MAY 25. Denmark. The swans have gone, the swallows have arrived, lining the electrified wire to the Icelandic horses’ fields. The young males are impatient as the females call. Like a boy band, their long hair hangs over their eyes. The first foal stands unsteady on skinny legs, its knees too big, its coat curly like astrakhan. There are marsh orchids in the field. I climb over the wire and admire the marking. Skylarks flutter impossibly high. Their call echoes inside me. Wild lilac in every shade lines the hedgerows. We ride through its fragrance on our bikes and pick an armful for the house. The larches seem to have grown half a metre in a month. The wild carrot and campion sway in the slight sea breeze. The birch stands spectral in the evening light. The bird cherries are forming, food soon for migrating flocks. The blackbirds call from their nest in the hollowing stump. The hare, huge now, runs through, up on his strong back legs, a flash of orange back. I thought he was a fox at first but nothing else moves likes that.
We have walked by the waves at sunset, wrapped against the northwest wind. The sea turns tarnished silver as the light drops. Here I am inoculated against my missing father. Blossom covers our apple trees. The three pear trees all cross-pollinated. We sow tulip seed because we can afford to wait three years. It is a place for families. We mow the grass. We watch the wild things. We trim the beech, weave branches back. My back and shoulders are moaning, I have been stabbed in the eye by a stick but the firs are standing free. We sow foxglove seed in the cleared space. They will take two years. The last tulip petals hang off their stems like flags at a bedraggled bandstand.
MAY 25, 7PM. London. Time for a quick cup of tea after the flight, but the homeless beans are calling. I lift the nursery row, plug beans around the base of the hazel poles and push in an occasional seed as backup in case of marauding slugs. The broad beans are flowering crimson, black and white. I snack on a few top leaves as a treat. Howard’s away so I sneak in a few sunflowers in the corner. The plot seems to like the attention. The salad rows are bright green and red in the gloom. There are a couple of us working quietly in the late-light summer evening, only looking up to nod or say hello. My mourning is over (at least for now). I am looking forward to the longer days.
At home I find notes I’d made after talking to Colin in Melbourne. There’s another song he thought I should hear. This was for the Sheila he knew. It sums her up, he says. It is a disco song from the Eighties, featured in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Please don’t talk about love tonight
Please don’t talk about sweet love
Please don’t talk about being true
And all the trouble we’ve been through
Please don’t talk about all the plans
We had for fixing this broken romance
I wanna go where the people dance
I want some action, I wanna live
Action, I got so much to give
I want to give it, I want to get some too …
Alicia Bridges, ‘I Love the Nightlife’
It was through music I first learned there were more like me, just not in Aveton Gifford. The shaggy-haired boys on Top of the Pops (I identified more with the Rolling Stones than The Beatles; I yearned for a Marianne Faithfull). Later, when I moved around, music was a shorthand to my tribe. The introspection of Leonard Cohen coloured my studies at Battisborough School. The death of Jimi and Janis added doom to Basildon days. Magazines, too, played a part. Oz and International Times exposed a world of sex and drugs. The Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 (Hendrix, The Doors, Sly and the Family Stone) ended my childhood. I slept on the beach outside Ryde for three weeks, only going back to Basildon to say goodbye. I didn’t yet know where I belonged but I knew it wasn’t among skinheads or to be found in Ray’s preaching. For a year or few, I drifted through empty buildings and ley lines, swooning to Van Morrison with floaty girls in green silk. By the time I was 18 I was squatting in London, running an occasional hippie cafe offering two courses and tea for 10 pence. I was happy guerrilla gardening around Notting Hill Gate.
MAY 31. John is fixing the new super-strimmer. He strips and reassembles it from scratch. I cart Mary’s sacks to the compost. She is here a lot now. I empty bags of manure into her pumpkin pit and rake it around. The muck is almost liquid. We are at the time when the plot seems to shrink, and I don’t yet have enough of anything except for rocket. I borrow the strimmer to clear the connecting walkway and break it almost immediately. I have never quite mastered the mechanical thing. It is approaching 8pm when I leave. I have been here the whole weekend. The path and plot are cleared and so is my head. I am grateful for the chance of finding my father and family but I have been good (or good enough) without it all my life. Recovery comes quick, I tell myself.
June
JUNE 1. There is a text from Tony O’Toole. He writes that he is Frank’s eldest son and ‘received information today that there was a possibility we both had the same father’. He hopes I don’t mind him contacting me.
I wish it were true, I reply, though the DNA says no. I call him later. We speak for an hour. He was around 17 when his dad died. I can hear the loss in his voice. He talks lovingly of Frank. Towards the end, his kids wheeled him to the pub in the evening and picked him up at closing time. Frank never knew he had cancer, Tony says. His mother wouldn’t tell him.
Tony has re-read my Barnardo’s notes five times. He can’t stop going over them. He has Googled me. I have the O’Toole eyes. He thinks Christy’s leukaemia treatment could have affected the result. It might have been the blood transfusions. He has always thought he had a big brother out there, he says. Family legend has it that Frank carried a photo of a boy in his wallet and that Tony’s mother had found it. His dad was a cook and I write about food, he says. He wants it to be true. I feel helpless. I might hang on to shredded hope but DNA doesn’t lie. But it is in the eyes, he says. His wife agrees. I can feel his need overriding mine.
JUNE 7. Howard is here for the working party. He is back from a week in Wales. He is with Nancy and Otto, their new puppy. We move the last comfrey barrel and measure the support struts for Mary’s boards. We take over the barbecue. John sings Irish songs under the apple tree. His sweet tenor calls The County Down. Mary looks content and caught in conversation. Most everyone joins in.
Later that day, I phone Christy. I am concerned about Tony. I am messing with his memories and am unsure what to do. Christy has heard the story about Frank and the photo. It couldn’t be you, the boy was blond, he says. We resolve I’ll do a test with Tony to put his mind at rest. We will use a kit Christy had bought. He will send me one of the swabs. I text Tony to tell him of the plan. I don’t want the uncertainty but it seems the thing to do. Then this is the end.
JUNE 12. There is an allotment letter from David’s wife. She says his dementia has advanced from early stage. He keeps wandering off to the plot and leaving the tap running. She has told him it’s time to give it up and has handed in his key. She asks us not to let him in, as locking him out is the only way. The good news, she says, is he forgets quickly and comes home jolly. It is not in his nature to be angry. I will miss him and his old stories of Africa. I am not sure I will lock him out. His plot already returns to weed. Someone new will make it grow. I hope they keep his asparagus bed.
JUNE 13. I can’t stop thinking of Frank and the photo of the blond-haired boy he carried around. Before the days of DNA, he would have thought Sheila’s child was his. It is a tradition for soldiers and sailors to run away but he could have kept in contact, at least at first. Sheila may have sent him a photo of his son. He may have kept it. There is a curious comfort in the thought he would take it out to look at it in Yates Wine Lodge or as he travelled. The memory of his unknown child somewhere, a moment held half alive.
JUNE 14. There is a new bench on the roof terrace; a new rose and tomatoes too. Here I walk around in bare feet, dead-heading and tidying. There is often a baby robin at the feeder now. I try not to disturb it as I move. There are heavy-hea
ded poppies, scarlet as a soldier’s uniform. The Alexandra rose we bought when Lesley’s son Justin died is pale pink like wild. For the third year there are tomatoes. From Jane Scotter seedlings. She has stopped her stall in London. I miss her inspiration but she has been unwell. The tomatoes have been staked and the leaves picked out. I am obsessed with their smell when I brush against them: ripe with memories. That is all they are now: Lilian, Dudley, dear Christopher. I tend their remembrance still. Mostly, though, I drink in this space like spring water. Something alive without legs to look after. A quiet place above a London street, with the power to lull me to sleep.
JUNE 19. Another envelope with my DNA in the post. Another man with a hole where his father was. I hope he’ll be OK, Tony O’Toole, when science shuts down his dream. Thirty years after his death, Frank and family can’t escape. Sheila’s rage echoes through decades. Her hand snakes out to trip us up. We fall like dominoes.
Last on the list is Ray, sheltering in Basildon, incanting denial. He believes he is protected by Jesus, forgiven, safe, that he somehow escaped. For a year now I have thought I would have to confront him about Christopher. But I don’t believe in avenging angels. He is no Eichmann, after all. It would have been good to know. It would be still. But will I go and ask him, turn up at his door? I am less sure.
It has been a year since I started this journal, my journey through my life and the life of the plot, my past unfurling like leaves. It was to be different: a story of a small boy and the man he became, wrapped in flowers and food. Other voices have drowned it out: the call of an insistent brother; sisters still scarred from abuse; the voodoo cackle of my mother. Characters have changed, like wrongly labelled seed producing unexpected fruit. A kindly father figure reveals a crueller side. An ill-suited foster mother becomes gentler with the patina of time.
When the journal started I was recovering from an absence from the garden. The plot felt abandoned (of course), sullen and needing coaxing before it opened up again. Boxes of documents almost blew the writing off course. Meticulous records from a life in care: my bloodline pored over by committee. The Barnardo’s notes were still loaded with secrets, armed with my mother’s childlike signature. Still unsettling after 60 years, latent like anthrax spores.
Over the year the plot has given up broad beans, yellow beans, blue beans, green beans, purple-podded black beans; pink and white waxy potatoes, peas, radishes, endless salad combinations, beetroots in many shapes and colours; corn, kale, chard, herbs and flowers. Nasturtiums still give succour, coloured saffron like Indian robes. The flow of food like memories sometimes threatens to overwhelm, though easier to conquer than clotted fear. There are woodpeckers, blackbirds, robins, wrens, the kestrel calling, hovering a few feet overhead. There are hordes of frogs and magical newts. There are John Teevan, Annie, Bill and Ruth. There is American Jeffrey, with his English garden. Closest, of course, dear Mary and Howard. There is a plot of land the size of a living room where I have found companionship on my own.
I am happy surrounded by the trees I have planted by the sea in Denmark; with my tomatoes, rooftop roses and other flowers. But there is an older welcome on Plot 29, like a feral cat I come to feed. Bring me your fears, your anger, your endless packets of seeds and I will give you food and flowers and peace. My dull lead shines golden. Simply put, there is a home in homegrown.
JUNE 20. It is midsummer now, time again for bright, early-morning visits to the plot. We have blackfly on the broad beans and I haven’t the heart to spray the organic exterminator sold in the garden centre. It’s not that I have qualms about killing blackfly. I hate the way they suck the life out of the plants they infest. But if soap was enough for Lilian, it may still work for me.
I raid the kitchen for eco-friendly washing-up liquid and catch the first bus. The flowers and baby pods are crawling black. I spray soft, soapy death down on them. It is the aphids or the beans. I pick a pod for encouragement. I add more soap to the spray. It’s someone’s time to die.
After I finish, I water. The hose ban is still in place but husbanding crops sits well with me. I return later to gather onions and shallots. It is time for chard to settle in before the sun starts to dip. I sow four short rows of different colours: white-stemmed, rainbow Bright Lights, pink and gold. I finish with dill, coriander and parsley running the length of the path. I have been here for four hours. I thought it was two. One last trip on solstice Sunday, up with the sun. I’d spotted a few tagetes that I thought had failed and it’s an auspicious time to sow more. I add a row beside them, and another at the end. They should be good with autumn beans, courgettes and corn.
I want to reclaim my childhood from the records. I want to override facts. I want Dudley to be the kindly dad I constructed, not the mean-spirited man I unearthed. I want it to be summer in the early Sixties. I want to be coming in from playing on the river for buttered new potatoes and runner beans. I want Lilian to be smiling. I want there to be Angel Delight. I want Christopher to be excited about a new calf being born. I want him to score a six. We weren’t the pristine girls Lilian had wanted, the pure-born sons Dudley craved. They weren’t the hugging parents we’d hoped but it wasn’t in the job description, this twenty-first-century stuff about love. We were happy before Mum and Dad’s disappointments set. I want to remember the bright nights in bed in the crowded caravan that summer when the sun always shone. I want to erase Dudley’s begging letters to Plymouth, his anger and honesty. I want to rediscover the joy of the flower seed he gave me. I want to see nasturtium grow. I wish I didn’t know what he felt in bitter detail. I want my happier memories to block out the wretched whispering. I want my mum and dad back. I want them to want me.
JUNE 27, SATURDAY AFTERNOON. Back from a few days away. The blackfly are being herded by ants like the Masai moving cattle. Where are the ladybirds when I need them? Their numbers are down.
I am here to stir biodynamic cow manure, the building block of our soil. I sit on the steps by the tool shed, roll up my sleeves and swish mucky water to and fro. The sun drops and the energy shifts. Someone has borrowed the brush I spray with, so I cut a swathe of sage.
I am back in the early morning, meaning to sow late flowers, but I have left my seed bag in the rush for the first bus. I move sunflower seedlings, feeling for their spot. The dill is a still-shy, hazy run of green. The chard, too: scarlet-tinted, tiny. I weed. I water. I gather an armful of white-stemmed Fordhook Giant chard, its savoyed leaf a deep-forest green. I have brought three kinds of red tagetes seed from Sweden. Howard takes photos. The French beans look happier, holding on tighter to the poles to pull themselves up, whether revived by cow muck or the morning rain.
There is an anxious note from Tony Walker. It’s about my DNA. It takes me a moment to realise who he is. Tony O’Toole, my just-possible brother and new Facebook friend, also uses his mother’s name. Another man with another alias. I wonder which one he feels like. Anthony Walker on his birth certificate, Tony O’Toole to his friends. I wonder if it is confusing sometimes, as it occasionally is for me. His mail says the DNA lab needs my signature before they can test whether we share the same dad. I sign the authorisation and email it. I will know the answer in a couple of days, though it will more likely tell me who I am not than who I am.
JUNE 30. ‘I didn’t marry your mother, I married Christopher.’ I am in a room with Ray. I have been putting off going but I am drawn like a moth. I need more understanding of what occurred in the dark ages between birth and Dudley Drabble.
Ray is the keeper of the secrets: my life from Barnardo’s baby to a four-year-old sheathed in sores. He is the mother lode, the father who knows though has never said.
I am back in Basildon. Kids are streaming out of Woodlands, my skinhead school. It is 32°C. Too hot. I grab a cab. I ring the bell of the bungalow. The little house is wrapped in roses. I wait. I ring again. I knock.
A thin voice calls from inside. I am coming, it pleads. A slow shadow moves, then there he is. The man who married my mum. I do
n’t recognise him. He is heavier, older, with long, sickly, sticky hair, a ragged Don Quixote beard. He looks questioningly at me. He doesn’t know me either. It’s Peter, Ray, I say. I hold out almond tarts from Patisserie Valerie. Peter, I repeat – my name as a teenage boy who’d lived with him for a year. He looks bewildered. It’s been a long time.
Peter? Peter? Allan! He finally says. A thin smile. I follow him in.
We sit. He eyes me warily. The room smells of age and illness. I start by thanking him for sheltering me as a baby and a wild boy with nowhere to go. I make reassuring sounds. I mustn’t spook him. Like stalking a wild animal. There is much to ask. How long had he known my mother when he married her? Why did he do it? What was she like? When and why did she leave? Is he Christopher’s father?
The stories come slowly at first. He gets confused, he says, he can’t remember. Most of what he says doesn’t add up. The years are wrong and the timing out, we weren’t where he says we were. This is the first time he has talked, but he is 87 now, maybe his memory has gone. Maybe it’s hoarded and buried.
He starts to talk about Sheila. He knew her brother Terry, he says. He’d go round to the house.
I wasn’t interested in sex, he says, I was interested in Christopher.
I felt sorry for him, he says, he needed someone to care for him. He used to come up to me as I was coming up the path. Half the time Sheila was never there. She was out down to Union Street.
While he heats his homemade dinner I ask were they ever happy. Not what you call happiness, he says. It was convenience for Christopher. I don’t know that it ever did come to anything.
Plot 29 Page 17