Chapter 1

The old one has finally died. It had a piece of Gaffer tape holding the back together for twenty years. A Rose clawed it while I was pruning. Now the zips packed up. I suppose I could wrap it round me with a piece of string tied at the waist but I’ve bought a brand new one. It’s a longer version of the old one and flaps round my feet like a dressing gown. There’s plenty of clay soil rubbed into it now, so it smells nice and friendly. My wellies can just be spotted, peering out at the bottom.

Chapter 2

It’s so exciting living in a town. I can walk to the shops! I’m a grown up of seventeen, running a home, cooking and shopping. I have no idea how to do any of these things. Now five months pregnant, I join an ante natal class and make some friends. The neighbouring women laugh with me at my incompetence, and share stories about their own domestic failures. The new husband laughs at me occasionally but is otherwise coolly indifferent. This puzzles me as he’d been very keen until now. He used to listen when I talked, and he couldn’t keep his hands off me, which was a sure sign that he was really in love. He’d said that he was crazy about me, what more proof could anyone ask for?

Chapter 3

The new home has tall hedges at the front and gravel with a few spindly Roses. At the back is a large lawn with an air raid shelter in the middle and sparse borders round the edges. The husband mows the lawns and I stay out of his way as much as possible. I have my bedroom and he has his. I buy a bolt and screw it to the inside of my bedroom door.

Chapter 4

Sitting at the dining room table, we’re about to start a game of Canasta. The children, Possible Partner and me. I’ve just dealt and we pick up our cards. Daughter looks thoughtful, Youngest looks puzzled and Middle Child arranges his cards into a fan and then throws up all over them, and the table. “Oh dear, is your hand that bad?” enquires the possible partner, “I’ll get a cloth and bucket, I’m good at clearing up.” This is the moment when I know he is the One.

Chapter 5

Driving slowly down the road, a line of three tall grey gasometers clearly towers above the row of terraced houses. I’m checking the location of a possible home for myself and the boys. The estate agent hasn’t mentioned that there is a gasworks right behind the house that I’ve come to look at. “No way are we going to live next to that monstrosity” I mutter, and drive off. After a few days I face the fact that with my budget there is always going to be some big drawback to put up with if I want us all to have our own space.

Chapter 6

Few of us are grown in perfect circumstances. Perhaps the family tree has some disease which doesn’t destroy it but makes the new branches twisted and restricted in their growth. There may be such deep shade around the tree that the warmth and nourishment of sunshine is almost shut out. And yet the stunted tree grows. My family tree was that sort. Noticing a plant in this condition one might think it would be better off dead. Even if it squeezes out a few new leaves, the hope of it ever becoming strong and resilient can seem impossible. So it was with me. The counselling is the start of a painful but ultimately healing time of digging down and feeding up.

Chapter 7

Although I’d grown very fond of the gasworks when I find a house in Oxford with a municipal park beyond the railings at the bottom of the back garden, I quickly buy it. By the time the purchase is complete and I move in, Dan and I have ceased to be a couple. We seemed to have run out of lover-energy (what ever that is) and become good friends instead, which I am glad of.

Chapter 8

“We need frogs” I tell Bob. “To eat or to look at, or both?”?” he enquires. “The thing is” I say, “I read somewhere that Koi carp and frogs don’t get on together, so we’ve got to have another pond. Urgently. Just a little one”.

We both like frogs. Bob also likes obliging me, almost as much as he likes digging holes. At the weekend he digs a sunken round pond about the size of a dustbin lid. It’s maybe half a metre deep. He lines it and recuts the patio flags to overlap the edges and after filling it with water we beg some frogspawn from Dan’s communal garden. It has been raining heavily and their communal frogs have gone into an enthusiastic sexual frenzy and laid spawn in all the puddles.

Chapter 9

Bob is driving us up a steep hill just outside Worcester.  ‘It’s on the left” I shout, and we swerve off the main drag onto a narrow road which dips down through trees and back-jolting speed bumps.  Past little houses perched at the top of flights of steps like birds on a telegraph wire.  “Left again!” and we swoop round a corner past more houses but these have rather splendid balconies.  We head towards a fifty foot high wall of dark Conifers and with a sudden bend to the right, come out into sunshine and we’ve arrived.  Bob stops the car. Turns off the engine.  We get out into complete silence. 

Chapter 10

Although I’d planned to take a bit of time to settle in before starting a cartoon project, New Internationalist have offered me a job I can’t bear to refuse. It’s a double page spread illustrating the myths about aging. Being nearly fifty, I’m interested in busting negative stereotypes as soon as possible. They are letting me research it and write the content too. I’m immersed in the aging project and I also want to be outside doing things in the garden, getting stuck in, digging.

Chapter 11

On a tentatively sunny spring day, I take the train to Oxford and visit Nura. I ask her to be my Best Woman because I’m going to marry Bob. She knows all about having rather large trust issues. Speaking though tight lips I try to explain, “I’m fed up with always being poised ready to leave. It’s like half sitting down in case the chair breaks. But maybe it’s a good chair and I could relax into it, you know, lean back.” I’m crying now, “It might be alright with Bob because he listens and we work things out. But what if he changes?” Nura “Hmmm”s thoughtfully, “You’ve been together for eight years now, that’s a reasonable trial period. He seems to me like a pretty sturdy sort of chair. ”

Chapter 12

“I know what we need now,” I say as Bob sits down with a glass of wine, after work. His project has moved from Birmingham to Rugby so the commute is even longer than when we lived in Oxford. This rather defeats the purpose of moving closer to his job but, “I’m not leaving this place” he says. He’s hefted to the land now. “So what is it that we need?” he asks warily. “A really, really big pond” I say.

Chapter 13

Snow visits us much more frequently than it had in Oxford. “Oh wow!” Unoriginal, but what else can you say when you wake and look out of the window and the landscape is unexpectedly blindingly white? Bob does not share my delight. “I’m got a meeting that I really can’t miss, and the road is going to be impossible.” Having said that he eats a bowl of cereal and thumps off to the garage for a shovel. Feeling obliged to offer moral support, I find a spade and walk up the road to join him.

Chapter 14

At the top of the garden is the old crone sculpture that I made about a decade ago. “Well”, says Bob, “If you think that you made it ten years ago, it was probably more like fifteen”. He’s right, my memory is often vague about the passage of time and the older I get, the faster time seems to hurtle by. Strangely, it slows down when I’m sitting with a cup of tea. My original plan had been to build a large yet sinuously graceful crescent moon, on a weekend Introduction To Sculpting. “That’s quite an ambitious project” the tutor had said, “For a two day beginners course”. Constructed around a flat bit of wood with a metre high upright stick I’d nailed to it, the crescent shape fought back from the beginning.

Chapter 15

I’ve got a gardener! The lovely Anne who is excellent at doing what I ask and checking if I’m ok with the way she has done it. She’s my Avatar who carries out all the things that I can’t do. This is of course within the two hours a week that she comes, which means that I have to be really selective about what jobs she does. “That’s an interesting scene” says Bob, when he spots Anne kneeling with her bottom sticking out of a flowerbed whilst I gesticulate with my “Pointing Stick” which is actually a bamboo cane. It’s fun being the Madam Of The Garden but I’m also fighting back tears because I would have liked to be doing that weeding myself.

Chapter 16

“Am I swearing like Jeff Bridges in the Big Lebowski when I put my knickers on?” I ask the bedroom when I get dressed in the morning. “No, I am not! To the tune of Happy Birthday To You, I sing “Lots of lovely drugs for me, with my breakfast, lunch, and tea,” as I inch down the stairs. “You might not want to use those lyrics when the grand children are around” says Bob.

Chapter 17

In Disney’s old animated film, Jungle Book, Baloo says “You’re a human, Mowgli, you belong with them, it’s time to go back to the village.” “No! I’m one of you, I belong in the jungle” the boy protests.

In Rudyard Kipling’s original writing, after several years of living as a wolf, Mowgli is cast out of their tribe by the young wolves who resent his ability to hold their gaze. Like cats, they have to look away. He is received into a village. After a few months, with the help of four loyal wolves he successfully causes the death of the man-eating tiger, Sher Khan. Then Mowgli is cast out by the human tribe who are afraid of his friendship with wild animals.

Earliest memories of gardening:

My earliest memories of gardening come from a large garden at our home in Domasi, Malawi (then Nyasaland). This was in the first half of the 1950’s and I would have been about 4-5 years old. There weren’t many shops to go to, so we grew a lot of fruit and vegetables. We employed 2 gardeners and I remember ‘helping’ them in digging veg beds. I have old cine films showing the garden, so that memory has been kept alive. We also grew cannas and other exotic plants so the garden was a delightful place to be in. We often had tea in the garden at 4pm, very English!

Earliest memories of gardening:

Growing up in the town centre of Rotherham in the fifties, we didn’t have a garden. Nobody around us did. There were no window boxes or tubs of flowers in the streets around me. My dad had an allotment and went there on his bike and came home with vegetables that he’d grown.

Earliest memories of gardening:

My father coming home from work and getting out into the garden as soon as he had had his tea. He was a countryman at heart and, living in suburbia, that was his way of being true to himself.