Plot 29

by Allan Jenkins

  NOVEMBER 2, SUNDAY. A night and morning of heavy rain has me hunting out the waterproofs. I am working on two fronts: labourer for the roof terrace, humping heavy stuff up the stairs, and doing much the same at the allotment. It is clearing time. I will miss the amaranths’ astonishing colour, their exotic heads like twisted trunks. Sown as part of a salad selection, they are allowed to run riot in late summer.

  The birdfeeder swings. The young magpie shrieks amused defiance as it steals the blue tits’ seed. I pull overgrown chicory sprawling greedily around. Howard hoes. Colourful wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow heads to the compost, Mary’s weed sacks to the wheelie bin. It is mild, the air comforting, forgiving. The site is quiet. We don’t talk much. After a couple of hours, the allotment looks as if it’s had a haircut, gone its rebellious expression. I am home in time to lug wet sacks and window boxes down the stairs. The roof terrace, too, is clear; the windblown leaves, the annuals and tomatoes are gone. The winter violas and pink daisies wink.

  NOVEMBER 4. My fifth therapy session. I need to make a decision. One week left unless I sign for more. The care record anxiety has calmed but left unhappiness antibodies, a smouldering need to know more. Processing the Plymouth information will take tears, and years, to digest. I don’t know if I believe it does any good but it seems I am committed.

  It was always kindness, not cruelty, that undid me. Was this the secret the sexual predators knew? My search, I think, is for acceptance. Mine, not my mother’s; there was nothing there with her, a dark emptiness, a void. I had thought I had found peace. I have taken the cure, surrounded my life with love, wrapped myself in it, luxuriated, shared it as best I could. I found another love, too, hidden at the plot, among the leaves and flowers. I unearth it when I weed, when I sow and when I grow. Nurture and nature live there but still lingering is a need to talk it out, in a quiet room, with a clock and a box of tissues.

  12.11.58. Telephone interview with Mrs F. Rang re Alan Jenkins, he is very ill, went into hospital to have his tonsils out yesterday and hospital asked her to remove him, as he is covered with scabies [another word redacted here] could we help. Told her we could not admit a child in care with scabies, suggested she went straight away to Dr Nils who would most likely admit Alan to isolation hospital.

  14.11.58. Application for reception of children into care of the children committee. Mrs F cannot manage the children.

  2001. Uncle Mike has been in touch: my grandfather, Billy, has died. Doris would like me to come to the funeral. The tough old boy has passed away. I am happy for the invitation. The bastard boy redeemed. Billy had outlived Sheila, my mother, his daughter. She has been dead now for six years so I will be representing her and my brothers and sisters.

  I am in Billy’s backyard, waiting for the funeral car: Uncle Terry is squaring off against Aunty Joyce’s husband. There has been a slight, it seems. Two men nearing their seventies with raised fists and voices. Break it up, I tell them. It’s Billy’s funeral. I go back in to talk to Doris. She is shrunken with age and shock. She says she is glad I came.

  We arrive at the service to a Burma Star guard: proud old men who share the same battle scars and survived the camps. There is a soldier recital, the flag lowers, an honouring of one of their own. I cry, of course. The vicar gets up to welcome us: we are here to remember Billy, he says, proud father of five children: Joyce, Terry, Tony, Colin, Michael … except Billy fathered six kids: four sons, two daughters. One is missing. Sheila has been written out. If she doesn’t exist, then why am I here? It is the funeral of Billy Beale, scion of the family, whose eyes and mouth I share; an end-of-pier boxer with a thousand bouts and one last fight left. At the death. To the death. The shame of Sheila.

  As I stand in the car park outside, my uncles come to console me. We told her, they said, after she put the notice in the paper that didn’t mention your mother. Don’t do that at the funeral, we said, you know you have invited Allan.

  Family I don’t know mill around, look sideways at me. Sheila’s boy, their curious eyes say, scanning me like a suspect parcel. I feel an ancient sadness, for my mother, for proud old Billy and Doris, unprepared or unable to forgive. They look like me, the Beales: Welsh blooded, Devon born, the same blue eyes I have passed down, but I don’t belong here. The hurt was indelible, the history we share scorched.

  Then Doris smiles. Coming in the family car, she says? We hug. There is a nice spread, she says. After all, this is Doris’s day. She is burying her husband. Like Bill Sikes’ dog, I follow.

  NOVEMBER 9. Almost balmy, late sun shining through the skeletal trees, stubborn leaves only left. The willow at the high end is gilded by low light. I am talking to Mary. She is here more than me now. We are standing by Don’s memorial spot with the ferns in the hollow by the fruit cage. We are talking winter plans. Mary has been busy: she has already planted onion sets and has a bag of green manure. She wants the elder cut back; it is taking too much of her sky. We will wait for the leaves to drop so we can see what I am up against. We talk a little about planting trees, knowing you might not be there to see them mature. I talk about the birch at the summerhouse, she tells me about returning with Don to his family farm, the joy of rounding a ridge to see a group of tall trees his dad had planted there. I am off to Australia in a couple of days and Mary asks whether I will be buying seed. She tells me to look out for a company called Yates. I tell her I can’t seem to stop buying seed even though we have enough for several sites; it is about collecting hope – at £2 a packet – I say. She smiles and says that since she has been ill she buys seed because it has a future.

  19.11.62. The foster parents have had a lot of expense during the last few years and do not feel they can afford to adopt the brothers at this stage as was suggested when this case was last reviewed.

  NOVEMBER 23. Melbourne. I am meeting with Colin Beale, my mother’s brother, who has lived here more than 40 years since he left the RAF. We are talking about the care records and, I keep hoping, his memories of my mother. He seems disturbed about the case notes and asks whether I have told other family members. Colin is the family alpha male with his grammar school grades (better than Michael and Joyce’s, he says) and a car dealership. He once promised to share ‘secrets’ about Sheila but he has never been able to deliver. When arranging this meeting for Sunday, my last day in Melbourne, I apologised for intruding on a family day and he asked if I had forgotten I was family. We have the same blue eyes, he says, the Beale mouth, but somewhere in this concept of family, of how to behave, I have hit a barrier. Years after Billy and Sheila’s death, I fear the Beales are closing ranks.

  He tells me Ray had been around ‘from the beginning’, that he’d always thought Ray was Christopher’s father. He had babysat Lesley, he says, but has no idea where we boys were. The last time he had seen Sheila was when she visited him in hospital just before he went to Australia. I ask if he has any happy memories of my mother. I say all I have is horror. He says he has nothing more for me but he has the name of a song I should listen to. The lyrics of ‘Nobody’s Child’, he says, might help. He waves away more questions. I should listen to Lonnie Donegan.

  The words are saccharine sentimental, but easier perhaps for him to empathise with than his family’s forgotten boys.

  I was slowly passing an orphan’s home one day

  And stopped there for a moment just to watch the children play

  Alone a boy was standing and when I asked him why

  He turned with eyes that could not see and he began to cry

  I’m nobody’s child, I’m nobody’s child

  I’m like a flower just growing wild

  No mommy’s kisses and no daddy’s smile

  Nobody wants me I’m nobody’s child

  People come for children and take them for their own

  But they all seem to pass me by and I am left alone

  Lonnie Donegan, ‘Nobody’s Child’

  NOVEMBER 25. Back in the Kentish Town room of tears. There is a child’s pin
k, heart-patterned blanket next to the sand box. It is the last of the six sessions but I don’t appear to be done with it. A talking cure, a coping thing, who knows? I am still unsure why it matters so much now. Is it fear any answers will die with Ray or my uncles’ generation? Why can’t I bring myself to say it is my story, not a history of what happened to ‘the boys’? Why can Colin remember the words to a 1950s song but not where we were while he babysat my baby sister?

  Lesley is the last of the people who call me Peter. Christopher was the constant. When Lilian and I would speak every week, I put on that old persona, slightly worn but serviceable. We settled comfortably into weekly calls after not talking for so long (it would not be profitable to meet, her letter had said many years before, when I heard Dudley had lung cancer). My being a successful journalist had helped when we met again; their efforts finally seen to be paying off. Dad was editing the parish paper, they had moved deep into South Milton. Mum didn’t drive and he wanted her nearer her friends in the WI, to be enveloped in the village. We were careful about what we said, steered clear of politics, our sense of family still too weak to mention their coffee-table copies of This England magazine, their patriotism proudly on display. They moved into – and quickly out of – an old people’s home. Dad didn’t want to die there. They rented a bungalow overlooking Salcombe, where they would sit in the picture window watching life pass on the river. At 89, he bought the better place next door (it’s for your mother, he said, when I asked why). He died just short of 90 and I was convinced she couldn’t survive. She was frail at his funeral, unable to stand. Slumped in the car on the long drive, stuck behind a tractor, to the cemetery.

  She eked out another five good years. Sitting in his chair, shakily pouring tea. We were close in the last days. On Sundays I would call her (my other mother’s call was Saturday night, after she had watched Cilla Black’s Surprise Surprise). It is Peter, I would say when she picked up the phone. Cards were signed Allan Peter, echoing the name change Dad engineered as soon as Christopher and I moved in (I never discovered the problem with Allan; maybe it was an ownership thing, like renaming a rescue dog). I missed a Sunday call once. She was very upset, this strangely strong yet fragile woman who had cast me out for decades, a near-biblical oblivion for a confused 15-year-old. I quickly apologised. I cherished the careful rebuilding of this fragile family bridge. She was my mum, Sheila my mother. I loved her. Perhaps we both needed the forgiveness that came with the calls.

  With Lesley it is different. I have only ever been Peter to her, the blue-eyed brother she never knew, invading her cosy home, fighting for her record player. An odd country kid with a soft Devon sound butting up against her Essex edge. Hair longer than hers, in search of edgy girls and plastic shoes. She made room in her life and home for me. It must have caused confusion. I was there for about a year, 1969, a source of fascination to some of her friends, a hippie kid with his skinhead sister. We drift in and out of each other’s lives, a card, a visit, a phone call. She wasn’t interested in Sheila and I almost envied her that. Ray had never talked about her mum. She was insistent on not meeting Sheila or her siblings. When our mother died, Susan gathered together a free-ranging photo album of Sheila, Susan, Mandy, Caron, looking alike: same shape, similar hair, same smiles. Peas from the pod. I took them to Lesley, laid them out on the floor. A Kodacolor bag of absence, framed in smiling family snaps of the childhood she was denied. Lesley started crying, a keening sound from deep. She curled on the floor with the photos. I have carried the guilt of it since. Years later she hosted a family gathering when even Michael came: six siblings with the same scar tissue (it was during the time Christopher had disappeared). Still there at Doris’s funeral, when Joyce told us about the ‘backstreet abortion’, my mother’s other pregnancy that came between Lesley and I, explaining why we were born 18 months apart.

  The last time I saw Ray was at my sister’s house 30 years ago. Lesley was in a relationship with a Palestinian surgeon. He was cooking. We were joined for dinner by Ray and his scarlet-booted woman friend. It was going mostly well – except when Ray said Labour was the party of the Antichrist, the pastor had told them. At the end of the meal, while Lesley was washing up, the friend leaned over to say something about ‘people coming here taking our jobs’. I pretended not to hear. Minutes later she repeated herself. I sighed. I told her she was in my sister’s house. She was eating her food. It seemed rude. I had tried to ignore her comments, I said, but I wasn’t sure he was keeping other surgeons out of work. The conversation ended. The last link of my relationship with Ray was broken. There was nothing more there. Today, though, after reading the records, I fight an urge to turn up on his doorstep, beg him to tell the truth: about what happened to Christopher and me. Was he Chris’s father, what was Sheila’s appeal, how could he keep a housekeeper who couldn’t keep house, how did I come into contact with TB, scabies and herpes?

  NOVEMBER 30. A sunny Sunday afternoon, strangely mild at 12°C. The sky is clear, the brightest blue, squirrels are performing circus tricks, leaping from skinny branch to branch. The mustards are flowering yellow, wild Tuscan calendula, too. The Castelfranco chicory is firm and flecked with red. The jagged hedge of puntarelle is still standing tall. I wish I knew what to do with it – make risotto maybe. I am jet-lagged from Australia, gathering winter salad in a daze. The late radishes are crisp and hot so I share them with Mary, Annie and Ruth. As usual, they are the only people here. Howard arrives. He hoes. We have both walked over the heath and enthuse about the leaves on the beech. There is yet to be a frost. Mary’s garlic and broad beans are bright yellow-green with life. I wonder if it is too late for ours. Annie is frying sausages on her new plot and invites us for hot dogs. There is red wine in tin cups and a chocolate bar for pudding. The women talk about growing food, late autumn, sickness. Mary says the allotment is healing her, I say I feel it too. We share the last sausages. We empty the wine, I bask in the last of the sun and their company.

  December

  We tell ourselves stories in order to live …

  Joan Didion, The White Album

  DECEMBER 2. The first session of a new series with the shrink. People talk of their ‘inner child’ as though he or she is a gurgling toddler, natural, like entering Narnia. But what if he or she is a frightened thing, anxious to escape? Sometimes his anger engulfs me: I rage with his voice like in The Exorcist. I am learning (I hope) to recognise the signals, to step away before I have laid waste to a friendship, said the unsayable. Gardening swaddles my anxious boy in a basket, sits him in the sun, surrounds him with blackbird song, a soothing nature Norland nanny. There are no fingerprints in the therapy sandbox today. She gently asks, would I like to use it? Adults also act out what happened to them, with dolls, she says. I decline. Baby Allan stays inside, sleeping, for now.

  My memory is like flypaper. It catches passing buzzing thoughts and sticks to them as they die. Early memories are mostly built for us by mums and dads, if we have them, maybe siblings, sometimes friends. ‘Do you remember when?’ is how our story is shared, the way we learn to become ourselves through knowing where we belong. There may be other memories we don’t want to believe. She was my mum, he was my dad, it couldn’t have happened. Could it? You mustn’t remember is the mantra, the secret part of our private life. Some people excel in spreading amnesia. They spray it around like a fairy-tale spell. They deal in darkness, write invisible chapters, read our unwritten book. Here we have no hiding place. They know who we are before we do.

  1963. Tuppence is my Devon cat, big and bold, black and white, from the farm tom crossed with Tonka, our Siamese. My first ever living thing, he is mine alone to love. He comes and goes when he pleases. He leaves mice, rats and birds as a calling card. Once my mum found a weasel lying next to him; Tuppence’s flank was torn open. I was anxious until he recovered in a box in the shed with his stitches. Tonka is posh, beautiful, stand-offish at times, too keen to avoid my over-eager strokes. She likes to lie in the sun with her son, curled
up together like yin and yang. I relate to Tuppence’s heritage, take pride in his size, his mixed blood – a semi-wild dad and more refined mum. I see him on the other side of the river. I wait for his insistent call. One day he catches cat flu. Dudley keeps him locked in the shed. We aren’t allowed to see him. So of course I do. I tell him how I love him. I stroke his matted coat. I don’t close the latch properly, at least that is what Dad says. I never see him again but for years I imagine a ghostly flash of black and white in the riverbank grass.

  5.12.58. Interviewed Mr Jenkins. Enquire about Alan. Mr Jenkins was taking him to the doctors and he was going to have his tonsils removed as soon as his general health improved.

  1963. Boy Blue is our donkey. I like to feed him wild flowers, clumps of grass and carrots. He lives in the field behind the house, pretty much undisturbed. We have a saddle but he isn’t much for riding, resistant to anything but eating his way along the lane. Bigbury beach is three miles down the river but I never get him there. My plan is to rent him for rides but Boy Blue has a mind of his own. He isn’t a horse. He walks slower than me, no matter how much I urge him on. I am never quite comfortable with riding him. I prefer that we walk together, bridle loose in my hand. I get him as far as the golf course a couple of times, at the top of the bay, but the last stretch always seems too steep. I beg a bucket or large bowl of water, he drinks and we turn happily home. I’m not sure I could ever really hire him out for donkey rides. We have a Dartmoor pony in foal for a while. I watch the baby being born, shuddering miraculously, shakily standing on its feet, but Dad soon sells them on. As we grow older, Boy Blue is left alone except when Christopher and friends throw sticks and stones. One day, Boy Blue butts him against the barn wall and bites him on the chest. Christopher screams. I laugh. Dad comes running. He punches Boy Blue in the face. The old donkey lets go. Dad soon sells him to a family whose daughter is going away to college, leaving her pony lonely. I like to think he leads a happier life.