The boyfriend’s garden
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.
My genitals had already fallen in love with his genitals but I wanted to be practical as well. That experimental Meet My Children weekend is all that I had hoped and more. If he’d run the vacuum round as well, I’d have married him on the spot. A couple of months later at twenty- eight years old, in a hopeful fresh start, the children, Boyfriend and I, all move into a roomy old red brick house in West London.
Despite having had their roots lifted numerous times, the children, now twelve, ten and seven years old have survived and even grown taller and I have regained some strength and confidence.
The new home is beside a main road and has a small lawn at the front with a black and white diamond tiled path leading up to a porched front door. At the side of the house a tall dark wooden fence has a door in it. With a hard push it opens into the back garden. This is about the size of a tennis court. Mostly taken up by an overgrown lawn leading to a cloud of brambles at the far end. The near end of the lawn is edged with a low pile of different sized stones which were once possibly intended to be a rockery. It all looks wild and neglected. “I’ll look after you” I think, surprising myself and having no idea how to.
The first action I take is to buy a packet of white alyssum seeds which I scatter over the bare pile of rocks. The thrill when the tiny green specks started appearing is unforgettable. They eventually flower and twinkle all over the rocks. This is the first and last time that a packet of seeds that I scatter, actually comes up.
Finding a chimney pot lying half buried in a clump of nettles I stand it upright by the front porch and plant it with trails of ivy. Very artistic.
There’s a fig tree and I’ve never seen one before. Only recognising it by the fig leaves so beloved by statue makers and painters. The fruit, cut open, looked quite rude to me, all juice and seeds and somehow, womb like. The bramble patch is very satisfying when I needed to let off some steam. I regularly hack at it with a scythe.
The neighbours on one side tell me that they’re going to tidy their garden, and then they burn everything to ground level with a flame thrower. It must have been intentional as afterwards they want me to agree with them that they’ve really made a difference. I agree. After a while, dandelions cheekily poke their leaves up through the blackened mess and within a month the devastation is replaced by a bustling population of weeds and grass again.
My mother-in-law had loved gardening and used father-in-law’s empty paint cans, he was a decorator by trade, to plant all sorts of bits and pieces. Her back garden was tiny and on a slope above the house and adjacent to a path leading down to a beach. She told me that once when she was kneeling weeding beside her thick fuchsia hedge, she heard some women having a conversation the other side of the hedge. “What a lovely fuchsia, do you think I should take a couple of cuttings?” Mum-in-law said through the hedge, “Best wait until you’re on your way back from the beach then you can get them into water quicker.” There was a silence and then the sound of footsteps tiptoeing away.
It always tickled her that Percy Thrower, the radio gardener, advised people every year to bring their fuchsias indoors as autumn wore into winter. “How am I supposed to get a five foot hedge into my living room?” she’d cackle, confident that the huge hedge would survive anything the weather threw at it.
Mum-in-law was always taking cuttings when we were walking through public gardens. Either municipal gardens or perhaps the rhododendron park outside Slough when I was still living with Husband and she came to stay with us. I don’t know how she did it and I never saw it happen, but she’d come home and put all these snippets of stem and twig into jars of water then wrap them in wet newspaper for the trip back to her seaside home in the Isle Of Man. The next time I saw them they’d be stuck into paint cans in some sort of soil mixture and merrily putting out leaves. Making themselves at home in her multicultural plant community in the tiny back garden.
Her home was a fisherman’s cottage with thick walls, no bathroom and an outside toilet. She brought up three sons in that environment. I loved Mum-in-law dearly and felt more at home holidaying there with three kids and no bathroom, than I ever did with my mum or in my own home. I don’t remember her ever criticising the children or me. More importantly she reminisced about the challenges of raising kids and sympathised with me. We remained friends after I had left her son.
My mum is of different stock. She comes to visit at my new home. “Gran’s sitting on the blanket box in the hall”, Middle Child says on his way in from school. “Yeah, she looks really pissed off” giggles Daughter, “I’m going to ask her if she’d like me to bring her a cup of tea.” Middle Child adds “And maybe a cushion to sit on”. “No don’t”, I whisper, “She’s in a sulk and I don’t know why. You might make it worse.” Whilst my chest is tight and my stomach in a knot, the kids just find their gran’s sulk hilarious.
She and I had inspected my gardening attempts earlier. “I’d have those aconites out right away” she says, tapping the clump with her foot. And with a deep sigh, “Your sister’s made her garden beautiful, not a weed in sight.” Maybe I’d defended my garden in some way and that had brought on the tightly zipped mouth and retreat to the blanket box in the hall.
I retreat to the bramble patch for a nice bit of vicious hacking. My mother arrives and gives advice from a safe distance. “You shouldn’t be doing that, it’s men’s work”. I think but don’t say, “It’s saving you from being murdered”.
At dinner when I remind Youngest that his bed hasn’t been made yet, he is lippy, “Dunt bovver me so why does it bovver you?”. I give him what I hope is A Look and decide to Rise Above It. My mother stares intently at the ceiling with raised eyebrows. As I drive her to the station the next morning, “Hurray, she’s going home”, she brings up the bed making incident. “Your father would never have let you get away with being cheeky like that”. I take a deep breath, “No Mum, he wouldn’t and I was terrified of him. I don’t want my children to be terrified of me.” Her chin juts out as well as the mouth being zipped.
We do curt goodbyes as she gets on the train. “Thank God the miserable old bat has gone” I think as I drive home with a lighter heart. Compassion for her is not yet something that I can manage.
Over the next three years I do a diploma in graphic art at the nearest art college. Then get a job as a designer at a publishing company, four days a week in Camden. On the fifth, I tout my cartoons around the magazine and publishing houses spread through the rest of London. At first I drag along a huge portfolio which almost touches the ground. This is tedious for me and probably even more tedious for the unfailingly polite editors who wade through the contents. I eventually realise that quality, rather than quantity, is going to look much more impressive. A magenta briefcase with a dozen samples, becomes the new look along with my carefully chosen appearance. Unusual enough to look creative, purple hair and ripped jeans. Sensible enough to look reliable, tailored leather jacket and clean ankle boots.
Cartoons had become my way of expressing my feminist views and general angst about life and it’s frequent challenges. Using humour, I was trying to make my personal politics heard in an acceptable way. Spare Rib magazine used my work and published my strip cartoons about Lily Leaf, the feminist frog. Sadly the readership for a feminist magazine was limited and they could pay very little. Educational magazines and books became my reliable source of income. The commissioning editors were often women and gladly accepted that I drew girls playing football and the child in specs who looked extra clever, was brown and possibly a girl too. This was cutting edge diversity in the late seventies. The boyfriend who had been so supportive when I was a depressed single mother with no prospects, seemed to become sour and resentful of each new work commission that I secured. “You always fall into shit and come out smelling of roses”, he said when I landed a humorous illustration job from Good Housekeeping magazine. I didn’t understand what he meant and he wouldn’t expand but stomped off. It didn’t feel like a compliment.
After a while with optimism and a tight budget I was able to make a living as a full time cartoonist and give up the graphic design work. I’d not been very good at that anyway.
As I’d had very little spare time, looking back I can see that I didn’t make much difference to the garden in Hayes, but I did know that I loved working out there. The boyfriend owned the house. He said, “All this gardening that you are doing is a waste of time because I’m going to landscape it properly at some point”. It didn’t deter me and without realising it, I became an expert at doing things for the immediate present. Learning to garden for the sake of it without being attached to the outcome lasting forever.
“Those striped tights don’t do you any favours, they make your legs look short and fat” he tells me. “My legs are short and fat” I reply, though the comment has hurt. “And don’t tell me what you don’t like about my appearance, just tell me the bits that you do like.” Gosh, I’m getting quite assertive.
He is silent about my appearance after that. The silence is just as bad as the frequent acid remarks. Before we were in a partnership he seemed to like my legs well enough and they aren’t any shorter or fatter now. During our years together the warmth and goodwill between us has somehow become wilted and diseased and my poor gardening skills are not up to the task of healing it. Another relationship heading for the compost heap. Some plants thrive on being dug up, divided and planted elsewhere. Others by their nature prefer to stay in the same place. Whatever our personal inclinations were, I decided that it would be best if the children and I moved out. By this time The Husband and I were divorced and I finally received a small amount of money in the settlement. The oldest child, my only and favourite Daughter, was now sixteen and had left school. She went to live with Mum-in-law by the sea and worked in a local hotel. The boys would come with me to a new home, when I’d found one.
It’s official, I’m no good at relationships but learning a bit about gardening. Maybe I can study and improve my partner skills too? My friends are brilliant at helping each other to analyse how our husbands or partners could improve. Maureen now lends me books on how to analyse myself! “Women Who Love Too Much” and “The Cinderella Complex”. Maybe I can grow a new me.