by Rumer Godden
“Broad beans,” said the man who looked after them. “Don’t you be throwing things down here.”
“I’m not,” said Lovejoy.
“Well, don’t you,” he said so belligerently that Lovejoy saw more clearly than ever that growing plants was difficult in Catford Street.
Another man, in another area, was setting little plants in half-barrels. It was a barrel garden; it even had barrels cut into seats. Lovejoy knew the man; he was Mr. Isbister, Rory Isbister’s grandfather, a wrinkled, brown old man, who lived in the basement of Number Twenty-three. “What are those?” asked Lovejoy.
“Sweet peas,” said Mr. Isbister.
He was not cross as the first man had been, and let Lovejoy talk to him. “I’ve got some seeds,” she said.
“You’d better get busy,” said Mr. Isbister. “’S nearly April.”
“Is April the time to sow?”
“March, April, for most things.”
“Why?” asked Lovejoy.
“Because,” said Mr. Isbister and grunted as he bent to tie a sweet pea to a little stick.
“Yes, but why?”
Mr. Isbister pushed his cap back on his head, leaving earth in his grizzled hair, and looked at her. Lovejoy was standing above him on the pavement. They were not at a good level for talking, but he answered her. When Mr. Isbister talked there were few words and long pauses. It was not at all like Vincent’s eloquence but each word sank in. “Christmastime,” said Mr. Isbister, “till round ’bout Febr’rary—” Pause.
“Yes,” said Lovejoy encouragingly.
“Th’earth’s like dead,” said Mr. Isbister; another pause. “Round ’bout March”—pause—“begins t’ work. April’s working.” Mr. Isbister looked up at the sky and frowned. “April’s short month,” he said, “must get after things”—pause. “Get busy,” and he went back to his sweet peas.
But Lovejoy had not finished. “If you wanted to make a garden here, where would you do it?” she asked.
There was a silence, then, “Nowhere,” said Mr. Isbister.
Lovejoy set her lips.
“When you do anything,” Vincent had told her often, “people will advise you not to, they’ll want to drag you down,” and his eyes grew dark, thinking of Cassie. “Don’t let them,” cried Vincent. “They—must—not. You must refuse to let them. I am going to have a restaurant that I call a restaurant,” said Vincent, “or I’ll have nothing at all”; and, “I’ll have a garden or nothing at all,” said Lovejoy.
•
Every now and then, in the streets between the Square and the river, there was a gap, the bombed sites of which Olivia and Angela had spoken, though the children called them the bomb-ruins. Where once houses had been, or warehouses or shops, was a pit below the level of the street, a space that was sometimes a hundred or two hundred yards across, an open gap between the houses. After the war the bomb-ruins had been tidied up, the debris of the ruins removed, only rubble left that would do for making new foundations when new buildings went up. The workmen had left each one tidy, but soon they were all untidy again; people tipped rubbish in them, threw tins and scrap iron down in them; the boys used them as lavatories; most of the children were forbidden to go near them, and they were seemingly empty, but only seemingly. Lovejoy knew, as every child in Catford Street knew, that the bomb-ruins were the headquarters of the gangs.
Every boy in Catford Street who was big enough belonged to a gang. “But you’re not six,” Sparkey’s mother told him. The gangs kept to themselves, though they fought one another at times, and they had partisan groups among the girls. By tacit consent, the girls kept out of the ruins; they were afraid of the eeriness of that waste ground. “Tramps go there,” said Sparkey, “and thieves. There was a burglar dumped a safe there, an’ one night a girl was killed, with a stocking!” said Sparkey, his eyes enormous. If a girl went in the ruins, she was not behaving like a girl; no book of etiquette had stricter rules of behaviour than the children of Catford Street, and a girl who did not behave like a girl could be fought. “It’s y’own fault, y’asked for it,” the boys used to say if they had to fight the girls. “Come in here and we’ll knock y’teeth out,” they said now to Lovejoy.
For Lovejoy was hovering. With the packet in her pocket, she had been walking round and round the bomb-ruins; some, bare and wide, she knew were no good; they were as public as the streets, everyone could look in them; but there were some where the rubble made hiding places, in which, picking a way in and out, she could get where no one could see her—places disused, derelict, given up, quite empty. “If it wasn’t for those blasted boys,” said Lovejoy.
It was not only that they would have fought her; she knew they could leave nothing alone. If they saw a tin, they must kick it; a poster, they drew on it and tore it; a fly, they must catch it. They took it out of one another too; if a boy were near another boy, perfectly friendly, after a moment he would kick or punch, and in a moment they would start scuffling, twisting, and wrestling; they could not sit next to one another in the bus without driving their elbows into or kicking one another. There was no ill will, no malice, as there would have been with girls. It was as if there were—a fizz in them, thought Lovejoy. She did not know how else to describe that bubbling, bottled-up energy. She had it herself, in spite of her quietness, her self-containedness; often she felt more like a boy than like a girl; sometimes she sat down on the boarding steps of the bus if the conductor were upstairs, and, holding on with one hand to the boarding rail, she would stick out her legs low over the road to feel the air as the bus swept round; all the old ladies screamed out that she would be killed. Lovejoy put her tongue out at them and, before the bus stopped, jumped off. Sometimes she walked on her hands down the length of a block. She sucked gob-stoppers, keeping the ball in her cheek, like any little hooligan; neither Vincent nor her own mother would have recognized her. Lovejoy knew what it was like to be a boy but, thinking of the fragile loops of Mr. Isbister’s sweet-pea seedlings, she drew her breath sharply. Isn’t there anywhere those boys don’t go? she thought. She seemed to have been carrying those seeds round for days.
“Have a box,” said Mrs. Combie and Mr. Isbister.
“I won’t have a box,” said Lovejoy.
CHAPTER VIII
JUST as a bird, after flying and fluttering and perching and looking, will suddenly build its nest in some exposed place so bare and noticeable that it seems that a cat must get at it or boys steal the eggs and tear it down, so Lovejoy, after days of searching for secret spots, suddenly chose an extraordinary place to plant her seeds.
There was one bomb-ruin where, as far as she knew, the boys did not go, where they had made no camps—they called anything they built on a bomb-ruin a camp. This site was too close to the seething High Street, almost at the top of Catford Street, opposite the newspaper stand; it was public, but left on it were pyramids of old bricks standing up and a few remnants of brick walls that must once have been cellar walls; among them, where two made an angle, she found a place.
It was sheltered, the walls made it feel secret, if she stooped or knelt on the ground no one could see her, and in it was a patch of earth that showed among the rubble.
It’ll do, thought Lovejoy. She spent two days in clearing the patch until it was big enough, about four feet square; she kept the best bits of rubble to edge the garden, as she had edged the seaside gardens she had made on the sand in Bournemouth or Torquay or Margate in the halcyon days when she was sweet. I can put the bits close together and they’ll look like pebbles or shells, she thought.
The ground smelled of stale rubbish and soot and—the loo, thought Lovejoy, wrinkling up her nose. Each piece of rubble had to be cleared and put down with a gentle hand; she did not dare throw it on a pile or make any noise; it was neat work but slow, and very grimy; she grew blacker and blacker; her hands were like a sweep’s and her knees looked as if they had black caps on them.
She spent every moment she could in the garden. Nobody came—no
boys, only cats; once Istanbul stalked through the rubble and, after springing up on the gap that led to Catford Street, disappeared into Mrs. Cleary’s and Miss Arnot’s house—or was it his house? thought Lovejoy. He made her wonder again why Sparkey was not on his step; she had kept a weather eye open for Sparkey, but all these days his step had been empty. He’s probably ill, thought Lovejoy, who knew the ways of Sparkey.
The busy feet passed and repassed in the High with the blur of traffic noise behind them; nobody looked over the wall and it would not have mattered if they had; Lovejoy kept well down. Before going into the site at all she looked carefully up and down the street and seized an empty moment to sidle through the gap in the wall, jump down the bank, where she waited; if no heads came over, no footsteps sounded above her, she dodged across from one old wall to another, keeping behind the pyramids of earth and brick; sometimes even she could not tell which walls were hers. “Nobody will find it,” said Lovejoy.
It took a whole week to clear the rubble and make the edges; the middle was hard black earth with a few blades of grass and weeds in it. I must dig it, thought Lovejoy, but with what?
She asked Mr. Isbister. She appeared suddenly in front of him as a robin appears on the handle of a spade, only she was not as attractive as a robin. “What do you dig the earth up with?” she asked.
“Small? Little bit?” Lovejoy nodded. “Fork,” said Mr. Isbister and went back to his work.
“Mrs. Combie, will you lend me a fork?”
“What do you want it for?” asked Mrs. Combie.
“For something.”
“Yes, but what?”
“It’s a secret. Please let me have a fork.”
“You’ll spoil it,” said Mrs. Combie.
“Ettie, no one can spoil a kitchen fork,” said Vincent.
Reluctantly Mrs. Combie opened the kitchen drawer and took one out.
It was not much later that Lovejoy appeared in front of Mr. Isbister again. “Now look what you’ve done,” she said and showed the fork with its prongs bent up and one broken. “You told me to use a fork,” she said, glaring at him. “It’s Mrs. Combie’s”—and she wailed, “I have to take it back.”
“Garden fork!” said Mr. Isbister. “Look”—and he showed her a small stout garden fork and a trowel. “Real garden needs spade,” he said, “but you could manage with these.”
Lovejoy looked at the tools and then at Mrs. Combie’s broken fork. “You wouldn’t lend me them?” she asked.
“No,” said Mr. Isbister and put them away. He had a cupboard made out of a box in among his barrels, and now Lovejoy saw in it a horde of garden things; there were a spade, a watering can, some flowerpots and wooden labels, packets of seeds, and a bundle of raffia. Her quick eyes saw all these before he shut the cupboard door and, You need all that for gardening, she thought. Perhaps I could pinch—But garden things, it seemed, were precious and well guarded. Mr. Isbister, for instance, was taking no chances; he had a padlock on the door, which he locked, and put the key in his pocket. “You go and get your own things,” he told Lovejoy. She went silently away to face Mrs. Combie with the broken kitchen fork.
A fork. A trowel, a fork. How can I get a fork? At last Lovejoy came to the Square Gardens, and there Lucas—though she did not know his name was Lucas—had left his wheelbarrow on the path while, as Angela was out of the way, he had gone to have a smoke and some tea from his flask. Lovejoy saw tools in the barrow; she could see a twig broom and a spade, and a big fork; Who knows? thought Lovejoy, he might have left a little fork as well. She pressed her nose against the chestnut palings which had taken the place of the railings that had been there before the war.
In the war the railings had been taken away. “Every bit of iron was needed,” said Angela when she told this story. “Railings were taken from all over London. When they took ours we didn’t mind at first. We thought we should like the people from the Street to share our garden; we truthfully welcomed them,” said Angela, “but very soon we found out our mistake. They scuffed up the grass, the boys played cricket on it, they threw paper about, they even picked the flowers and broke off the trees. Lucas said—”
“I don’t like Lucas,” Olivia had interrupted once. “He’s a toady. He treats the children like the cat.”
“The cat?”
“The cat did this, the cat did that,” said Olivia.
“Nonsense, they are little hooligans, you know they are,” said Angela. “They nearly broke Lucas’s heart. They simply don’t understand about gardens.”
“How can they?” asked Olivia hotly. “I mean what chance? In the whole Street there isn’t a tree, not a blade, for any of them. Each child should have a blade, at least,” said Olivia.
“Well, we shouldn’t have one if they all came in,” said Angela, and she ordered the new palings. They seemed very tall to Lovejoy and they had sharp pointed tops. Still, I might get over them, she thought.
The Gardens looked an oasis of green and deep-down freshness after the Street; they smelled fresh, of grass and leaves and freshly turned earth; a few daffodils were out along the paths, and hundreds of crocuses in the grass. “You have been successful!” the residents said to Angela. “The Gardens have never looked better.” To Lovejoy they were a revelation and she forgot the fork as, holding two of the palings, she pressed her face in between them to look.
“What are you doing here?”
Angela had a new spring hat; it was blue, trimmed with blue feather wings, which gave her a look of extraordinary swiftness. When she pounced on Lovejoy she might have been an avenging angel.
“What are you doing here?”
Lovejoy, her back against the paling, stood mute.
“Answer me,” said Angela. “What are you doing?”
“Lookin’.” Lovejoy let the word out and shut her lips.
Angela did not know it, but one of the Catford Street children was doing what she had always hoped they would do, appreciate the Gardens. If Lovejoy had asked her question, “Is that good garden earth?” or been able to say what she felt about the crocuses, the whole history would have been different, but she was silent and sullen and dropped her eyelids in the way Angela knew meant that a purpose was being concealed.
“You were going to climb the palings,” said Angela.
Lovejoy was suddenly filled with a terrible feeling of the power of grown-ups, the power and the knowledge. No one knew better than she how to behave, pretty manners had been drilled into her when she was a very little girl, but now her helplessness enraged her; she had thrown the potato knife at Cassie, and what she did now imprinted her forever on Angela’s mind. She spat. The spit landed hard on the pavement by Angela’s shoe. Both of them looked a little frightened at that dark spot of venom on the pavement, then, skipping as if nothing had happened, skip-hop-jump, Lovejoy turned her back and disappeared towards the Street, while Angela, with a heightened colour, went home.
Lovejoy gave up trying to get a fork for nothing. “Where would I buy garden things?” she asked Vincent.
Vincent, as usual, ignored Woolworth’s or any shop in the High. “There’s a garden shop in Mortimer Street by Driscoll’s,” he said.
“It’s expensive over there,” said Mrs. Combie.
“That’s where you get good things,” said Vincent in rebuke.
When Lovejoy found the garden shop it was like Mr. Isbister’s cupboard multiplied a hundred times. She blinked at the riches; there were shining green- and red-painted garden tools, trowels and forks, spades, big forks, big and little rakes; Lovejoy longed to handle a rake. There were twig brooms, and watering cans with bright copper nozzles and tiny green watering cans with long spouts. It was a delectable shop; there was a smell of fresh wood from lengths of trellis; there were clean, inviting-looking flowerpots stacked in different sizes. There were wheelbarrows. If I had a wheelbarrow how I could move those stones, she thought, and stopped to read its label. “The Super-Nimble Wheelbarrow,” she spelled out, “£4.10.0.” Fo
ur pounds ten! She dropped the label as if it were red-hot.
A showcase, the whole of it used for seeds, was so brilliant with the colours of the flowers on the packets that Lovejoy was dazzled. Before she could touch them or read the names a shopgirl was beside her; shop people were always vigilant if a sparrow-child came in. “What do you want, dear?” said the girl briskly.
Lovejoy had seen a trowel and fork with red handles; they were tied together with string and laid in a wooden basket. “How much are those?” she asked.
“Eight-and-a-penny,” said the girl more briskly. “You haven’t got that, have you? Run along home.”
“Don’t you have cheaper ones?” asked Lovejoy. “What are those plain ones?”—and she showed a pair without any red paint.
“Those are stainless steel,” said the girl without pity. “Thirty-three shillings the pair.”
Lovejoy went out. She walked slowly back across the Square into Motcombe Terrace; there she paused, and suddenly her face cleared. Of course, I’ll go to Dwight’s, she thought.
DWIGHT’S REPOSITORY AND SALE ROOMS, Established 1889 was a few doors down the Terrace from the Street. People said it was the same Mr. Dwight who kept it now. Sooner or later everybody in the Street bought or sold something at Mr. Dwight’s; he seemed to have the flotsam and jetsam of all the streets round; in the window and inside the shop, from the floor to the ceiling, was junk: furniture and clothes and china, toys and bits of bicycles and perambulators, birdcages, parts of wash-hand-stands, and nearly new washing machines, shoes and books and radios; things were thick along the pavement and nobody knew how Mr. Dwight managed to get them back into the shop at night.
As Lovejoy came up, Mr. Dwight was there as he always was, with his boy, putting out more things on the pavement: a bookcase of books, a sofa, a jug and basin patterned with ivy on a Japanese table, another basin full of old stirrups under the table, a sewing machine, some dinner plates on two card tables, and a tin bath. Lovejoy waited until Mr. Dwight looked up, then said, “Mrs. Combie sent me to ask, have you a small garden fork and a trowel.”