhouse in there without it being seen from the house.

  ‘Mam?’

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Can I build a greenhouse?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The other side of the midden?’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘To grow a few plants in. Cookie says she’ll give me some spider plants and some busy Lizzies – cuttings from hers in the front room. But I need somewhere to grow them.’

  Mum looked sceptical. ‘What are you going to make it from?’

  I shrugged. ‘Some bits of wood from the garden – there’s that pile Dad’s got. For firewood. I could use that.’

  ‘What about glass?’


  ‘I won’t use glass. I’ll use polythene.’ I could see her about to interrupt, so I got in first. ‘I’ve saved up my pocket money. I’ve got enough for the polythene. I’ve measured up. I need about twelve feet of it because it comes folded in half and it measures three feet wide, which means that when you unfold it, it’s six feet wide, and I don’t need a door because I can just make a flap, so can I do it, then?’

  I saw her trying not to smile and knew that I’d won.

  ‘Go on, then. But I don’t want mess all over the garden.’

  Triumphantly, that Saturday morning, I walked down the road to Hothersall’s ironmonger’s shop in Leeds Road and asked Mr Hothersall for four yards of polythene. Mr Hothersall always looked beleaguered, as if he had something more important he should be doing. I suppose this was understandable when he was serving a ten-year-old boy with a cheap bit of polythene and being asked to make his cut particularly straight. I never knew why he wore glasses. He was always looking over them, or had them pushed up on the top of his head. His black hair was slicked back with Brylcreem and he wore a tweed jacket and a tie and puffed a lot. You could never really hear what he was saying. He just sort of chuntered.

  He put down the large pair of scissors and rolled up the polythene. ‘Will that be all, young man?’

  ‘Yes thank you.’

  ‘That’ll be three shillings, then, and I must get on.’

  I handed over the cash and carried out the roll of polythene under my arm. It felt smooth and silky. I smelled it. It was a clean, healthy smell. The smell of growth. At least, that’s what I would come to associate it with.

  The sun was shining when I got back home. I went down to the cellar and found a hammer and a saw and some three-inch nails, and for the rest of the day, barely stopping for lunch, I hammered and sawed and built a small lean-to framework behind the midden.

  ‘Can I borrow your dressmaking scissors?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘No you can’t. They’ll never cut anything again if you use them on that. Ask your dad.’

  Dad was up in the bathroom, plumbing in the hot water cylinder and boxing it in so that Mum would have an airing cupboard as well as radiators.

  ‘Have you got any scissors, Dad?’

  ‘What would I want scissors for?’

  ‘Cutting things.’

  He sighed. ‘Hang on.’ His blowlamp roaring all the while, he rummaged in the brown canvas tool bag on the floor, and in between the brass elbows and the offcuts of copper piping, he found a lethal-looking knife. ‘Be careful with it. It’s sharp.’

  It wasn’t, but I took the warning, and in spite of its bluntness it cut through the polythene as if through butter.

  It was a simple matter to drawing-pin the polythene to the timber, and within an hour I had created a secluded world all of my own. I walked inside it and let down the flap that was to act as a door. The noise of the back lane faded away. Even the birdsong was muffled. Here inside my very own greenhouse was a place to escape. No one else would come here. It was my own kingdom. I could put things where I wanted them. I rigged up staging from old floorboards and bricks, and went up to the lavatory on the landing to bring down the half-dozen plants I had been growing on its windowsill – the cacti and succulents from Mr Rhodes.

  Harry Rhodes was the kindliest of teachers. Where others were gruff and called boys by their surname, Mr Rhodes used Christian names for boys and girls alike and smiled a lot. Mr Rhodes, with his Roman nose and wire-rimmed spectacles, seemed always to be optimistic and encouraging.

  We all liked him because he was in charge of the gramophone when Miss Hickinson walked into morning assembly. Usually he would choose a stately bit of Handel’s Water Music, but sometimes, with a twinkle in his eye, he would play ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’, to see if she would notice. She usually did, and shot him a warning sideways glance. He would sheepishly lift the needle from the groove, say in a dignified voice, ‘Hands together and eyes closed,’ and stand to attention while Miss Hickinson intoned the first prayer of morning assembly.

  Mr Rhodes’s hobby was growing cacti and succulents, which he did, by repute, in two greenhouses in Parklands, a rather smart crescent in Ben Rhydding.

  It was from Mr Rhodes that I learned my first Latin name – Bryophyllum pinnatum. This succulent was memorable for another reason: it produces tiny plantlets on the edges of its leaves.

  ‘You’ll only have to buy this once, Alan,’ said Mr Rhodes from behind his house plant stall at the church bazaar.

  ‘Why’s that, sir?’

  ‘Look at all these little things here …’ He pointed around the edge of the leaves. ‘They’re all babies. Every one will make a new plant.’

  I’m not sure that I believed him, but I handed over my sixpence, and when his prophecy turned out to be true, Mr Rhodes became a god.

  Cookie was true to her word and handed over a generous amount of cuttings of this and that, so that by the middle of summer my greenhouse was awash with geraniums and busy Lizzies, spider plants and false castor-oil palms.

  But the interest in natural history continued unabated, and I bought from the pet shop a mouse. At one shilling and sixpence it was the cheapest thing on offer. I had given up hope of ever having a shed filled with hutches of rabbits and guinea pigs and hamsters, and thought that instead I could combine my hobbies of gardening and nature by keeping small animals in among my plants.

  The idea lasted all of three days. On the fourth day next door’s cat got in through the polythene flap of the door and frightened the mouse to death. I found it in its cage, quite stiff with rigor mortis.

  Two things happened that day: I fitted a proper door to the greenhouse, and I decided that plants were a better bet than animals.

  The Yorkshire Dales are not especially noted for their horticultural prowess. They have some great gardens, but commercial horticulture is thin on the ground in an area better suited to sheep and grouse. I suppose this makes it all the more surprising that I chose a career in gardening. But it was already in the blood. Both my father’s father and his grandfather had been ‘jobbing gardeners’ – taking on gardening maintenance wherever they happened to live.

  I never knew ‘Granda’, as he was always referred to, by way of distinguishing him from ‘Grandad’ – Mum’s dad. He had died before I was born. There are pictures of him in the family album – a short, slim man with a moustache and a fine head of hair. I’m grateful to him for that. Dad seldom spoke about his father, except to say that he had died young.

  Neither did Dad mention, in my early years, that his father had been a gardener, but that must have accounted for his reluctance to encourage me. He relented later on and gave in to the inevitable, but it must have worried him that in spite of his efforts to break the mould – when he became a plumber – that the urge to cultivate plants had not left the bloodline entirely.

  I asked him, in later life, why he had never enjoyed gardening himself. ‘Because my dad and grandad made me weed,’ he said, ‘and paid me a penny a bucket.’ I’m glad that he did not work harder at putting me off.

  Hopes and Dreams

  Whenever school got me down, I had one infallible way of lifting my spirits. I would dream. Not about cars and trains and space travel, but about having my own nursery. There were two role models in Ilkley, and both of them had all the ingredients necessary to allow my dreams full reign.

  The first nursery was in an unlikely spot behind the police station. Mr Robertson was the proprietor, and you could see him busying himself among his plants wearing a tweed jacket and a faded blue apron, his dark hair slicked back with Brylcreem, a pencil and labels tucked into his top pocket, a budding knife in his horny hand.

  There was no smartly painted sign proclaiming the nursery’s ownership, or even its existence. You had to know it was there. But if you walked up the steep slope of Riddings Road, which rose towards the moor, and looked to your right just after the blue lamp, you would see a narrow gateway. The creaki
ng iron gate opened into a small level area flanked by two wooden racks on which would be displayed bedding plants and vegetables, their prices chalked on to a small blackboard. There were scarlet geraniums in clay flowerpots, and fuchsias tumbling from troughs. Piles of apples were bought in to augment the home-grown produce, and there were fresh-dug potatoes and cabbages, too.

  Beyond this pocket-sized sales floor, several stone steps led downwards to a long, low, white-painted greenhouse, which ran directly away from you into the distance. Through the open door, you could see solid staging – built of brick and topped with gravel – on which tray after tray of antirrhinums and tobacco plants, French marigolds and petunias would be fattening in the sun that filtered through the whitewashed panes – whitewashed to prevent sun scorch in the early days of May.

  ‘Aye, it might look a bit shaded here, but you’ve got to watch that sun. It can burn ’em up in no time.’

  Above the greenhouse and to its left was the open ground where Mr Robertson grew a few vegetables and the odd crop of fruit to add to the display on the wooden racks. There were shrubs here, too, in neat rows, and ornamental trees, to be dug up and sold in autumn when they were about to slip into their winter dormancy.

  The scene was one of quiet productivity, and in the greenhouse the smell was one of growth – a mixture of foliage, damp earth, nicotine solution and Growmore. Step down into Mr Robertson’s greenhouse, if you were lucky enough to be allowed – ‘Aye, go on, then; come and ’ave a look’ – and you could transport yourself into a world of bonemeal and bees, horse manure and heliotrope. For a young lad with green fingers – for that’s what they told me I had – this was the stuff that dreams were made on.

  The other nursery had a more picturesque location down by the Old Bridge that crosses the River Wharfe at the bottom of Stockeld Road. It’s a handsome stone structure, built in 1675, and nestling beside it, right on the riverbank, is the Old Bridge Nursery. It is still there, though a lot smarter now, with plants brought in from another nursery lower down the dale. But when I was a boy, it was a ‘proper’ nursery that grew its own plants, with a little lean-to greenhouse and a stone potting shed on whose door were marked the heights of the various floods.