My Life on a Hillside Allotment

by Terry Walton

  Settling Down

  I WASN’T THROWN out of the pencil factory straight away. After my thoughtless outburst I was dragged over to the office, where they basically told me to leave if I wasn’t happy. By then I had calmed down and said, ‘Well, it was just a heat of the moment thing,’ hoping everything might blow over.

  But it was too late, and the production manager said, ‘No, we can’t have this kind of attitude here. As soon as you find another job, you’re out.’

  So I had to go home and break the news to Anthea, not many weeks after getting married and committing ourselves to the new house, which was going to cost us all of £3,500, a huge amount in those days of single-figure weekly wages.

  I was glad then that I still had my vegetable empire going strong. An allotment plot can be different things to different people, but as I was discovering it is also many things to the same person. For me it had meant land where I could do what I loved most and where I could earn good money relatively easily, supplying produce that people around me needed and enjoyed. It was sound exercise in the fresh air in congenial company. And now it proved to be almost a consolation and a reassuring kind of continuity.

  Fortunately Anthea was well aware of my passion for the allotments and the amount of time and commitment they took out of our life together. She accepted that right from the start, and all through our marriage has happily shared me with that plot of land on a Rhondda hillside.

  And I had the car, which I soon found made transport a lot easier and quicker. It had brought other benefits in the days before I got married. I was the only one among my friends who owned a vehicle, for example, so it became popular as a means for us all to travel further afield to dances.

  We could venture beyond the valleys at weekends, especially in the evenings when we started exploring places such as the very trendy (to us then, at least) Vale Country Club, the place where I took Anthea on our first date. This appealed to us because it provided gambling facilities – poker, blackjack and roulette – quite lacking in our district.

  * * *

  Adventure on the road

  OWNING A CAR ALLOWED me to go with two of my closest friends, Dai Martin and John Rees (my former fellow allotmenteer and entrepreneur), on camping holidays outside Wales. Before we went away I’d usually go to the allotments and collect vegetables to sustain us during our week’s camping. I’d take a whole sack of potatoes because chips were our staple diet for the week, and since there was insufficient room in the boot this paper sack, together with some of our other possessions, was usually kept on the roof rack.

  I remember one night we couldn’t find a camp site and so we parked up in a lay-by, on a hill outside Southend. It was raining heavily when the three of us settled down to sleep in the car.

  In the early hours of the morning we were woken by a steady bumping on the car roof and bonnet. We sat for a few minutes summoning up the courage to go and confront whatever was out there, and finally agreed that on the count of three we’d all leap out together.

  When we did we found that the mysterious intruder was the paper sack on the roof, which had split open in the wet and was allowing potatoes to drop out and roll off the roof on to the bonnet, and down the hill towards Southend. There went our food supply for the week.

  * * *

  The empire really flourished once I’d got wheels. Now I could deliver in luxury and easily pick up extra potatoes whenever I ran out, and I carried on unabated during the four years I was at the pencil factory, running the business on the ten allotments and selling all the produce at the weekends.

  I can’t pretend it was easy, because in those days we worked long hours – 7.30 until 5.00 from Monday to Friday, plus Saturday mornings from 7.30 till 12.00 – which meant the allotment business was concentrated into Friday evenings after I came home from work, with all the deliveries fitted into Saturday afternoons. Sundays I spent up there working the ground as usual.

  We had a Mountfield tiller by then to help with all the cultivation. My father had decided it would be a good idea to invest in this 3½ horsepower (2.6 kW) machine, which made work a bit quicker, if not necessarily any easier. The trouble was that the paths and the narrowness of many plots meant you couldn’t really till across the slope of the mountain: for ease you had to till up and down. But all the plots sloped steeply and so, going up, the machine tended to bury itself in the ground, and when you came down you were usually running to keep up with it.

  In addition most of the plots on our site are not square but more like a trapezium, some short and wide and others long and narrow. All measured the standard ten perch in area, but with different shapes. Cultivating some of them wasn’t too bad, but because my ten plots were scattered I had a variety of shapes, some of which were never easy to turn over. And, as with all machinery, the thing wouldn’t always start on the days I wanted to do something, and I’d be pulling and pulling at the starter trying to awaken some sign of life, and then I would open the choke and flood the engine. That often meant spending an hour or so stripping it down and cleaning everything out, just to get it going. So I could easily waste an hour before I’d even started. The fact that I would always rather dig by hand anyway didn’t help matters.

  Using the tiller would have been much more practical if the plots had been laid out on a large flat area. But, as always, the contours of the valley affected what we could do up there. For example, some of the plots run by other people have been terraced, divided by permanent paths and edged all round with ‘zincs’ (corrugated galvanized-iron strips) to create a series of plateaux down the slope, but that’s not something that appeals to me.

  My allotments did have the edges neatly finished off with zincs, but each plot was a single undivided expanse. And I had no permanent paths within a plot, just one on either side, as now, with another at the bottom where my blackberries grow and an access path to the front of the greenhouse.

  All the rest I trod out on the soil wherever I needed them, and then dug them in again at the end of the season. I think this method wastes less ground than the currently fashionable network of permanent paths and small beds. I’ve always tried to get the maximum possible yield from a plot, and I feel my kind of layout favours this.

  Another way of ensuring a good yield is to double-crop at least half of the ground, arranging sowings and plantings so that an early batch is followed by something else as soon as it finishes. You can’t do that with some vegetables, which occupy the ground for so long that there isn’t the time left in the season to follow with anything useful. But my basic repertoire of early potatoes, fast small carrots and early cabbages or broad beans was always cleared with enough time to fill the space with a follow-on batch of lettuce, radish or something quick like that.

  I was still avoiding winter crops. The days were too short to cultivate them after work, and going out in the soaking wet and trying to dig parsnips or pick sprouts in a stiff north-east wind never really appealed to me. Meeting any demand would have been difficult, because even with ten plots on the go I couldn’t guarantee a complete basket of veg for a normal dinner in winter.

  Nor could I have risked interruptions when people expected a steady supply. My kind of gardening wasn’t an occupation where you could miss an occasional weekend, simply because the weather was too harsh for you to gather the produce. If you make commitments, you’ve got to meet them and make sure the orders are filled.

  This was part of the challenge in summer, meeting an order when I had run out. It was never possible to make up the shortfall by buying from one of the other gardeners: I never bought beans or potatoes or anything else off any other plotholder. Some grew for their own purposes and wouldn’t have a surplus to sell, while a few of the others did sell a bit, but then only to certain customers. It was generally accepted that they had their clients, I had mine. There weren’t that many members on site by that time anyway. I had ten plots at my peak, Tommy Parr had a good handful and the top was more or less empty, so between the
two of us we must have had more than half the plots that were in use.

  It was four or five months before my next job (my other one, because I’ve only ever had two in my entire working life), and the growing season was well and truly over when I finally left the pencil factory in December 1968, four years to the month since starting there.

  I was to remain with my new employer for thirty-three years (a whole generation) until I retired in 2001. And in the process I worked up from one of the original dozen employees to managing director.

  Like so many famous companies, Perkin-Elmer started life in simple, almost primitive conditions. Richard Perkin was the inventive partner, a New York astronomer who found in the 1930s that he couldn’t buy the kind of telescope he needed to carry on his work, and began making them himself in a garage in a New York suburb. People soon discovered these telescopes were very good and wanted to buy them, so he started a small business making and selling optical instruments.

  After the Second World War he realized that the chemical industry was developing fast and lacked precise instrumentation to check the quality of chemical products quickly. To meet this need he invented the first infra-red spectrometer, a big heavy beast of a machine that would shine light through a particular substance or cell. By doing various calculations you could then analyse what this substance was from the results, using reference graphs supplied with the machine.

  At this point Charles Elmer, a rich financier, came on the scene. He recognized the potential of these analytical instruments in industry, with the result that Perkin-Elmer was founded as a partnership in the late forties. It took off immediately and grew at a phenomenal rate. By the mid-fifties they had opened their first British sales office in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and very shortly afterwards started up a factory there to produce instruments for the European market.

  The company was making lots of money and investing much of it in research and development, so they were soon offering more sophisticated analytical methods – first infra-red and gas chromatography, then ultraviolet and nuclear magnetic resonance – and quickly established a complete range of instrumentation, which was assembled and tested at their Beaconsfield plant. But in the late sixties they began to have problems in finding sources to supply the small volumes of high-quality components they wanted.

  About that time south Wales was becoming a big regional development area, with large incentives to draw companies in to fill the voids left by the decline of heavy industries such as coal mining and steel. Perkin-Elmer were offered an attractive deal to open a factory in Llantrisant, and this was started up in early 1969 to make essential components for shipping up the motorway to Beaconsfield.

  We started here with a machine shop and sheet metal shop of just 20,000 sq ft (1,846 sq m), which is small by industrial standards. But with the demand for instruments growing so large and so quickly Beaconsfield soon ran out of capacity, and we built another 30,000 sq ft (2,770 sq m) to make their gas chromatographs for them. In the early seventies more production was moved to south Wales. Then we set up an electronics plant making circuit boards and harnesses because more and more electronics were being built into instruments. Very shortly afterwards we added another 60,000 sq ft (5,538 sq m) of factory.

  Then, in the early eighties, we hit a slump, and a large section of the factory stood empty. Beaconsfield was still building instruments, but in an ageing ex-munitions factory. There was a plan to knock it down and redevelop it, which we were afraid might mean everything moving up there. But the Americans said no, it was too costly and we had space standing idle down here. In the end they closed Beaconsfield and moved all production to Llantrisant. Very few of the existing staff transferred to south Wales, so all the new opportunities and promotions came the way of people already living here.

  Back in 1968, when the Welsh chapter of the Perkin-Elmer story opened, I’d been told to leave the pencil factory as soon as I could, but I wasn’t in a hurry and they weren’t pushing me: even though I had technically been fired, there was a kind of truce between us.

  One day I went along to the Labour Exchange in Talbot Green, where I found an advertisement on the board about vacancies at Perkin-Elmer and the new factory on Llantrisant Common. I rang them up, and they wrote back to say they were interested.

  ‘Can you come up to London for an interview?’ they asked.

  London! That seemed a world away. In those days the M4 motorway wasn’t open much beyond the Severn bridge between Wales and England. It was 150 miles to London and I had never driven my canary yellow Ford that far in my life. In any case I decided I really didn’t want to spend my days making test tubes, which was all ‘scientific instruments’ meant to me at the time – my laboratory work at the pencil factory had basically involved watch glasses, Bunsen burners, retort stands, simple chemicals and little else. I didn’t know anything more complex even existed.

  I made up my mind I didn’t want to go, and rang to say I was suffering from the flu. About four days later another letter arrived, telling me they had rearranged the interview for another date. I still had several irons in the fire with other companies, so I wasn’t too desperate for the job, but I didn’t feel I could cancel again and decided I’d just have to drive all that way after all.

  The night before the journey I sat down and planned my route with military precision to make sure I got there in good time for the interview: to a valley boy like me, London was a million miles away. I didn’t sleep at all well the night before. I was up hours before I needed to be and set off very early, worried whether my little yellow car would actually be up to the long journey.

  All my planning paid off though, and I arrived with plenty of time to spare, feeling very pleased with myself. As I drove into Beaconsfield, I remember being impressed by all the huge houses surrounded by their great expanses of ground. No need for an allotment here, I thought: you could grow all you wanted in the garden.

  As I realized later, the factory was over twenty miles short of London, so I didn’t make the big city after all!

  I walked into the factory and met Ken Walker (later to become my first boss), who invited me to have a look round and see what they made. My eyes must have opened as large as gobstoppers! There was this super-clean production area and brilliant lighting, and everywhere strange high-tech equipment and instruments that were far more sophisticated than anything I had expected or could have imagined. It was like something out of science fiction.

  We finally sat down together and did the interview, at the end of which Ken told me the job was mine. All the preparation, anxiety and long drive had been worthwhile, and I returned home feeling much happier, pleased with my day’s efforts and looking forward to this new career.

  And so Boxing Day (which wasn’t a holiday then: all you got off was Christmas Day) found me standing on the platform at Bridgend station at six o’clock in the morning, waiting to catch a train up to Reading where I was to get a bus to Beaconsfield. Anthea was all teary-eyed because we’d only been married in July, this was our first Christmas together, and I was going away for two weeks’ induction and training. That first New Year of our marriage I spent in lodgings in London Road, High Wycombe.

  We duly opened up in Llantrisant on 6 January 1969. There were just twelve of us, the twelve apostles as we called ourselves, all on exactly the same wages: the guys to run the machine and sheet metal shops, an overall manager, and myself as production planner. The idea was that Beaconsfield would tell me what they wanted, and I’d order the materials and the tooling, and plan everything on the shop floor to meet their demand.

  We had sparkling, brand new machinery and equipment, all paid for by the development grant, and the government gave the company an extra £4 per week for each of us as part of the employment deal. And from that simple beginning the company grew and grew, until at its peak we employed 275 people.

  I started there on £1,000 a year, my first four-figure salary. After all my initial apprehension I had the job and the
wage I wanted, enough for us to live on comfortably and to pay for our new house. We were still lodging with my parents-in-law up in Llwynypia while our house in Tonyrefail was being built, which in those days took a year from the time they put in the foundations until everything was finished and ready for us.

  We finally moved into our own house in October 1969, and have lived here ever since.

  What we liked about our new home was that it was part of an extremely small estate of four semi-detached buildings and three detached houses. The gardens were reasonably large, which immediately appealed to me. All the people who moved in at the same time as we did were young couples, and it says a lot about the stability of life in the valley that four of the original couples are still here, while four more of the properties have had the same residents for twenty years, including Marilyn and Clive, who live in the other half of our semi.

  So nothing much has changed since we first moved into our little corner of Tonyrefail, a friendly, secure area where our children have grown up with those of our neighbours. The estate itself has grown over the years to several hundred houses, whose owners are constantly changing, but time seems to pass by our end.

  At first our new garden was an extension to my allotments, somewhere extra for growing vegetables. But I soon realized that with all the plots in production there wasn’t really any need for this additional capacity. Instead I planted apple trees, raspberries and blackcurrants, and gradually converted the rest to a real flower garden, a place that would look pretty with bulbs, polyanthus, wallflowers and forget-me-nots in spring, followed by a stunning display of bright annuals all summer.

  I’ve always felt the home garden is the best place to cultivate the various herbs used in the kitchen. Certainly in our household wanting a herb is a spur-of-the-moment thing: whenever Anthea prepares a dish, she has all the produce there fresh from the allotment, but at the last minute she’ll decide if something’s missing from the flavour. This is where herbs always come in handy, but it’s no good if they’re growing back in the allotment. You need to be able to pop out into the garden on an impulse and gather them at point of use, so always make a corner available for your favourite kinds among the flowers.