Cry hard and keep gardening
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.
Between the spaces and cracks in the old bricks paving the courtyard, miraculously a sea of forget-me-nots arrived.
The ex-husband makes small maintenance payments towards the children’s upkeep and I am ruthless in prompting them to go shoe and school uniform shopping when they are with him for a weekend. This helps but I’m still afraid of not having enough to pay the mortgage as well as supporting two teenage boys and myself. “Have you any idea what electricity costs?” I shriek when I find an empty room with the light on. “If you’re hungry when you get in from school, fill up on bread and butter, not biscuits.“ And in desperation, semi-joking, “If you’re still hungry, have a drink of water and a lie down.”
For the first year in my very own home, I work long hours taking any commission I can get. Someone pays me to design a Yellow Submarine cartoon to be painted over their entire VW, and I do it. When I check my savings at the end of twelve months, there is enough spare money to have a conservatory added to the back of the house.
The first step is transplanting the sweet yet crumbling shed from behind the house to the other end of the garden. “Would you like to be part of a shed shifting party?” I ask the burlier ones amongst my acquaintances. “There’ll be a curry lunch afterwards”. I don’t warn them that it will be cooked by me. On the appointed Saturday morning I’ve emptied out the shed. A little wooden ironing board, a couple of smoothing irons, heavy metal shoe lasts for do-it yourself cobbling, crates, boxes and other junk/treasures left by the previous owners. The burly five lift the shed, floor and all, and without fuss deposit it at the gasworks end of the garden. It doesn’t fall to pieces on the journey and the door was hanging by one hinge before it set off. When they’ve gone home I throw the curry left overs away and refill the shed with all that I’d emptied out.
The new aluminium framed conservatory is installed in the released space and attached to the back wall of the house. An arched entrance is knocked through the kitchen wall and I cover it with a thick curtain each winter to keep the cold out. It doesn’t but I am still in heaven as well as extra jumpers. In a junk shop I buy a tin bath which fits snugly across the far end of my sumptuous glass palace. This is in the seventies when most people regard tin baths as old rubbish. In it I grow cucumbers and melons for the first and only time. Mrs Birdy uses some of the space to nurse her aubergines and chillies along. Bright blue morning glories climb strings up to the glass roof, twining with the cucumber tendrils.
As the hot, dry summer meander on, everything in the conservatory becomes covered in beautiful dense white cobwebs. The tiniest coral red spiders potter about on them. Then everything growing in the conservatory sickens and dies. “Red spider mites” says Maureen “Vicious little buggers”. I’d never heard of them before.
Being mid-terrace means that everything for the garden has to come through the house. As well as many wheelbarrow loads of bricks there is a kind donation of horse manure. I think I vacuumed the living room rug after I’d barrowed that lot through. The horse manure is dumped to rot down at the bottom of the garden where I had now planted a russian vine, also known as mile-a-minute. With the added kick from the manure the vine obligingly climbs the tall wall and begins to race up the metal fence and barbed wire above it. Eventually it reaches the huge gasometer pipes and drapes artistically over them like a languorous green goddess.
I actually pay an entrance fee to look at a garden! A local vicar’s wife has opened hers to the public. “I love collecting different plants” she says, “And by pruning them vigorously I can squeeze lots into my small space”. I like her thinking and cram my garden with a wide variety of interesting and often budget busting plants, supplemented by packets of seeds and any cuttings I can lay my hands on. During a slow work period when I can’t afford to run a car, Maureen and her husband kindly invite me to join them in a visit to a garden centre in theirs. We have a draughty journey home owing to the two trees that I have fallen in love with, sticking out of the back windows.
Sitting in bed on wet Saturday mornings I pore over my two garden books. The Small Garden by John Brookes and The Readers Digest Encyclopaedia Of Garden Plants And Flowers. In those days there was no internet so I trawled through nurseries and garden centres trying to find the plants that I’d chosen from the books. This was usually a disappointing experience where everything I had painstakingly read up and thought would be perfect in this corner or that border, was not to be found. Eventually I decided that it would be a lot simpler to look at what was available with flowers on it, and choose from that. This was more fun and fatal for my finances as I made lots of impulse buys.
Nurseries and garden centres used to offer the full range of their stock throughout the year. All was laid out in alphabetical order of the Latin names. None of your collections of shade loving plants or groups of sun lovers. Through my ignorance I grew all sorts of plants in the “wrong” place but learned that quite a few things thrived despite not having ideal growing conditions. Later, on Gardeners Question Time, I heard Bob Flowerdew make an interesting point when he said that growing things in less than their ideal conditions can often be an advantage. They don’t get above themselves and start crowding into the space of their neighbours. Even though it may put out less blossom, a flowering plant in a shady position will simply oblige later in the season and will keep its colour better.
More useful gardening advice comes from a healer in Hampstead who I go to see after discovering a lump in my breast. Whilst waiting for a biopsy I buy a strapless dress as I’d never had one and think that this might be my last chance. At this time prosthetics are quite unsubtle and breast re-construction hasn’t been invented yet. It also seems worth a try to visit a healer in case she can cure whatever is wrong with my breast. She is very nice and not only tackles the breast issue but somehow we get on to gardening.
“Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of seedlings I’ve raised” I say, “It’s lovely that they’ve germinated but now I’ve got to pot them all up, and find space, and there are too many. Not to mention the sickly ones that I worry about.” She calmly responds “Why don’t you just compost the ones that you don’t want?” I open my mouth to reply then there is a long pregnant pause while I realise that I’ve been treating the plants like children. The garden has replaced mothering the children who have now all left home.
This awakening helps me to fully grieve the children growing up which I’d not done before. It was such a relief not to have the responsibility of supporting them financially and trying to be a wise parent. And, it was so sad that they would never be my little ones again.
The breast lump was not cancerous but mastitis, an uncomfortable but not life threatening issue. Composting plants was good advice and I also became more robust at doing the same with some relationships that were more hard work than pleasure.
Part of my garden vision was that it would be gradually revealed by wandering around the various raised beds. It was only after building it that I realise that I’ve not thought of making any place to sit. Now I lay some crazy paving beside the conservatory to stand a small table and chairs on. Not having the skill or patience to fill the cracks with mortar, you have to be careful where you place your chair legs or you’ll slip into a crack between the slabs and the chair will throw you over backwards. This little patio is then separated more from the main garden by adding trellis and an arch between the two. I plant a jaunty clump of dog daisies beside the trellis and it quickly looks as if it has been there forever.
I begin to love the gasworks. At night the pale shape is like a huge sculpture, lit with little lights to warn aircraft of its great height. Silhouetted against the night sky, it seems almost protective. A giant creature patiently crouched by our terrace, watching over us.
It’s only a short walk to the canal which runs parallel to the back of our row of houses. There’s a narrow path running alongside the canal which leads eventually to a series of small islands between the canal path and the river. Kingfishers flash across the water sometimes. Untidy clouds of heron nests fill the trees.
When I walk up to Uxbridge to get the weekend shopping, I walk beside the main road with a narrow stream on the other side of the path. Occasionally there’s a water vole swimming across. The stream has its share of half-submerged shopping trollies and plastic crates too.
The memories of childhood continue to arrive. Usually coinciding with something lovely happening, like the launch of my most successful book of cartoons. The group of local friends who have stuck with me during the time that we were raising our children and through so many ups and downs in their lives and mine, now find it hard to understand why I’m having therapy and “Opening a can of worms”. Why make myself unhappy for no reason? I don’t know the answer to that, but know that I need to do this exploration of my past and try to understand it if I can.
Digging around in past experiences which leads me to be tearful and unhappy, I grow away from the old friends and begin to form new friendships with the amazing women at an Inner London Survivors group.
Earning a living with my sense of humour helps me to put my sadness and confusion into a box for a while each day. In between nurturing my family of plants and weeping about my childhood, one of several books of cartoons that I’ve had published, becomes a best seller for a while. Suddenly for the first time in my life, I have lots of money, well, comparatively.
I can now afford to live practically anywhere! Oxford is a beautiful city and the place where the weekends-only boyfriend I’ve had for some time, lives. We’d met through the dating column at the back of “City Limits” magazine, it’s deceased now. “I’d better tell you that I’m jewish”, he’d said to me after we’d met a few times, “Do you mind?” His question surprised me, it seems that prejudice against jews was the only bigotry my family of origin hadn’t got. He is a kind man with a forest of bronze curls, freckles and wears thick glasses. He’s good at making me laugh and he cooks lovely food for me. He lives in a communal house full of interesting people who I’d grown to know and like. They seemed to like me too.
I’d had a wonderful experience of community and friendship amongst my Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and vaguely Christian neighbours in Cowley. The children had gradually left to experience living with their dad or go to university so that I didn’t feel that I had to try and create stability for them. The mile-a-minute vine was now halfway up the middle gasometer. Leaning against the conservatory was an unusual pink flowered wisteria that I’d planted two years earlier and I was still waiting for it to produce some blossom. Now I’d never see it flower.
This was the first home that had belonged to me. I had the power to decide who was allowed in. No-one criticised the way that I gardened, it was my creation and caring for it seemed to make me very happy. Though I’d thought that I was settled here for life, five years after moving in I was off again. Crying about leaving and excited about the new landscape and using my new skill of having two opposite feelings at once.
Leaving the London suburbs for beautiful Oxford.
It’s the late eighties and I’m reading self help books and going to therapy groups. If I work hard I can change my Karma/ think myself happy with the intention of escaping all uncomfortable emotions very soon. With New Age Positive Thinking, I just need to sort out my muddled emotions and I’ll never get upset again.