AUGUST 29. The box has arrived from Plymouth. I ordered it a few weeks ago, a freedom-of-information request for my records – 10 years in the city’s care. I need to know more facts, to sift reality from uncertain memory. I am now mining deeper into Devon every day but I can still feel Christopher fading. I can’t remember where he was. I can’t much remember when we were happy: one or two snapshot images but the memory album is empty. There is no one left to remind me.
I have spent months preparing myself, or so I thought. Christopher’s death is edging out Dudley, my journal less now an homage to my father than searching for my brother. I need to dig beyond the marigolds and here it is. A plain cardboard box in a plain package, postmarked my past. Harmless-looking. Innocent, though it should come with hazard tape. Warning! Contains memory nitroglycerine. I gorge on my photocopied history at first, the tale of ‘two agile little fellows, both proud of being brothers’.
Single-spaced, there are hundreds of pages. The writing is 360 degrees: reports from welfare officers, care-home workers, teachers, doctors, and reports and letters I wish I hadn’t read from Dudley, my foster father.
I came to the childcare department’s attention this time aged four, it says. My family is ‘well known to them’. A hospital had refused me a tonsillectomy because I had scabies and herpes. They were concerned about infection. Now so am I. I had known I had rickets and history with tuberculosis, but here lie unsettling layers of grime, like rooting through a dead man’s belongings, the body lain alone for years.
Scabies, herpes, rickets, TB. Jackpot. A bonanza, winning a lottery for the unloved.
Christopher had been brought from Portsmouth, it says, to live with us at the home Ray had with ‘Mrs F.’, who looked after us after my mother left. Christopher must have been with my mother, although we’d been told she had run away, never to be heard from again. There is a letter from Sheila too. She has heard about the TB test, is concerned, asking about me. She has remarried, she says.
Christopher had been operated on for a hernia. He was nervous, withdrawn, the records say. He was very small for his age.
The reports are novelistic, unreal, almost unbearable. The first care-home worker reports we had ‘no deep attachment for anybody. There was never a murmur out of the boys for “homesickness” or anything like that’. I can’t help but wonder why. On another page another shell explodes: ‘There is some doubt as to whether or not Mr Jenkins is the father of Christopher, but there is a remarkable resemblance’. This would be cruel if true. Christopher never fully recovered from his conversation with Ray about our birth certificates.
I can’t stop reading my story. It is a fairy tale from another world in another time, happening to another child. Who are these boys? Is Allan/Alan/Peter really me? How did Christopher survive?
It is news. Like a drug, addictive. Compelling like coffee. Until suddenly anxious, I have overdosed. Exhausted, at last I go to bed. It is late. My wife looks worried.
I am at the allotment before 6am. I need peace, positivity; to think about something else. One of the wigwams has collapsed, flattening most of the corn. Even here, structures are unsafe. The heavy metal pole is pulled from the ground, bent out of shape like me. I try to right the wigwam. It is too heavy, a two-man job. I walk through the plot, heavy with dew, disturbing a couple of unconcerned frogs. A mouse runs across the path. It is the dog days of summer. My load lightens, my breath deepens. I breakfast on blackberries, more ready for the office.
AUGUST 31, SATURDAY 7AM. I am meeting Emli, a photographer who’s asked to take pictures of the plot. She is a social-media friend. We have never met but I know she is Danish, adopted from a Korean family. There is a connection there. Bill is at his allotment when I walk through the gate, waiting for Costa Coffee to open. I am intent on tidying when Emli arrives, I show her around the site, tell her its history. I show off the Trail of Tears, fully purple-podded now, the beans a shiny grey. I give her leaves and herbs to taste: chervil, apple mint, chicory, sorrel, Danish lettuce. We talk about being brought up as outsiders in the countryside and how it stays with you. She has recently broken up with her partner, she says. She has lost her home and her garden. I pick beans for her to take home, we talk about how colours affect texture and taste. The Tom Thumb nasturtium is perfect now, so I offer her flowers. While I walk her to the tube, I tell her that when she next feels the need to be in a garden she’ll be welcome to visit ours.
I return in the afternoon like a wounded animal to a cave. Unhappy thoughts and feelings are looping out of control. My chest a generating plant of pain, I am flooding with anxiety, fighting back infant tears I have no immunity to.
I have decided to grub up the wigwam. We need space for autumn leaves more than we need more beans. I pick off the pods and sort them: thin for eating, fat for seed-saving. I wheelbarrow the vines and weeds away, two trips piled high, leaving a trail as I walk. I pick up the pieces. I pack away the poles for next year and tidy around Mary’s bed. There are no signs she has been here, the runner beans hang long and lonely. I hoe the cleared bed thoroughly and rake it. It is ready for autumn sowing. It is September tomorrow.
September
SEPTEMBER 1. The first day of autumn, probably the last for the tomatoes. The end of the summer. For the past few months, 10 unruly plants in plastic tubs have camped out on the roof terrace like gypsies in a Cotswold village. They’re there on sufferance. Not for them the beautiful pots that indicate permanence. These are allotment interlopers, grown from Brown Envelope seed. The bulk of the plants are old-school knobbly Brandywine tomatoes, the sort you’d be happy to find in a grocer’s shop in Greece. They have thrived this summer, the hot, dry July helping produce two heavy crops (there is a big bag in the fridge as I write). Now they are over, a few small, greenish fruit ripening too slowly among the curling leaves. Any day now the last will be picked, placed in the sun on the sill. The plastic will be packed away until late spring when I will start making needy eyes at my wife, pleading to let me park my gaudy caravan on her green again. After all, a tomato picked in the sun, with salt in your pocket, proves you’re a proper gardener.
1987. A week or so after Ray confirmed he wasn’t our father, I ask Lesley if she could discover whether there is someone who might know something of our mother, even have her photograph. I don’t want anything else from him, no hard feelings as they say, but I feel he owes us that. Lesley brings me the address of Ray’s sister. It seems she and Sheila have kept in touch, meet up from time to time. Many years too late, perhaps, but I’m closer to finding my mother.
I send her a letter, saying sorry to intrude but I hope she remembers us. Is there anything she could tell us about our mother. I write that we don’t, I think, want to meet her, but we would welcome news of how she is, what she looks like. Would she have a picture, perhaps from the wedding?
I wait for her answer. Weeks pass, hope fades. She never replies.
Fast forward seven months: 7am one Saturday. I am asleep when the phone rings. It is a call from someone named Susan. I don’t know her, she says, but she is Sheila’s daughter. Her mother had sat her down, told her a story about her old life, about some children she had left behind. The call doesn’t compute, I don’t understand. It is early. I don’t know anyone called Sheila. Then Susan says she is my sister. That her mum had asked if I might call her. Sheila hopes we don’t hate her, she says.
I tell her I’ll phone around seven. I need Christopher. This is the call we have waited for. As long as I can remember, I’ve longed to be held by my mother. Maybe I had lost something when I found Ray, the hope it would work, would calm the child I sometimes hear inside.
Christopher comes over. We make the call in the evening, hear the voice of our mother for the first time in 30 years. I cry, of course. I am wracked, rung out with sobbing. Lost and now found, as the song says. Years of longing and rage released. Relief comes off me like steam on a horse. It would never be as real or overwhelming again.
JANUARY 14, 19
54. (Though I am not to know this for 35 years, long after finding my mother): ‘I’m not having another bastard in this house,’ my grandfather Billy calls down the stairs. It is the night before I was born. My Uncle Mike was to tell me this story too many times. Mike might be fuzzy on when we children lived together, if at all, but he is insistent on this. Billy was back from working in the pub and not happy at the thought of his daughter coming home with another child. Christopher was a year old. Born in a Salvation Army home near Exeter, he was supposed to have been put up for adoption but Sheila had changed her mind. She brought him home. Now there is another one and the thought is more than Billy and his wife Doris can bear.
It is the 1950s, in Plymouth, south Devon, where respectable families don’t have two illegitimate children and the women don’t hang around sailors in red-light bars or lurk around the city docks. Mike has other stories: of my mother climbing out of her bedroom window to go to Union Street; of Doris dragging her home. There are later stories too: of her jealous husband bursting in when searching for his missing wife; of my mother being in bed with two sailors and her friend while 12-year-old Mike tried to sleep. Where his memory starts to fail is on where the kids are. Were we at least together, I ask him and my Aunt Joyce, but the mist of shame has obliterated their memory, although Joyce, the eldest, says she was supposed to look after me until my mother changed her mind.
SEPTEMBER 3. My fourth plot visit in five days, an unusual frequency at this time of year, but not now to water, rather to keep me connected. I have been frit since reading the case-conference reports. I’ve rewritten history, maybe all my life, like a Stalin-era Soviet, turning my foster father into Santa Claus and now the care notes are calling this into question.
So I am here, Tuesday morning, another early visit before work, late to sow winter salads. I’m on the ghost bus again, with the half-alive in the half-light. With my bag of seed and hope.
I don’t have much time and there are many rows to sow. I hoe through the bean bed, re-rake it until I am happy with the tilth. I cut sticks, cut string, lay out short rills. I place a seed packet next to each row. I sow for autumn and winter – chervil, three types of chard; there is pak choi, chicory, Indian and Japanese mustard. Howard arrives. He is back now summer’s over. It is the first day of term. Rose has a new teacher, Nancy a new school. I do light weeding while he waters. We squeeze in shorter rows between the overblown summer salads. He picks leaves. I pick beans. By 9am, we are ready to leave. The seeds are in, it is over to the fading sun and our soil. I will be back again soon to see how they are doing. There is nurturing to be done.
16.3.59. Parklands care home report on Alan Jenkins, by Mrs D Russell, Plymouth:
‘A very charming little boy and very brave-faced if faced with disappointment or reprimanded in any way. He, in his turn, is very fond of his brother Christopher and behaves towards him as an older brother instead of the younger, advising him and watching out for any pitfalls that might come across Christopher’s way. He hates to see his brother hurt. His personal habits are excellent. He is overjoyed if he can give a present to those in charge of him. (Generally wild flowers.) Alan takes great care of his appearance and one comes across him washing his hands as often as possible. Progress at school is good and he is very fond of his Mistress. His appetite is good but he is certainly not greedy. Alan will be much missed when he does eventually leave Parklands.’
16.3.59. Parklands care home report on Alan Jenkins, by Miss G Fredrik, Plymouth:
‘Alan has a very pleasant disposition, and he rarely gives any trouble. He is very affectionate. Unfortunately he was caught telling a lie yesterday, but that is the first instance of anything like that coming from him, and I hope it will not become a habit with him. He is very generous, shares his things. Unfortunately he cries rather easily.’
I still delight in giving flowers and I still cry rather easily. I wish I was still able to advise and watch out for Christopher but it seems I’d forgotten how.
Case conference 17.3.59. Plymouth:
‘We have had these children in ever so many times. Mr Jenkins married Mrs Jenkins and she already had several illegitimate children, whom he adopted.
Christopher is the eldest
Alan – born in 1954
Lesley – born in 1955
Caron – born in 1956
We have had to take the children into the Nursery. Christopher hasn’t been in care before; he was living with some of his mother’s relatives.’
I am still unsure why reading the records is so upsetting except I never knew I had been in ever so many times, and that Christopher hadn’t been with me. I don’t believe my mother had relatives in Portsmouth. That wasn’t why she went.
Sometimes I think there is a reason memories burrow and hide, not wanting to be found. It’s why I stopped therapy. I started when I turned 50, a sustained attempt to understand my ‘inner life’, but I tired of breaking down walls to the scared boy only to brick him up again at the end of the hour. The transition was often too abrupt, like suffering diver’s bends: jumping half a century in 15 minutes on the journey from pyschoanalyst’s couch to newspaper office.
SEPTEMBER 7. A celebration of harvest time with an end-of-summer meal. Food from the plot – courgettes, beans, chard, potatoes, herbs, cooked on site. There is no sign of Mary, no evidence she has been here. The still-high sun scatters shadows through the tall plot, throwing the fennel into filigree as I strip the last large wigwam. I feel guilty, as it is still pumping out gold and blue beans at an alarming rate but (as always) we can’t keep up. It is time to let go. I lift the poles and strip the pods as a pair of wagtails dance on the wing, intricately, by. A late Red Admiral butterfly passes. Howard arrives as I am wheelbarrowing the waste away. He has brought a cooking pot. I have brought tomatoes. I cut a couple of our courgettes: Italian, ribbed and rugged, grown from Franchi seed. They sit well with the corn and sunflowers in a late-summer surge. Howard lights a charcoal fire, cuts chard and digs a few potatoes. I chop beans and herbs into my hand, hippie gypsy style, like when I lived in a caravan and cooked in a can on a fire outside Glastonbury, aged 17. While the pot bubbles prettily, we add our chilli and oregano. The beans soften, the potatoes too, the colours are Mediterranean. Silence is broken by conkers crashing on the tin roof and the green woodpecker’s call. Howard’s wife Polly, also a fine photographer, arrives with Nancy and Rose. It’s good to see them all together. I hoe the bean bed and Polly cuts string for fresh rills. The girls make elaborate floral displays and divide dried garlic and beans into piles. Polly and I take it in turns to sow beetroot, radishes, chioggia. I save nasturtium seed. We eat summery vegetable soup from paper cups while the woodpecker rat-a-tats from a nearby tree. We grill our last corn over the coals. Here among flowers and friends I am happier. After six hours at the plot, I leave replete, a little healed. Nancy gives me a hug.
SEPTEMBER 8. Another bad dream, more torture, more cutting. I have had the same nightmares as long as I can remember. There are always knives, there are always men hunting me. I don’t often die. This was a repeat of a previous dream: the person to be cut, to be killed, wasn’t me but a girlfriend. I knew what would happen. She would be killed by someone I knew with a sharpened spoon. The dream ends when she does. So I am here, wide awake in the dark. Heart pounding, adrenalin sick. My first recurring nightmare was when I was aged, I think, about eight: the devil arguing with my parents for my soul. Every night for about a week I was scared to sleep. I couldn’t tell anyone. How do you say Satan is a three-feet-tall, three-legged Siamese cat, smart like Shere Khan from The Jungle Book, looks like an Egyptian god, has a BBC accent? Night after night, the conversation went back and forth with the cat about to get me, then I would wake. In the end, Mum and Dad won through. The dream didn’t return. The hunting nightmare has been ongoing throughout my adult life, on average about once a month. They always catch and often cut me. Always blades. Maybe it’s about the closeness of the danger. The dreams are mostly unrelate
d to the day, seemingly not triggered by stress (yesterday was a good day), but they always come back.
1960. Plymouth and Portsmouth, twin cities of despair, sinkholes of transit, servicing sailors. Beacons of unloveliness, hopelessness and open wounds. When I wondered what happened to my mother, where she was, where she had been, when I trawled Plymouth’s streets in hope of finding her trace, Portsmouth should have been obvious, the same vibe, the same vice. In my care records, Christopher’s happiness is measured by how much he talks about what happened in Portsmouth, until the darkness lifted. It took a year or more for his fear to retreat, though like a virus it lay dormant. I don’t know why I don’t remember he came from there. I was four in the children’s home but I could see he was hurt, had been snared, was a little strange. He had been marked like a stolen banknote, visible only to people expert at scanning for pain. Exiled from Eden, his childhood hope eaten away. A cancer-causing trauma, etched too deep for me to reach.
SEPTEMBER 10. Denmark. Back at the summerhouse as the migrating birds and other tourists gather to leave. Hedges are alive with chattering starlings, clustering in liquid clouds swooning over the bay; geese criss-cross the sky in squadrons, their anxious calls signalling time to go; the nearby farmer’s field has become a temporary home to a large group of cranes, standing tall and motionless like Antony Gormley statues, waiting for stragglers. Their wings stretch out like old people putting on a coat. We bicycle close and watch with binoculars, the kids with us entranced.
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