My Life on a Hillside Allotment

by Terry Walton

  Choose a really ripe marrow, wipe it clean with a damp cloth, and remove a piece of the stalk end, deep enough for you to scoop out all the seeds and pith to leave a clear cavity.

  Fill this with sugar (the amount will depend on the size of marrow), packing it down firmly. Replace the cut endpiece and seal in place with sticky tape.

  Suspend the marrow, sealed end uppermost, securely over a jar or jug, and leave for 2–3 weeks.

  After this time unseal the end and add more sugar to replace that absorbed into the flesh. Reseal and suspend for 6–7 weeks or until the liquid contents have all dripped into the jug, leaving an empty shell.

  Stir the yeast and yeast nutrient into the liquor and then strain into a fermentation jar. Fit an airlock on top and leave until fermentation ceases.

  Siphon or strain into a clean fermentation jar, fit a clean airlock and keep for at least a year, by which time it will be very strong and taste like rum.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  Social Life on the Plot

  WHEN I WAS working full-time and going straight up to the allotment afterwards, it was not just to unwind and relax but also to keep up with all the routine gardening chores. I must have been a pretty unsociable guy then, because I almost resented anyone coming over and talking to me. I was there to sow the carrots, do a bit of hoeing, pull a few weeds or get a few plants in; I needed to do something useful with my limited time – it might rain the next day and then I wouldn’t be able to get on. After hours of talking and answering the phone at work, the last thing I wanted was to chat to somebody else for three-quarters of an hour instead of tending my plot.

  Retiring was like a big wake-up call. Suddenly there was no pressure any more, and I had time to be sociable.

  The typical pattern these days is that the first thing I do when I get up to the plot is sit down. Albie will have coffee on the go, and we’ll chat for maybe twenty minutes before I wander off and do a bit of work. An hour and a half later it’ll be ‘Kettle’s just boiled!’ again, and it doesn’t matter now that there’s all the time in the day. Jobs that used to take me an hour or so might take me four, and that’s not because of my age.

  In fact there’s a lot more than gardening taking place on the plots these days. When my father was up there people came along, they worked, they might discuss what they were doing and exchange tips or comment on the weather, but that was all. Since there were very few buildings on the site, there were no obvious meeting places. But over the years the greenhouses and sheds have developed into a small community, and many have become more than just somewhere to grow tomatoes or store materials.

  My father was one of the first to build. Even when I was small he had a long, low greenhouse made out of old sash window frames along the top of one of his plots, and that was where he grew his chrysanths. It was roofed with plastic corrugated sheeting, which was relatively cheap in the early days.

  And then in 1971, about the time my first son was born, he bought his first Halls greenhouse, a big wooden structure that looked posh and upstanding in those days. I didn’t have a greenhouse then – nothing so exotic. There wasn’t the time to look after something like that, and I tried to keep my allotment work easy and streamlined.

  But then other people began to erect greenhouses and sheds on their plots, home-made buildings that avoided the need to spend much money. Joe Vickery, who had my current plot before me, was a local carpenter and he managed to acquire a large number of ammunition boxes. They were made of wooden panels, ideal for building, and were being sold off for pennies. All you did was buy a quantity of them and knock them apart, and you had the perfect boarding to make a shed for a few pounds.

  Fortunately the local council never laid down any stipulations about the size or materials of greenhouses or sheds, possibly because nobody had bothered with them before. But now the idea was catching on, especially as many people in the Rhondda were starting to exchange their sash windows for double glazing, so suddenly there were lots of cast-off building materials going begging.

  Back in the fifties and early sixties people never changed a thing, and removing a whole window was a very ambitious undertaking. As people became more affluent, however, they gradually began to look more critically at their homes and entertain the idea of a better-looking front door or windows with double glazing to conserve the heat. Out went the old sashes, which were just the thing for making a shed or greenhouse: all you had to do was knock up a frame to fit these windows in, and then the old front door of a house would become the door of a shed or greenhouse, sometimes complete with a stained glass panel.

  There’s a standing joke in the valleys that when anybody orders a skip to do some building work, it’s delivered and taken away empty. No sooner do windows or doors or useful bits of wood come out of the house than they’re up on the allotments. We are the skip-raiders of the valleys, always on the alert for anything useful. It’s the old spirit of the pioneers, but instead of chopping down trees and building a log cabin, we go and raid a skip to bring back all the window frames, door frames, old buckets and anything else that has potential. Nothing’s wasted in the valleys and almost everything ends up being reused: this so-called new policy of recycling is old hat to seasoned allotment keepers, and we were doing it long before it become fashionable.

  It seems strange to me that this isn’t common practice elsewhere. At a Cardiff site that won the Allotment of the Year award, for example, you walk in and there’s not a single building there. It’s completely flat and the plotholders are not permitted to build a greenhouse or a shed or anything else. I found the same at Highgate in London, where we were filming The Big Dig: there’s all these lovely town houses overlooking the site, so no one’s allowed to build anything in case they spoil the view.

  Fashions change, though, and there seem to be a lot of people giving their back gardens a makeover who are keen to get rid of their aluminium greenhouses, because they’re upgrading or perhaps building a conservatory instead. The free papers regularly carry advertisements offering them, for nothing, provided you dismantle and collect them yourself, and there’s a new influx of these on the plots. They look a lot neater but somehow lack the character of the old shanties, and I suspect I shall keep mine the way it is, with its sash windows, corrugated plastic roof and an entrance through somebody’s old internal door with a large glass window in it.

  What amazes me is where these sheds and greenhouses are often sited. We’ll say, ‘Don’t build there because you’ll cast a large part of your plot in shade. Put it at the other end instead.’ But they’re always built where they’re just a step off the main path because that’s more convenient. And they tend to have the sun full on the building, which means several yards of good soil are in shade for most of the day.

  There’s almost no plot up there now that hasn’t got a greenhouse or a shed, and they’re often large structures. The greenhouses are generally used just to grow seedlings and tomatoes, sometimes fifteen or twenty plants that produce massive amounts of fruit. And the sheds are used as stores, of course – or at least they were at first.

  Once bottled gas became available, someone had the bright idea of bringing up a small stove so they could boil a kettle and make a cup of tea or coffee or sometimes a mug of soup. If you did that you could spend a whole day there and look after yourself quite comfortably.

  The next step was to start cooking food. People would bring a piece of meat with them, go out on the plot and gather fresh vegetables, put all these ingredients in a pot and make a fresh broth. While they were gardening in the morning, this would be bubbling away in the shed for whenever they were ready to break for lunch.

  And then Albie started making coffee in his greenhouse, where he had a two-ring stove. One morning I was working away and suddenly I heard a shout: ‘You want a coffee, Terry?’ It was just what I needed. His plot’s just across the path from mine and he had a couple of seats in there, so we sat down and relaxed for quite a while over
coffee and biscuits.

  A coffee break became a regular thing. Very soon other people began to join us, and in the end there’d be four or five of us gathering in his greenhouse. The stove would be on, the chat would flow and it was great. Once again allotmenteers are at the forefront of progress: Albie set the trend, Starbucks and Costa followed!

  Then Rhys, who had a bigger stove in his shed and two big patio doors that you could open right up, started bringing up bacon, bread, tomatoes out of the greenhouse and some mushrooms, and would cook breakfast. So we had a coffee shop and a café where you could meet for bacon sandwiches or a full mid-morning breakfast.

  People began spending longer and longer up on the plots, not necessarily gardening but talking, eating and drinking, and that has changed the whole atmosphere. Instead of being an intensive work session, a visit to the allotment has become an important social event.

  Some time before Albie’s coffee bar started up, there used to be a wine club at the far side of the allotments where four or five members met regularly. They would gather wild crops like elderflowers or blackberries and brew their own wine in a shed belonging to one of them. On a Sunday night you would find these guys sitting outside this shed on a big long bench in the evening sunshine, enjoying the view up the valley and sampling their wine.

  One Sunday evening while I was still a working man, I went up there to do the watering and took Anthea along for the ride and a stroll through the allotments afterwards. These guys were sitting there in the sun, and greeted Anthea politely (allotment holders are always well-mannered).

  ‘Mrs Walton,’ one of them said, ‘would you like a glass of wine?’

  She thought about it and then said yes, she would.

  He went into the shed, fetched a wine glass from the stock he kept on a shelf, rinsed it out in his water barrel (which disturbed all the mosquito larvae) and then poured out this glass of wine. They didn’t go in for the refinement of filtering their wine, so it came out somewhat murky.

  I remember the look on Anthea’s face as this brown, cloudy nectar was presented to her. She took a cautious sip, said, ‘That’s nice,’ and drank it all down quickly to avoid prolonging the experience. But she wasn’t used to home-made brews, and this was stronger than she had expected. With the heat and the sunshine, her legs began to feel heavy. Seeing how quickly she had drunk her wine, they asked if she’d like another glass, but she politely declined. We sat there chatting with them until the sun had finally set, and returned home with Anthea in a distinctly happy mood. She suffered no long-term effects.

  We never did discover the identity of that amber nectar, and perhaps it was wise not to enquire: ignorance can often be bliss! That wine club continued for many years and eventually closed only when a couple of the members became too old to work on the allotment.

  Several distinctive social groups now gather regularly up on the plots, which has enlivened things no end. It increases the popularity of the place, and people tend to stay longer instead of just doing their chores and leaving. Right throughout the year there’s always someone around now, which never used to happen, especially during the winter. And that’s good for site security, of course.

  This is why people are reluctant to change allotments nowadays. They have become more attached to their plots, and don’t want to give up their little bit of heaven to move closer to the gate. Thirty or forty years ago, when there were no fixed assets and it was more attractive to be where it was easier to bring in and take out whatever you needed, no. 1 plot was the ultimate goal of every member.

  Recently it took me years to let no. 1 for any length of time. We did allow newcomers to have it because nobody else wanted it, but that didn’t work out and as time went on the plot became quite scruffy. I finally managed to let it in 2006 to someone who immediately started building a greenhouse, something it lacked, and we are keeping our fingers crossed.

  Even though some attitudes have changed with the more relaxed regime, the choice of crops grown is still very basic and conservative. There might be a wider repertoire of seed varieties, but few people grow unusual vegetables and most concentrate on the same staples I grew in the fifties and sixties. Potatoes, cabbages and beans are grown in huge quantities. Few tend even to grow things like carrots and beetroot, seeds that are sown directly into the ground, perhaps because it’s a little more complicated and needs more skill. And the rhubarb you used to see everywhere in the fifties because it was so dependable, giving you several months of rhubarb tarts and crumbles, is nowhere near as popular now.

  Apart from about five or six of us who were there in the seventies, there are no really long-standing gardeners on the allotments now. People have been coming and going all the time, mainly going until the latter half of the eighties when the organic movement was gaining momentum and people began to look at growing their own again on a small scale. I suspect The Good Life series on television helped, making people think maybe they could do the same themselves.

  After that, gardening became fashionable. There was this big upturn in people wanting to grow their own, a lot more people on television were plugging it, and suddenly it seemed that everybody wanted an allotment. It was back in favour once more, just like in the fifties. Even a programme like Ground Force helped: it might not have been about growing vegetables but it did make more people see the outdoors as a part of their life.

  Perhaps this is why in the last twenty years we’ve taken in new members who are more builders than gardeners, at least initially. The first thing anybody does when they take on a plot now is build something, instead of turning the ground over and getting crops in. Even if there’s already a shed and greenhouse, they’ll install edging or divide their plots into smaller beds with more fixed paths. The hard landscaping comes first, and sometimes there can be more paths than arable land in the end. Perhaps it’s the ‘garden makeover’ influence spreading from the back garden on to the plots.

  I sometimes wonder if gardening programmes these days are getting a little too sophisticated, plugging grand landscape designs and letting the Latin names of exotic shrubs roll off their tongues, when many gardeners still just grow annuals in the front garden and vegetables out the back, with no space for an ambitious herbaceous border.

  I think there’s a need on television for more information on basic vegetable gardening, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes in a show every week during the growing season explaining what you should be doing now on the veg plot. It’s not enough to look at the seed packet and follow the advice there because conditions may not be right on the ground. This is something I try to address on air whenever I can.

  In the last few years we’ve been getting a lot more active support from our local council, partly because of this growing demand for allotments and also because of the media attention. They installed drainage pipes down the main road through the allotments, resurfaced it with hardcore, and then added a turning place so that plotholders can bring their cars right in, turn round and drive back out. This avoids the difficult manoeuvre of reversing out past all the obstacles at the ends of plots. In addition they excavated some waste ground outside the allotments to create a car park for members.

  The Jeremy Vine Show seems to have put the Rhondda on the map now that we broadcast from there every two weeks. There have also been various television programmes, and when the camera on the plot catches the surrounding scenery, which, especially in the middle of the summer, is absolutely outstanding, it must convince people the Rhondda is more than just industrial history.

  I like to think the threat to our allotments that alarmed us when interest was declining has now disappeared. There’s a growing demand everywhere for plots, even pressure to increase their numbers, and this may persuade some authorities to think again about sites as a vital amenity rather than let them go for development just because of the pound signs waving before their eyes. I’m convinced allotments generally, and ours in particular, have a good future.

  Certainly the calibre
and variety of recent incomers give me grounds for hope. They’re bringing in some new ideas and an injection of enthusiasm. Take Keith and his wife Jean. They are in their sixties, keen gardeners who have moved to the valleys from Swindon. Keith’s allotment has become more of a leisure garden than a conventional plot. He grows quite a lot of vegetables, but he’s also got apples and other top-fruit trees – things that were rarely planted in the old days – as well as an inviting bench, a patch of lawn and a pond. It’s great, looks tidy and aesthetically pleasing, and is the kind of plan our committee is happy to accept.

  Then there’s Carl, who is in his thirties and just finishing long service in the army. He’s a more traditional vegetable grower: plenty of beans, cabbages and the various root crops, but nothing exotic, exactly as it used to be long ago. There’s also our well-known inventor, Russell Vaughan, who has seen the light and ‘gone biodynamic’. He gardens according to the phases of the moon and uses a special calendar which tells him on what days to plant and which to avoid.

  Roger has been a member since way back in the seventies and, like the rest of ‘the ’70s club’ (as we call the elite few who have survived allotment gardening for thirty or more years), has gardened on many different plots in his quest to get closer to the gate. His allotment is one of the best on the site for tidiness and layout, with flowering shrubs and trellis laden with clematis among the areas devoted to vegetables.

  And there’s a special plot used by the local school for children with learning difficulties. That started a few years back when Jim Sullivan, a community policeman, was looking for somewhere safe so that the children could be outside in the fresh air. He approached several allotment sites that weren’t interested at all or were concerned about the practicalities of having these kids around. Then he came to see us and was quite shocked when we said yes, no problem at all. A lot of our members help out and it’s good to see how much enjoyment the kids derive from getting their hands dirty and seeing things grow. They come up during school hours, other people come in and help on some of the other days of the week, and the plot is really beginning to take shape.