Say no to gardening

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 zip’s 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.

When I’m a kid, my mother’s gardening coat has a belt at the waist. It makes a slight indentation in the thick grey bolster of her body. “I don’t know why I bother!” she storms bursting into the kitchen with a blast of cold air. I watch her carefully. “What the wind doesn’t flatten gets killed by the frost”. She battles to make the kind of garden that she wants. I’m five and I don’t know what that kind is. And the weather doesn’t seem to help.

My older sister and myself are given small plots of our own to work in. Hers is at the side of the house beyond the lumpy lawn. It’s a long thin bit of soil, nothing in it except worm casts and stones. Our mother gives her some pansies to plant. Every time that I remember to have a look they seem to have got smaller, then one day they aren’t there anymore. As if she’d never stuck them in at all.

My bit of garden is a little patch in the dark corner beside the high iron gate in the wall. When you go through, you’re in the front garden. Our mother lets me have some snowdrop bulbs. She says “They probably won’t come up because it’s the Peak District”. But I keep looking and one day after the snow there they are. Little green pointy leaves sticking up. Then white flowers like bells come. One day I go to visit them and my grandpa is standing there with his back to me. I know what he’s doing because I can hear the splashing. You’re not supposed to see people wee and he’s doing it on my snowdrops. I go away very quietly and decide that I don’t want to garden anymore. I don’t tell anyone. I don’t like my grandpa and try not to be near to him.

It's much better to potter around the ponds, fields and woodland in my opinion. Nellie, our collie dog comes with me.

Off we go, unless the rain is really lashing down, just having a look-see at what has changed since we’ve last been out. Nellie and me clamber over several stone walls as we go down the fields. You must use the sticking out stones that the wall maker put there, when you are climbing. “Bloody walkers uv got t’ wall down again” is what the farmer says when he finds a wall collapsing because someone climbed it the wrong way. Well, that someone certainly wasn’t me. Might have been Nellie, but I say nothing.

When we get near the woods, mostly avoiding the cowflops, I’m getting really excited. Finally I am there and peer into the trees. “Yes! They’re here again! Blue like the sea, everywhere!” In those days there was no concern about the springtime bluebells ever running out and I would pull up a fragrant armful of them, with their long white roots moist and pristine. By the time I’d carted them home they’d already be drooping their heads lower, and the stems would collapse in the vase within hours.

Spring is also the time when the midden warms up. This is a very big concrete box. It’s as long as a tall grown up lying down and just as wide. If a grown up stood inside, only their head would poke out of the top. It’s in the farmers yard. It’s where he puts all the cowflops that have been swept out of the milking shed. Right now, it’s full up to the top and there’s no lid, just a thick crust. My sister and I are balanced on the wall’s narrow edge. “Go on, you could easily run across if you got a move on” she says. “You do it first”, I offer. “Nah, I’m too heavy but you could make it cos you’re little”. Reluctant to turn down a rare benefit of being younger, I waver, looking at the steam rising up through cracks in the brown crust. “Go on, do it!” my sister shouts “Just Do It”.

“I thought that might happen” she says as we both stare at one of my wellies which is slowly sinking under the surface. Golden bubbles rise around it and pop with a “Bloop”. My sock is warmly wet on my foot. “Oh God you’re going to get into such trouble when Mummy finds out,” she beams. I do.

At the back of our house, through the scullery and out across the yard beyond the high stone wall, there was a meadow on our land. Lady’s smock with its delicate lilac petals grew there and I imagined a shepherdess wearing that soft mauve colour on a smocked dress. A sort of combination of a shepherd’s smocked bodice and the kind of crinoline that my mother’s collection of china ladies wore. The flower’s soft strange fragrance is just at the edge of my memory now.

Leafy spires of sorrel grew as tall as me and through August they turned rusty red first and then in late summer dried to ruby brown. You could run your fingers down the stalk and the dried seeds would pour off into your hand. Though I didn’t know the names of the grasses in the meadow, I liked to compare the different colours of their pollen. Cream, gray, lilac, six different kinds of white, sometimes I made patterns with it on an old plate or in a jam jar.

You had to be brave to get into the meadow. Honeysuckle grew thickly over the wall in the corner of the yard and a narrow stone stile almost hidden there, led into my Paradise. Bees buzzed lazily as I squeezed past them, scared of getting stung and yet lulled by the fragrance of the honeysuckle in the heat.

Once in the meadow, I could lie on my back with a circle of blue sky above me, framed by the tall grasses which also conveniently hid me from view. With eyes almost closed in the gentle sun, I relaxed, though I wouldn’t have known that was what I was doing. The weather in the pennines was often bleak, so the warm sunny days were precious when they came.

Another sunlit memory of that time was of my sister and I making parasols from the broad-leafed stalks of rhubarb. “It’s fratefully hort isn’t it?” we drawled to each other in our poshest voices as we walked around the rows of cabbages with our noses pointing at the sky like ladies. It’s the only thing that I remember about the walled vegetable garden, which was looked after by a man with a gammy leg. He came a couple of times a week and his name was Jim. He called my mother “Mrs Faulkner”. We children called him by his first name although we were required to call my parents friends “Aunty” and “Uncle”. This led me to believe that I was somehow superior to Jim, even though he was a grown-up.

In the house my sister and I were secretaries, staggering up and down our bedroom in my mothers’ old high heels, shuffling wodges of typing paper. “File this Miss Brown” my sister would order me. After shoving the papers under the bed I would try and gain some authority for myself, saying firmly ”Do type this letter Miss Green, it’s very important”. We both loved “typing” so she’d do as I said and sit at the ancient machine banging the keys which would immediately tangle. Then she’d hit the return key a lot which didn’t tangle and sounded very professional. Neither of us ever played mummies and daddies. My father’s secretary was a frequent visitor and he liked her a lot. He didn’t seem to like our mother or us very much.

Shortly after reaching the sixth form in school I became pregnant. Having made no causal link between what I was doing with my much older boyfriend to oblige him, and the likelihood of unprotected sex leading to a baby, I was as surprised as everyone else when my period failed to turn up.

“You stupid girl, why on earth did you audition? You knew that you’d have to leave school at Christmas.” My mother is understandably annoyed, as she will now have to write an embarrassing letter to the history master, explaining why I will not be performing in the school play. Yet I cannot help being proud that I was picked to play Joan in Shakespeare’s Joan Of Ark. Even though I will be seven months pregnant, married and living in London at Easter, when the performance is to happen.

On the outside I look like an average teenager with thick wavy brown hair which I hate, and a pink and white skin which I also hate, but my mother is very proud of. Underneath the newly sprouted bosom and hips and sarcastic mouth, I have quietly turned into a concrete post.

In disgrace and a roomy navy velvet frock, I am hastily married. “Well if we invite the Carringtons we can’t leave the Smythes out” says my mother. “I thought it was supposed to be a small wedding” says my father. As a token nod to a proper wedding and the growing guest list, I wear a head dress and short white veil. Although I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the pregnancy, nothing will conceal the stomach which is fast overtaking my expanding breasts. I will be leaving the family home to live in a London suburb with my new husband who is eight years older than me and luckily had been saving up for just such an occasion.

My father had run over my best friend Nellie the Collie dog whilst he was giving me a lift to school when I was about nine. Sitting in the seat beside him, I felt the bump. I held my pencil box tight and looked at it carefully. It was made of wood. I swivelled the top section out and stared at the layer underneath. Then I swung it shut. I did it again. And again. It made a click each time. There were pencils and a rubber lying down in the bottom layer. “Bloody dog, chasing cars. It was bound to happen some day,” said Daddy.

When I got home from school I asked my mother where Nellie was. “She had to be put down” she said. Nellie was not mentioned again. I said nothing.

Looking back through the telescope of time I don’t think that my parents were able to love themselves or anybody else very much. It had been an unhappy time living in that family and I left them with no regret. The beautiful countryside which had been my friend and comfort for so many years? I didn’t give it a backward glance.