The biggest steepest ever
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.
“Even if I had the time I don’t know how to start because it’s just a pile of brambles,” I say. Bob makes “Hmmmn” noises. “There are only two shrubs and they’ve grown into one big lump that looks like a boil,” I say. After two weeks at the drawing board, and only brief forays down to the river and back, the Myths Of Aging project is in the post. Clicking my teeth in a pointless way, I stare over the little cliff and down into the main garden.
Unlike many homes where the front garden is a bit of a public area and the back garden is the main one, we are the other way round. Well not quite, the back garden is smaller and more private but even steeper and very shady. Apparently, Sol, who lives at the other end of the terrace, had fallen down his garden and broken his leg when they’d first moved in. At the top of each back garden is a huge old oak tree.
How do you plan when the rule “Short plants at the front and tall ones at the back” no longer makes sense? The steep slopes dominate everything. Broad flower beds are not possible. Most of the borders will be looked down on as well as looked up to. Each border will be visible from the back as well as the front. It’s daunting, and very fortunate that I like a challenge and I’m also experienced at having no idea what to do.
It’s June and it’s belting hot. There’s a drought eventually. Bob leaves at 6a.m each weekday to drive to Birmingham and I get up at the same time, in order to get some digging in before I start work in my studio. By 9a.m. the heat outside is too hot even for mad dogs and me. “I’m melting” I think to myself, “And gritty and a bit dizzy”. Probably after two hours clambering and digging, I need some breakfast.
Because the garden is so steep, I’ve planned a few steps which I’ll ask a builder to make, followed by a sloping zigzag path from the top, through the mass of brambles down to the first narrow terrace of lawn. Having no idea of how to use a spirit level or tape measure to assess the path’s angle, I just shovel and look up occasionally to gauge roughly where it’s heading. Later this path will give me easier access to weed and plant the area.
In the meantime, as soon as he gets home from work in the light summer evenings, Bob is building a platform of rubble to put a summer house on. It’s a massive job, raising a section of the slope to create a flat area. When we can tear ourselves away from the garden in the twilight, we clamber down the track through the woods. I have to drag Bob past the communal sewage plant, which he loves watching as its paddles slowly turn. We cross the water meadow and the potholed track that a brave vehicle can bump along, and reach the river.
We get obsessed with the garden work and as the summer wears on we wear out. It seems like a wise idea to take a week’s break in a Welsh rented cottage by the sea. After four days we come home because we’re itching to get back to gardening.
“I’ve finished it!” I bellow at Bob as he arrives home from his long day. “The zigzag path! Obviously, the steps aren’t built yet so you have to slide down the first metre or so on your bum.” He obligingly comes to look at it, still in his work suit, and clambers down to the rough path. “Yes a great job, it does finish half a metre from the next terrace so we can either jump that or get more steps built.” he says.
Now I’m looking at the next job, tackling the mass of brambles and couch grass which, except for the narrow strip of the new path, cover the whole slope down to the next lawn. I want to be organically friendly and so I dig out loads of couch grass before finding that was a mistake. Apparently I’ve just made a whole load more couch grass babies by chopping the roots which will now make even more couch grass. At least that was what I was told at the time, though nowadays some experts might say it would have been better to keep weeding it out. Anyway, wanting to press on with the planting, I finally decide to use a one-off treatment of herbicide. This did a surprisingly thorough job. I suspect the potency allowed twenty five years ago was stronger than we are allowed these days.
The territorial red ants are very upset at having their established and extensive nests disturbed through my labours, and I hate their painful bites. A silver lining is the shy green Woodpeckers who flies down to the top lawn in the early morning to eat them. The bird book describes their call as “Yaffle yaffle” which baffles me. The black and white Woodpeckers make many squeaks and chirps, but they don’t Yaffle either. Having never seen any kind of Woodpecker before, we are very excited about visits from both sorts. Later it becomes a commonplace but always welcome sight that gives me a ripple of pleasure every time.
Privacy becomes an issue for me in this garden. In the Oxford one, although we had neighbours on either side, with our tall hedges there were lots of little spots in which I could feel completely hidden. The new garden has tall thin alder saplings marking the boundaries, so there is very little screen between us and our new next door neighbour’s plot. The need for privacy is partly because of the amount of weeping I’ve started to do. Being outdoors in the garden seems to comfort me and also makes me cry more. I spend quite a lot of time wiping tears on my arm, whilst peacefully digging the new flower beds.
As the days become shorter and autumn wears on, I sink deeper, becoming enveloped in a miasma of misery which I can’t shake off. Even my sense of humour disappears in a complete absence of gladness. When Christmas arrives, I make excuses to avoid spending it with any of my children. It would be embarrassing to weep all over the place whilst they are trying to have fun. Feeling that I ought to be having fun, seems to make me cry even more. Bob and I make Christmas dinner at home and I bump between beaming with gladness and then melting into yet more tears. He is growing worried about my continual grief. Although Bob is enjoying his first ever go at living rurally, he suggests that we should move back to Oxford and cut the experimental year short. I sit by myself and think about this possibility. An image comes to me that I’m standing in an icy cold fast flowing stream in my bare feet. Although it’s uncomfortable and painful my feet are on the ground, and something is being washed away and healed. I know that I need to stay.
I decide to find a therapist and she is really helpful. I’d complain, “Now that it’s over I want to leave the past alone and make the most of the life that I have in the present with good friends and a supportive partner.” She’d just say, “You have a lot to be sad about” and I’d feel curiously relieved. It gradually becomes clear what is happening to me.
As a little kid, I’d accepted the behaviour of my family as normal and knew of no other possibilities. When my older sister and I were around seven and ten years old we were left for a few days with a local farming couple and their children, Mary and Lizzie, whilst my father and mother were away. Aunty Susan and Uncle Geoff, as we were told to call them, worked their farm a few fields away from where we lived.
Uncle Geoff ate at the dinner table with us all when he came in from milking the cows. The grown ups talked in a friendly way to each other and to us children. Mary and her little sister talked as well. It was like something in a film. At the time I was amazed and puzzled by this weird family. I forgot about them when we went back to my house.
After I left home and married I had gradually moved myself towards people who were kinder than my family. Now when I once again live amongst beautiful fields and woodland, the old childhood memories have flooded back. Here I am, living in a lovely landscape, but this time feeling safe, sharing my home with someone I love, who loves me. The contrast is agonising. I slowly and viscerally, experience quite how lonely, anxious and hopeless I’d felt as a child.
How can you explain to passing neighbours as you cross the road heading for your garden, that the red nose and puffy eyes are not actually due to a cold. That you are realising and grieving how your life was forty or fifty years ago? They would think you mad, I thought I was mad.
Although I sometimes despair that maybe the grief will go on forever, gradually it shifts as winter moves into spring. Bob is endlessly patient and never suggests that I should get a grip or leave the past alone.
Every day when he gets home from work I greet him at the door “Hi Sweetie, how was your day? I had three biscuits with my coffee, guess what kind?” Helping him off with his coat, “And how are you? How are you Really?” I press him. I’m missing the small group of intimate friends that I had gathered over the years in Oxford. Now I drive into Worcester every Friday and catch the train back to Oxford to see them, especially my closest friend Nura. We have been each other’s life belts for years. She knows me and my history and understands how it was.
One early morning my car won’t start when I’m planning to catch the train down to Oxford. It seems so urgent, to go and visit Nura. Quickly I remember that Jane Next Door will be going into Worcester for her teaching job. As she answers the door in her dressing gown, hair standing in all directions, I recall that its the Easter school holidays. As I stammer apologies for waking her up she says sweepingly ”No problem, my husband will give you a lift”. Even as she speaks I can see him hopping across the landing getting into his trousers. It makes me reflect as I sit on the train that a good friend can mean other things than being able to talk to them about your emotional issues.
Then there is Bob.