2006. Ruth is the tenant of Plot 30. She has waited 18 years for an allotment, until one came along when she wasn’t well. It is in north London, near where I live. Hilary says we can garden it for a year and hand it back as a working space. Ruth will hopefully be better by then.
We go to see it.
Ruth’s plot neighbours the one we garden now. My first allotment love, it is hard to make out at the start, not so much overgrown as swamped with weed. It falls quickly away down a steep slope, littered with bindweed, bushes, large abandoned lumps of concrete. This is allotment as waste land. My companions’ faces fall. Mine lights up. Here is territory I have long understood: a garden damsel in distress; beautiful, abandoned, like a rundown river cottage that needs work and a helping hand to express itself.
It starts well. Magazine staff give up weekends to dig. We are seeing ourselves in a different light: muddy, more than a little sweat. But there is too much to do. It will take too long. The weeds are endemic and we are digging out lumps of old buildings lurking malevolently underground. We unearth an Anderson bomb shelter complete with corrugated roof. It is too much to ask. It is their weekend, time to get away from work. Within a few weeks I am on my own, with the rain, the buried bricks, the wire and broken glass for company. Enter Howard and Don and Mary.
I’d first hired Howard to take photographs for Monty Don’s gardening column in the magazine and had loved his work since seeing his book with Derek Jarman on the Prospect Cottage garden in Dungeness. This was austere, artful planting in almost savage harmony with its situation. Howard’s quiet pictures of Jarman, of driftwood and detail, had changed everything for me about how to see space.
Jarman captures him in the book when he writes: ‘Howard Sooley is a giraffe, a giraffe that has stared a long time at a photo of Virginia Woolf; he possesses the calm and sweetness of that miraculous beast.’ From out of this calm – and companionship – together we would conjure our first miraculous plot and go on to make more.
1960. Christopher is obsessed with forming clubs. We have homemade badges, drawn and coloured on card, attached with safety pins. Mum is concerned about the holes in our shirts and jumpers. Our badges are usually round, sometimes shaped like shields. There are arcane rules. He is always the leader. I am the only other member. We are always a secret society because other boys are immune. We never ask girls. We make dens as meeting places. I swear loyalty to the club and Christopher. I am soon replaced by cricket.
SATURDAY JULY 11, 6AM. Under siege. The midges that hang around the pond and plot in the summer evening and early morning are attacking me. I am intent on clearing space for new growth, letting in light and air. It is already monsoony humid, threatening rain. I don’t much notice the midges at first, batting them away absentmindedly, irritated by the odd bite as they penetrate gaps on my shirt sleeves, the pale flash of flesh as I bend. I clear the last of the broad beans, battered by slugs. I pull invading calendula, picking through it for cut flowers for the kitchen table, leaving the vivid orange bloom I haven’t the heart to take. I thin through new-sown salad for lunch. There is much still to do when my face and arms begin to itch uncontrollably, like a child with chicken pox. While I have been working, the bugs have been feasting. I urgently need something to stop the swelling now pressing on one eye, and the raging scratching. I retire from the skirmish, stopping to grab leaves, beans and flowers, and flee.
Later, hopped on antihistamine, smothered in cortisone cream and disfigured with a leer, I return. Howard joins me. We need to sow. The twin pea beds at the bottom of both plots are failing, so we will supplement them with low-growing bush beans. It may be our last chance to sow them this year. We pull the flowering coriander and hang it on a wigwam to dry. I brought the original packet back from Brazil. It is intensely spicy – a local strain, I think. We save the seed for later. I clear another bed for wintering chicories. At the last minute I rip out the top bed too and re-sow with a black bean from Brown Envelope. The crinkled peas should have been picked while we were away. We eat a few from the pod and divide the rest. As the light dips and Howard gets bitten, we finish. In the three hours we have been here we have hardly spoken. The few words exchanged are about the benefits or not of getting a wheelbarrow and which beans are for where. Conversation picks up on the walk home down the hill.
1961. Almost as soon as Christopher and I are reunited we begin to grow apart. Nurture acing nature, if not just yet. He holds on fast to his history and name (though why this decision is his I don’t understand; it should never have been). I pack myself away in search of something safer, smarter, more versatile. Like a Christmas cowboy suit, like dressing up. My identity is broken, soon it will be time to try on Peter Drabble; from underclass to middle class, like the jacket in the first photograph that didn’t yet fit. I often imagine now how my brother’s life would have played out if Lilian and Dudley had called him Christopher Drabble. In my head he is smiling, happily married, with many dogs and kids, maybe managing an arable farm in Canada. His life would have had more choices.
Herons Reach is on the Stakes Road across the mud flats, half a mile from school if the tide is out, a mile if it is in. I love messing on the river on my own, while Christopher loves the village. He is bigger now, brilliant at head-butting me, but I can feel his fragility. Sense the uncertainty. See it when no one else is interested. He will come to rely on his fists. I will rely on my wits.
The change will come between us often. Rural Devon in the Sixties is still remote. A place where brothers have the same names, the same features, the same interests. We are different, and difference is difficult.
Other boys too are to be discouraged, at least at home. In our first year there is a birthday party but this is to be the last. Lilian doesn’t like boys or parties in her house – too noisy, too messy, too muddy, too hard-edged. Softness for me is to be found in other kids’ homes, a warmer welcome with a tender touch. Boys don’t much come around again, not even for Christopher and he collects friends like I collect stamps. He starts spending his days at the farm next door, walking the fields, helping call in the cows, bringing home milk and mud. The farmer is handsome, young, in his twenties, a bachelor, though this thought has only struck me now. I prefer to stick closer to home, closer to Lilian and Dudley, watching as she pares the runner beans he grows into neat piles of wafer-thin green. Food is always simple, almost always freshly grown. For Dudley, as for Mary’s husband Don, runner beans signal English summer.
SUMMER 2007. Ruth’s allotment is slowly taking shape. Howard and I have spent weeks up to our knees, thighs sometimes, trenching out bricks and glass, wire and wood, tree stumps and concrete posts, while Don looks approvingly on. Mary leaves us small bags of salad as encouragement. One day, the allotment association steps in. They hire a skip and I arrive mid-morning to find a fireman’s chain of wheelbarrows to run the rubble up. It seems everyone is here to help.
Sarah turns up from the advertising department of the Guardian where I work. Who knew wellingtons came with high heels? She helps me spread five tonnes of topsoil we’ve brought in to slow the slope. She learns to kill slugs and snails. She drives 300 miles with me to pick up a lorry load of cow manure. ‘Horses’ energy is too fast for vegetables but fine for flowers, you need cow’, was the opaque advice from Jane Scotter. The manure is a gift from a farmer who had answered a plea put out into the biodynamic community. It’s harder than you think to find organic cow muck in London. We drive back delicately in our hired, loaded-down flat-back truck (we have been a bit vague about what we want it for, failing to mention manure). We are barely making it up the hills, laughing, almost choking, in a heavy fug of farmyard.
The slope is tamed now, the soil is fed. We are ready to grow.
The Danish agricultural museum has sent us ‘lost’ seed, including Tagetes Ildkonge (for Christopher), the deepest-red, most velvety marigolds we have ever seen. Sarah and I plant a large bed of perpetual spinach. We have a wigwam of fragrant sweet peas and another of pur
ple-podded Trail of Tears. The tagetes grow to a thick hedge. We have herbs, fennel, flowers, beetroot, carrots, kale, mustards, green manure. I set a national competition for school gardening clubs to design a scarecrow and have the magazine fashion team build and dress the winner. Soon a six-foot scarlet pirate, complete with eye-patch, hat and silvery sword, guards against the resident pigeons. They ignore him. We plant an apple tree, a plum tree, gooseberry and currant bushes – just like Dad. Everything we sow grows lush like rainforest, as though its energy had been imprisoned and is now unleashed. The allotment is happy and so are we, but I can’t bear to thin and throw the weakest tomatoes – maybe I identify with their need, preferring to give them more light and food and love. Soon we have 20 plants, tall and fruiting in the sunniest spot at the top of the plot. We don’t know blight is endemic on the site and that nurturing rain also spreads disease. Their leaves start to brown and buckle. The tomatoes too. Seedlings I have nursed from birth are sickening and dying, and there is nothing I can do. Throughout the site, tomato plants are failing. The weakest die first, of course, their fruits blistered, their stems and leaves discoloured. Seasoned allotment holders strip the leaves and spray them, like a field hospital for failing plants. Still they fail. Like plague before penicillin. In the end we pull them all and cart their corpses to the green bin by the gate. No compost renewal now. A gardening lesson in love and loss. But one I am reluctant to learn.
SUMMER 1973. My first garden in London is in Elgin Avenue, a street of squats near Notting Hill Gate. I am 19, working for a garden centre in Kensington, selling window-box flowers to posh west London ladies. Here, it seems, everyone buys their gardens ready made, no time to wait. This is gardening as competitive sport. I have become skilled at persuading neighbours to upgrade over each other. If one has bought red geraniums and a three-foot window box in terracotta, I’ll sell next door a three-and-a-half-foot in stone and with better, bigger flowers. No one grows from seed. There is a lot of waste. This is new to me. I start carting home pots of dried-out azalea rescued from the bins. Soon I have buckets of rehydrating bushes inside and outside the flat, front and back. I nurture my waifs back to life. As the garden fills up, I start planting out the rest. The speed freaks don’t much mind as long as they don’t have to water. I spread down the street as fast as the dealers spread up. We have azaleas, geraniums, pelargoniums, magnolia, a bay tree slightly bent out of shape. There should be an award for the best-dressed street of squats.
JULY 17. The temperature has been in the high twenties for the past three days and I have promised Mary I’ll water. She is taking a break in Cornwall and I want the plot to look well in time for her return. Howard and I head up before breakfast. I love the light at this time, fruit trees and bushes backlit by the low early sun. Our neighbour Jeffrey is an American banker with a passion for English cottage gardens. His fennel and hollyhocks are two metres tall. Bees stream from the next-door hives like Star Wars fighter squadrons. A fledgling robin, head cocked, watches us. Red amaranth and bull’s blood chard stand in contrast to the other, younger lime-green leaves. All is right in allotment world. Howard waters while I take more calendula, mildew at its base a warning signal of autumn. Time for the borders to breathe, time for beans. Of course we have too many (the seed finally pulled though). Feeler vines outstretch like a drowning man’s hand. Howard is buttoned up against bugs but still they get through. The anxious scratching starts.
SEPTEMBER 1959. The village school test for TB has alarmed Mum and Dad and me. My left arm is very swollen, with red streaks running down. And the doctor thinks I am ‘rickety’. Christopher is OK, which only means more mystery. Where was I? Where was he? The first clue we maybe hadn’t always been together. But why our amnesia?
Rickets. A Dickensian world away from the family life the Drabbles have been building. No vitamin D and now I am touched by TB. Capital letters writ large of lack of care. Where was family, where was safety, where was my other mum? It had been beaten into us at the home, this cross we carry. We are either unlovable or the cursed brood of an unloving mother. Either way, we need to be quarantined from the herd. Mums are meant to be like Mary, a loving Christian icon clutching her baby to her breast.
For the next 10 years I have an annual X-ray, looking for lesions. My sunken chest pressed against cold metal, standing on tiptoe on a box, straining chin on top. Would my past incubate? Would it return to disturb me? I have a large spoonful of cod liver oil every morning now, shuddering as it sluices down. I also have a memory of being given raw liver, but this may be elaboration or invention, a common failing for kids like me.
I invented my father once. There was a man who regularly used to watch as we played on the roundabout in the park at the back of the Plymouth home. I told everyone he was my dad. (I didn’t say he was Christopher’s; maybe my brother wasn’t there. My memories are sketchy and episodic, pixelated like worn VHS tape. No one to top them up.) The mystery man was watching over me, waiting, I told the other kids. He would be coming soon to take me away when he had found a place for us to stay. I didn’t understand when he didn’t come.
JULY 19, SATURDAY. It’s sweltering after two nights of thunderstorms, with temperatures hitting 32°C. There’s no more need to water, at least for now. I hit the plot in the late afternoon to check on progress. I have been sowing Mary’s ‘pumpkin plot’ with squash and courgette seed and I’m happy to see new plants popping through. I fork up a few potatoes, blushing Red Duke of York. As a child, I loved to dig the potatoes for weekend lunch, lifting them in the hour before eating. They were always King Edward’s, boiled with apple mint when new, diligently scraped and served with salty butter. We grew peas, runner beans, strawberries (Dudley’s favourite) but it was from potatoes I learned the joy of growing food for the table, taking as much as you need for the meal and no more.
JULY 20. Back on the first bus, early Sunday morning. The success of the squash seed has inspired me to weed the pit and move Mary’s bags of manure. It’s not yet 7am and I am smeared with insect repellent and horse shit that has liquified in the heat. It is steamy, mucky work as I stack the sacks. I hoe through the bed, move a stray calendula and sow courgette seed. I am prone to over-sow, almost as though my faith in things is thin and I still don’t quite believe in miracles. (I do. I think I almost am one.) I weed through Mary’s beetroot, beans and chard and cull the choking strawberry runners. The first beans are ready on the first wigwam: blue Blauhilde and Trail of Tears. I pick a handful to add to the potatoes. We will have them steamed and served with butter, just like Mum and Dad. My boots and trousers are smeared with manure. My shirt is soaked with sweat. My hair is sticking to my head. I am happy. A smart matron with two blazered schoolgirls pulls them closer to her as I pass. I am not dressed for Sunday society or even for the bus. Hampstead should have a tradesmen’s entrance.
JULY 22. Each garden in my life has its own identity, fulfils a different function, but the oldest and perhaps purest is the roof terrace at home. It was tiled with asbestos and packed with junk and dead bicycles when we moved in. I went a little mad at first, turning it into a country-cottage garden above an urban street. It was a riot of colour and contrast. The walls were trestled, none left bare. Roses rambled and added scent. Jasmine too. Early- and late-flowering clematis came next. We covered the floor in marble pebbles, brought in a weathered teak table and chairs. We eat dinner there on a summer evening, drink tea in our coats with the newspapers in winter. The roof terrace keeps me connected to the countryside. It’s an oasis of calm in Kentish Town. Pots are planted for colour, always brighter in summer.
Its identity has changed, matured with us. First to go were the trestles, the climbing plants and the once-white stones. Flowers became more individual, picked for personality, but there are always dahlias. Dudley thought them ‘common’ but I love them for their myriad shapes and strong colours as they ease the shift into autumn. There is a Magnolia stellata because its flowers signal early spring but mostly the roof terrace is a
gateway to our piece of sky, a place to potter outside.
1959. We have our own bedroom, our own bed. But the truest sign of home is our dressing gowns. To be worn watching TV or after a Sunday-night bath, shiny for the new school week, downstairs for a goodnight peck, ours are brown wool, plain with a piped edge. My cord is blue and white, Chris’s is red and white like a barber’s pole, the colours of Manchester United, his favourite football team. Local Plymouth Argyll lose too often for his liking.
1960. Seven-year-old Christopher looks like Alfred E. Neuman from Mad magazine: gap-toothed, freckle-faced, wide cheeky grin. He is growing. The past is beginning to fade. He has slipped its grip. He is made for village life. It is more forgiving than Mum and Dad. He rediscovers his appetite. He comes in from outside (he is always outside) to wolf down fuel for the afternoon. Roaming like a puppy, seeing what he can find. He is what he says on the tin: an eager kid who deserves a break, who’ll adore you if you adore him. It almost works, in the heady days before Lilian and Dudley’s caustic disappointment becomes more marked. He is alert, senses it long before I do.
Christopher tells me stories at night as we lie excited in our matching beds with matching candlewick bedspreads. I am jealous of his teddy bear with its stitched black nose and articulated limbs. I have a stuffed white Scotty dog, its legs too stiff and short to hug. We wear matching Ladybird Cosijamas, fleeced inside, no strings or buttons, almost American. We can’t believe our luck sometimes, like we have landed on the moon. Safety like we had dreamed of, a family like we’d hoped. The storytelling lasts about a year, not every night but nearly as often as I ask. They are mostly adventure yarns: pirates. I am big on pirates. The river calls me from outside our window, occasional small boats elevated into three-masted ships, skull and crossbones flying, bearded ear-ringed men, heavily armed, sabres between their teeth. I am an impressionable child, overexcited in the summer light. Christopher is kind. We are close.
Plot 29 Page 3