It is mushroom season and they have exploded like dandelions: scary scarlet fly agaric are dotted through the plot like Alice’s Wonderland. Others are coloured amethyst, violet, murky pinks. Some are like scattered leaves. We skip our special foraging spot and lazily fill a basket with ceps and other boletus in the plantation by the beach. They make a pasta dinner with parsley and garlic. The good neighbour has emptied his eel net and found a couple of dozen crabs. We quickly dispatch them, slow-cook them in wine and water; the broth will be a base for soup. One of our apple trees is still laden with fruit, wasps are feasting on the windfalls. The pears have mysteriously disappeared. There are banks of blackberries on the beach to make pies with apples for autumn.
There are chores to do but most will wait so we cycle through the woods along the shore. There is a warm burst of Indian summer as we laze in the September sun. Some of the trees need attention, a few are dropping branches, looking a little bedraggled, but Bo, the tree surgeon with the missing finger and Viking beard, costs more than we can easily afford. We will cut out a few of the trees ourselves and leave only the tallest and expert trimming to him. Meanwhile, we order a couple of cubic metres of ash logs for Christmas. The trees we chop this winter will warm us through the next.
The fields still whisper summer, Pollocked with ox-eye daisy, cornflower, poppy. We fill a few vases. We are back in a month, when we will gather berries and beach apples along the shore. We tour the garden first thing every morning, admiring the spider webs thrown like fishing nets through the grass, the boletus, primrose leaves already shaping for spring. There is a Nordic winter yet to come but, as in Devon when the last ice-cream van left the beach at the end of summer and we returned to walk the dog along the empty sand, the belonging here deepens as we wrap up warm and dry against the cold and wind and rain.
My first wild food was, of course, blackberries, eaten on the back lane to school. Later, gathered with milk cans and Mum. I don’t remember Christopher being there so he must have escaped. Mum disapproved of eating berries before they were thoroughly washed. Cleanliness being next to godliness was one of her core beliefs. I couldn’t wait, and couldn’t hide my purple shame. Hazelnuts were another hedgerow treat; trying to bite into them, wondering which would break first, shell or teeth. Sometimes the nuts were empty, mostly they were sweet. Christopher could never be bothered but I would fill my blazer pockets.
There were field mushrooms behind the house after Dudley put in dairy cows. I would go out before Saturday breakfast to hunt through the clumps of greenest grass. No one else would eat them. Dad disapproved of things found free. Mushrooms were oddly suspect. The countryside (like Christopher and me) wasn’t to be trusted unless tamed; fields were to be worked, planted with fruit trees, red pines, or rented out for animals. I was always comfortable with wildness, Christopher more comfortable with the farm.
SEPTEMBER 15. The roof-terrace tomatoes are still turning red. It is looking as if they’ll all ripen. I will pick them at the weekend. The magnolia leaves have coloured and curled, those dropped are gathering in swirls around the pots. We will have to sweep soon. The echinacea flowers have rusted and frayed like battered moths. The geraniums are still brave and strong, as too the tagetes, orange as Sunny D. The dahlias are losing the fight against mildew, each flower more precious now. The impulse-bought chrysanthemum is a glitterball, a disco riot of purple colour (how Dad would disapprove). The pink schizostylis has thrown its arms open, extravagant stems confidently reaching out, demanding admiration. I am hoping autumn will bring birds back to the abandoned feeder. I will switch from seed to nuts, see if I can entice them.
Care report, Plymouth:
Date and time of proposed receipt of child, Friday, 19th day of Sept 1958
SEPTEMBER 20, SATURDAY, 5.30AM. I have arranged to meet Howard to sow at 6am but there is a torrential downpour, lightning. The first text arrives at 5.40am. Howard: ‘eating bagel hoping rain stops’. Quite rainy, I reply. ‘Feeling like it might be too wet for seeds, can drop them off if you want,’ he responds. We message back and forth for another 15 minutes before we call it off. The ground is soaked. The rain doesn’t stop.
I head up around 3pm. I haven’t been at the plot for a fortnight since the early-autumn sowing and soup. Everything is falling – apples, unpicked tomatoes, the summer light. It seems we have moved a month in two weeks: misty rain like low cloud hugs the ground. At the plot, two of Mary’s weed sacks are waiting patiently to be emptied. She has been clearing the bed by the beans. At least I hope it is her. I will return tomorrow, weed a bit more, but today is just a quick tidy, a chance to say hello. The first sunflower is out, a quiet riot of spiralling seed. The courgettes are growing into marrows. It is like the Seventies. I will wait for Howard and inspiration. I take the easiest option and cut three smaller fruit for a Saturday ratatouille. Slugs are feasting on the squash and chard. I kill a few, throw some snails over the wall (is it only the shell that makes me more kindly disposed?). Some amaranth has been flattened by rain; I cut a long, purple-trunked bunch to take home. The late-summer seedbeds I sowed with Polly look promising, the radish leaves a confident run of green. I will hoe them through tomorrow and pick a small bunch of nasturtiums, jewelled by raindrops. They are a reminder as always, as constant as the quiet gardening brings.
SEPTEMBER 21. Howard picks me up at 7am. Only a day away from the autumn equinox and there is no hiding it now. The plot is slowing, energy drawing back into the earth, but until then we have the marrows. Howard has ideas of a Greek-style dish with lamb; I am thinking something Provençal. My wife will roll her eyes at another sack of unwashed food to find room for. The morning is clear and cool with a heavy dew. There is little sign of summer midge. The nasturtiums are like lily pads, only missing their frog prince. As the light hits the tree tops, I spy a flash of red, an unmistakable profile, my first spotted woodpecker here, bathing in the sun. We watch till it flies off for Hampstead Heath. A squirrel leaps from tree to tree like Tarzan, unleashing a cascade of conkers that takes out others further down. While Howard photographs, stopping only to show me the results he is happy with (it is good to see him with his camera again), I hand-hoe the new ‘leaf bed’ where the collapsed beans have been. It is precise work, intensely satisfying, evening out the odds against the weeds and other obstacles. The pigeons are already culling the sweet-tasting baby kale and winter salads. We pick late salad leaves and each take two marrows (I cook mine with tomato, onions, garlic, ginger and turmeric for a southern Indian curry). The woodpecker calls goodbye.
I return that afternoon to find Mary, freshly scarfed, looking slight but strong. She has been digging. Her operation has been deemed a success. She is busy hoeing and pulling weeds, talking of shopping for new clothes, maybe a dress. She feels she has more options now she has lost a little weight. There is vigour in her walk and talk, her weeding. We discuss her treatment, our winter plans and the merits of early onions. I am so happy to see her. She picks perpetual spinach and runner beans. I offer to dig her potato patch. It is still too much for her. I turn over the heavy soil in a largely unsuccessful search, digging deeper like an anxious pirate with an unreliable map. After an hour or so, Mary stands me down with six potatoes to show. We may have to revisit our trenching plan. Howard may have to help.
SEPTEMBER 28. No good deed goes unpunished. I am racked in pain and discomfort as Mary does the digging. The wheelbarrow is stacked high with weeds. I can’t stand straight. Three days this week I’ve been pinned to the floor like a butterfly on a board. I am eating anti-inflammatories. Was it just the potato digging that undid me or my care records, perhaps a backbreaking combination? Whatever the cause, I’ve collapsed and now it is Mary who is revived and working her land while I sit invalided and watch. The sun shines through the thinning leaves, the curious robin is excited by the promise of bounty from Mary’s broken soil. I cut herbs and admire the sprawling sunflowers decorated with sleepy bees. My plans are on hold. It seems I need to rest. Sit quietly. Soa
k it in.
SEPTEMBER 29. ‘If I met my mum, I’d have asked, excuse my language, “Why were you such a cunt?”’ My mild-mannered, saintly sister Lesley is talking about why she refused to see Sheila when I found her. Lesley is a nurse, a sister on a geriatric ward. She understands a helpless cause. For the past 20 years her life has been immersed in her two boys, Russell and Justin. She has always lavished them with love. Then last year, Justin was hit by a car and killed. Lesley and Justin dyed their hair the same (though Justin told me his was black and red while his mum’s was red and black). Lesley is still bitter about Sheila abandoning her. She is a mother. She can’t forgive.
I have horror-movie memories of being restrained, strapped down, when I was small. I was young. It was after Sheila. There was another woman I barely remember, though I know the room I was locked in was dark. Family memories are shared and re-shared, part of the architecture of who you are, but what if the memories you carry with you have worn thin and frayed? You have taken them out to read like an old newspaper cutting but how reliable could they be? Until one morning in Camden when my sister Lesley starting talking about crusts. When Ray and a woman he lived with had separated they’d found bits of old bread, she said. Lesley had hidden them under the carpet to eat when she was being kept in a cupboard.
What was it with Ray? Did the Pentecostal preacher have a serial addiction to dangerous women? From frying pan to fire. This all in the Jenkins name I have carried. The one I slewed off only to reclaim it – my pawn-shop identity. Now it’s been redeemed and worn with love by those who love me. Here at least, at last, I may have honoured Christopher.
SEPTEMBER 30. I am back in the therapist’s chair, the plastic pocket clock facing away, the box of tissues almost to hand. I have been troubled processing the care records. They are too indelible, too true, without the cosy comfort of selected memory honed from storytelling. The records box and the two little boys and their fate torment me – the language used, Dudley’s transition from Santa to salesman. A sympathetic face is opposite; we are both in low bentwood chairs. There are cushions on the floor, a small sandbox on the sideboard to help children express their fears through play. It has been seven years since I sat in a room like this. I thought I would never return, but fear keeps coming back like nausea. I am haunted by snatches of ill-formed memories and my dead brother.
The therapist is a specialist in childhood trauma, listening to voices choked by tears, and I try not to cry, honestly, but too often the words and thoughts and feeling overwhelm me. I hide my eyes, my mouth, and reach for the tissues. Yet again my gaudy tale unwraps in faded Technicolor: the tart with no heart, the bullies, the boys. She speaks only to seek clarity: who is dead, who is still alive. I sob, I speak. We agree to start working together next week. After an hour I leave for work. The sadness stays with me.
October
OCTOBER 1. Dudley’s birthday. He would have been 105 today. He is a colossus in my life, this old man. A therapist once asked why I didn’t talk about not having or knowing a father, why it was all about my mother. The question stuck with me. I am aware of my search for acceptance but I had no answer. There had been Ray, of course. He had confused me for a while when he took me in, though I think I had always known he couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, ‘him’. The only answer I have is Dudley, my father figure. My dad. With him, at least, there was something, someone, to aspire to. His love for his wife, his piece of land, carving something from nothing: a house, a garden, and me. He has always loomed larger in my life than Lilian; a little easier to attach to. He pulled me from the abyss, offered me shelter, a life, a home, a name (Lesley still calls me Peter; she is the last one left). I came from ‘poor material’, he writes in an unsentimental note to child services. This from the man who was a standard bearer against the mongrel masses, who loathed cities and the mixing of race. The reports say he was ‘disappointed’ in Christopher. More poor material perhaps, unable to transcend his blood and past. Is it possible to love someone and still despise their culling of Christopher’s hopes? Within a year of our arrival, the papers say, our adoption was on hold, the requests to Plymouth for more money more insistent. It is hard now to square the meanness, the extreme carefulness with cash. Why should I be troubled by the impatient attempts to get 18 shillings back other than it hurts that Dudley Drabble wanted someone else to pay for Peter Drabble’s presents? But compared to the ghost figure who fathered me, the Christian preacher who could never forgive, then I’ll take Dudley and wear his colours, if no longer his name. Sometimes there has to be acceptance. Sometimes the searching has to stop.
OCTOBER 4. Driven indoors by incessant rain and melancholy. Autumn has come, the temperature’s dropped, the onion sets have arrived, ordered almost without thinking. Every year I toy with the idea of not sowing sets, garlic, early broad beans; not nursing them through frosts, from attacks from predators and wet winter, but by the time the stream of seed catalogues arrives, promising spring and green shoots, my reservations vanish and I am ready to start again. My back is fragile, my heart heavy, but gardening for me is medicinal, an antidote to what troubles me. A friend texts to tell me of her ‘deep soulful sadness, like a sinkhole in my thoughts’. She ordered her care records a little before me, so we share this rare disorder. We are both lately overwhelmed by an overdose of information but it is too late now. Unhappiness is trapped inside me; sometimes sleeping, mostly stirring, too often now its wings beat restlessly. Knowledge as insistent as winter rain, distilled into misery. The last element to be released from Pandora’s box, they say, was hope. So I will mourn the children we once were and I will sow chicory for bitterness. I will plant spring beans and alliums. I’ll look after them.
OCTOBER 5. It’s a quiet, sunny Sunday, the autumn air is still, almost holding its breath. Mary is here and has been working through the week clearing the bank and the bottom beds. Sacks of nettles are piled up. We chat for a little while and I carry her weeds away. I’m standing straight but I’m not looking to dig so much as feel out late sowing spaces and my thoughts for the winter plot. Howard arrives. It’s maybe the first time we have all been together since spring. The late sunflowers are bunched, two to three metres tall. Branches of orange-tinted hydra heads gather in quiet conversation. Insects hover, fly low and slow as though running out of fuel. The amaranth is backlit velvet, fluffy as a dressing gown. I stuff my jacket pockets with beans from the last late planting, harvest a few courgettes complete with flower I will slice into soup later. I divide my haul with Howard. Sowing and planning can wait another day. For now, I am basking in low sun and a sense of belonging. Plot 29 has wrapped me in its loving magic.
1987. Sheila is a shock. Christopher and I have taken the train together, perhaps for the first time ever. We are in our early thirties but it feels as if we are wearing shorts, evacuee kids in wartime, our names on a plaque around our necks. I almost hold his hand. This is it. Back, finally, to where we started. Susan is waiting at the station, she has the look of Lesley – kind, compassionate, a little confused. The house is on a corner, Paulsgrove estate, Portsmouth.
Then there she is, our mother, standing at her door with a stick. Short, fleshy, her hair dyed raven black, morbidly obese. She sits in her front room like a fat spider dripping in gold and draws me into her web. She isn’t what I had hoped for, but I can feel an insistent undercurrent pulling at me, my mother’s corrupt connection. Christopher is beaming, bubbly. I feel the first clutch of anxiety, then a lifetime of longing breaks through. The addict has found the pharmacy, dishing out narcotics to the lost and under-loved. We eat sandwiches and sausage rolls. She tells her stories; they sound hollow and over rehearsed. My father had been Scots, a sailor, she says; they had been in love a long time. But I have spun my own fictions, I know when it isn’t truth. It can wait until we know each other better. She is my mum. I’m not going anywhere. She had to run away from Ray, she says, taking the baby, my sister Caron, named after Ray’s ship. He had threatened to hold her hand in a fire, s
he says. It’s what hell would feel like for the damned and unrepentant. There are to be no tears this time. It seems our first phone call has me all cried out. After a few hours it is over. My brother Michael, the one who looks like me, waits in a car down the road. He won’t come in, wary of what it all means. On the train back, Christopher is radiant, bouncing off the walls. I am overexcited, wrung out, aware something is wrong, but I will call her every Saturday night, faithfully forgive.
1992. I am invited to my grandparents’ diamond wedding, Billy and Doris celebrating 60 years. I have been adopted into my family. Freed from shame. There had been a reaching out, an invitation to become part of the family I might have had if life hadn’t intervened. Uncles were there in numbers, Aunty Joyce, cousins; the Beale clan, their friends. A large room full of strangers, occasional faces with familiar eyes. People come over to me. They cluster. I had lived for a while with a number of them, it seems, looking over me now with sticky curiosity, some sort of concern in their voice. They are seeking recognition. Their memories bubble. Mine stay locked away. We had you to stay one Christmas, one says, though they don’t say why, or where my mother was. Another had taken me in for a ‘few months’ but this isn’t the time or place to ask. It is a celebration of staying together. Suddenly, the room goes hush. Something is wrong. I look to its centre. My mother is coming in, slowly, on her sticks. Uninvited and unwelcome. My sister Susan and her husband Jimmy escorting her. No one moves or knows what to do as she edges towards a table. The celebration stops. Sickens. She has greedily sucked its life. The feral ghost in the room. The hideous, hidden secret. I dutifully join her at the table. What else to do? She is my mother.
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