Although he never told me of his feelings before he died, and although we never discussed that moment again, I feel happiest when I tell myself that all along he knew what would happen. That I would prove him wrong on the one count and right on the other.
He would be proved wrong for thinking that gardening was not a proper trade. He would be proved right for believing that my love of things that grow was not just a flash in the pan and that maybe I could make a go of it as a gardener.
Whatever his reasons, I’ll never stop being grateful that he gave me the chance to shine, and I’ll be for ever thankful that he lived just long enough to see me making a go of it on TV. It wasn’t that I wanted him to be impressed by my fame, just that I needed him to know that gardening wasn’t the dead-end job he’d once assumed it to be and that in spite of my slow start I had, eventually, made something of myself.
Impressing my parents was more important to me than almost anything else. It seemed a way of repaying their confidence and the energy and effort they’d put into bringing us up during those tough years after the war. They never seemed tough to me and my sister, and it was down to my father’s hard work, and the attitude of both my parents that we were allowed to grow up in a relatively carefree atmosphere, while they worried about the next meal, and whether or not the insurance man would get his money when he came to call on Friday night.
For me and my sister, our childhood was a place of comfort and reliability, and in between coping with Mum’s funny little ways, and Dad’s ability to side-step trouble with a brief ‘Yes, dear’, we knew that we were lucky to be where we were.
There are moments, all too infrequent now, when I muse on what would have happened if that contentment at being in the right place, which I felt even when I left home at the age of twenty, had persisted and I’d resisted the temptation to strike out and ‘make something of myself’. A part of me – a large part of me – wanted to stay in Wharfedale. I was happy there, most of the time. There were a couple of girls I quite fancied, not that they’d noticed me, but given time, well, you never know. And when I left school early and became a gardener at the nursery, amusing myself in the evenings with a bit of singing and acting in the operatic society, it seemed that life could offer little more.
J. B. Priestley’s play Dangerous Corner explores the circumstances that follow a particular chain of events. Towards the end of the play we are taken back in time to the moment at which one particular line sends all the characters off in a certain direction. The second time we see the scene, something else is said and their lives take a different course entirely; much less dramatic, much less eventful.
When I was still in short trousers, the world in this Yorkshire dale was as much of life as I knew or wanted to know. There was enough here to keep me occupied every waking hour, and to let me fall asleep at night with no more noise coming through my open window than that of the town-hall clock striking the hour and, when the wind was in the south-west, the sweet-and-sour smell of bracken drifting down off the moor. And yet the tang of something else in the air pulled me away from the sheltered confines of the dale. You can call it fate, you can call it ambition. I don’t know what to call it. All I know is that I followed my instincts and began, in the words of J. M. Barrie, ‘an awfully big adventure’. It’s a childish expression, but an accurate one. And in my mum and dad’s eyes, I suppose I was always a child. Their child, right up to the end of their lives.
I was walking down Leeds Road with my dad just a few months before he died, when one of his workmates shouted across to him, ‘Not doin’ bad, then, your Alan, is he?’
‘No,’ replied my dad. ‘Not bad.’
Then he winked at me and smiled. ‘Considering he’s nobbut a lad.’
Table of Contents
About the Author
Also by Alan Titchmarsh
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Foreword
Early On
The Outsider
The Allotments
Grandma Titch and Auntie Alice
Me Mam
Doctors and Nurses
Grandma and Grandad Hardisty
Me Dad
Skewell
Dahn Leeds Road
Down by the River
The Lone Ranger and Cindy
Company
To Catch a Train
Domestic Offices
Out the Back
Arts and Crafts
The Dawning of Reality
The Voice
The Posh End
Back to Nature
Hopes and Dreams
The Piano
Street Theatre
Playing With Fire
’Osses
Wheels
The Trades Fair
Moving On Up
The Lame Duck
Greener Grass
Nobbut a Lad Page 22