The gasworks garden

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.

The other affordable house is next to the Nestle coffee factory with an overpowering smell of burnt coffee in the air. Only in hindsight have I noticed that without a thought I’d rejected spacious flats because the ones within my budget didn’t have a garden.

The estate agent doesn’t bother to come with me for the viewing when I return to the gasworks. The owners have left and there’s nothing worth pinching in his opinion. So with the borrowed key, I let myself into in, alone. Walking through the dark hall with doors leading off into the front room and then the living room I notice my shoulders relaxing and I take a deep breath in. The doors are all darkly varnished and someone has made patterns on them like feathers. The walls are papered in something beige brown and look as if they have years of nicotine stain though I can’t smell evidence of cigarettes.

The old couple who had lived there for thirty years had moved into a care home some time ago. They’d left an old fashioned vacuum cleaner the size of a sausage dog in the middle of the living room. You went down a shallow step to enter the tacked-on kitchen. It has a bare concrete floor and contains an ancient gas cooker and a broken range. Two small crooked homemade cupboards stand side by side against the wall. The plaster is falling off the walls.

I discover the stairs in a cupboard on one side of the living room. Upstairs is a big room at the front overlooking the road, where I could have my studio. I’m now earning a precarious living as a cartoonist. If I sleep on a futon it can be rolled up at the side of the room during the day while I work.

A small room for the older boy is next to mine. Beyond that, and down a step is a bathroom with a coughing gas geyser for the hot water. The kitchen and bathroom are obviously modern amenities added many years after the original Victorian terrace was built. The younger boy could have the downstairs front room which is big enough to squeeze in the piano that he’d adopted when the pub was throwing it out.

It's a fine day when we move. The youngest plays the piano on the front lawn at the now-ex-boyfriends house whilst friends help us to load our small collection of belongings into a van and drive us a couple of miles away to our new home in Uxbridge. At least the gasworks is quiet and doesn’t smell of burnt coffee.

My huge drawing board with a plan chest underneath had been acquired when I still lived with Boyfriend. The Kodak company had moved out of London and reckoned it was cheaper to buy new kit up north than to take the old stuff with them. Everything was being thrown out so a friend rescued and rehoused the drawing board and plan chest with me. It’s perfect for my work, big enough to attach reference photos and sketches on the same board that the final artwork is being produced on. At the new home, it is far too big to go through the cupboard on the twisting staircase so it’s hoisted in on a rope through the front bedroom window.

On alternate weekends the boys go to stay with their father, the ex-husband. Without them to care for and with no partner to worry about pleasing, I don’t know what to do with myself. At first I throw myself into work because I’m terrified of not being able to keep up the mortgage payments. Any spare time is used to decorate the house. Finding my own taste in décor is a joy. I deliberately try to set aside my expectations of what a Victorian living room ought to look like, or what might impress or please my friends.

Sitting on the sofa I shut my eyes and ask myself, “What would I like to see around me when I open them?” Pale blue and pale pink float into my mind. Really? Surprisingly it doesn’t look like a baby’s nursery when it’s done. The walls pale blue, and the old fashioned doors on the cupboards built into the walls and the one leading onto the stairs, pale beige pink. The round dining table gets painted blue, with pink spots. It feels both peaceful and airy to me and the children let me get on with it without comment.

One Saturday night the kids are a having a weekend with their dad so I am child free and feel that I should be out having fun. “Hi, I’m around if anyone is doing anything, going anywhere”, I say in the most un-desperate voice I can manage. After phoning everyone that I know, even people I don’t like very much, I find myself stuck at home on my own. This is awful. I am not yet thirty-three and surely everybody goes out on a Saturday night if they’ve got a babysitter. What a loser. I’m nobody’s partner, nobody’s special person. The kids love for me doesn’t count in my mind, as being their mum, they are stuck with me.

Drifting around the house weeping and picking things up and putting them down, I start to strip the crumbling plaster off the kitchen walls. After a bit I put a music cassette in the machine and then begin to dance around the kitchen whilst I work. And sing along in quite a shouty voice, with Kiki Dee, “I’ve got the music in me”. A couple of hours later the phone rings, friends inviting me to go to a party with them. “Actually I’m busy”, I say, “But thanks for asking me”. I realise that I’m having a good time in my own company. On a Saturday night.

The back garden leading down to the looming gasworks is the elephant that I’m ignoring. The garden is long and narrow, about thirty metres by six metres. It ends at a two metre high brick wall topped with heavy duty metal fencing. This has a snake of barbed wire cresting the whole thing. Rather like a high security prison exercise yard.

The Monstrosity looms slap bang behind it. The gasometers rise up to over forty metres tall when they are full. Two other gas containers flank it at the bottom of my neighbours’ gardens. The gasworks go up and down. On Sunday lunch times they sink to their lowest whilst lots of people are cooking their roast dinners. People didn’t usually go out for Sunday lunch in the late nineteen seventies.

The scrappy, balding lawn is edged on either side with narrow borders speckled with weeds and the odd dead chrysanthemum which had probably once been donated by the old chap who lives on the right hand-side next door. He is very keen on chrysanthemums, and they may be the only flowers that he grows so that there is a spectacular display in autumn.

Maybe I found it in the library or Maureen lent me her copy, but John Brooke’s book “The Small Garden”, has a photograph which inspires me. It’s a town house courtyard garden, no lawns but carpeted with bricks and something called “raised beds”. It doesn’t have a gasworks but no matter. I begin to collect bricks. People who know me start to tell me if they’d noticed a knocked down building and I’d go round and ask for the bricks and bring them home in my wheelbarrow. After chiselling most of the mortar off I lay them edge to edge on a bed of sand on top of the thin grass, all the way down the garden. Leaving the borders exposed I cover the rest with bricks, including the scuffed earth strip down the middle, that was once the path. Then I make raised beds here and there with more bricks.

It's an odd step in the progress of becoming a keen gardener, to start by covering most of the area in bricks. I didn’t have the ability to enquire within myself why this unusual design was so appealing to me. Perhaps I’d seen enough balding and boring lawns to want to get rid of mine? If I’m honest, it might have been an unconscious desire to have some control over something.

Whenever I raised my head from bricklaying, my eyes were inevitably drawn to the tall brick wall at the bottom of the garden and then upwards to the huge metal tubs soaring into the sky. Although I can’t remember which way the sun went around them, I don’t remember long shadows being cast. The gardening book was now my bible and I’d bought my own copy. “To distract the eye from an ugly view, plant an interesting specimen tree in the foreground”. The eucalyptus sapling that I selected for this job was not able to live up to it. In fact despite my best efforts, including regular stroking and encouraging chats, it died a slow lingering death.

A couple of years later I make a second attempt at following John Brooke’s advice to put something tall and interesting in the foreground of a large ugly view. This time it’s a bold circular raised bed smack in the middle of the garden. A philadelphus tree and as a smaller companion, a silvery weeping pear with delicately bowed branches stand together like the bride and groom on a wedding cake. My next-door neighbour Ousha has become a friend over the few years that I’ve lived here. She tells me that in Delhi the philadelphus is called “Queen Of The Night” for its white blossomed fragrance in the evening.

When I’ve accumulated a bit of spare cash I pay someone to sink posts into buried concrete down both sides of the garden and then attach six foot high trellis to them. On Chrysanthemum Man’s side I plant espalier apple trees. On the opposite side I grow honeysuckle and climbing roses. The three little Hindu sisters, Urina, Choti and Seema peep through the trellis with their big eyes, “Veev, can we have some of those?”. They point at the ground and I scoop up handfuls of fallen rose petals for them to play with.

Senior Mrs Birdy is their grandmother. A short yet substantial woman with grey streaked hair in a small, tight bun on the nape of her neck. Always in salwar kameez, she speaks no English but is a keen gardener. Mostly in a supervisory role. Through the fence she passes me numerous cuttings of unknown plants. “Edible” she mimes with exaggerated chewing actions. Either they’re not suited to the English climate or my amateur talent is not adequate to care for them because they never thrive. In return I offer her cuttings or pieces of plant divided from my michaelmas daisies or roses. She mimes putting them in her mouth, eyebrows raised. When I shake my head she holds up a rejecting hand. Then she points to her large belly with a laugh and my small one, with a down turned mouth and laughs some more.

Ousha is the mother of the three little girls, she wears salwar kameez like her mother-in-law. Ousha gets supervised firmly as being daughter-in-law with three girl children, her position in the hierarchy is low.

These neighbours are so lovely. Ousha came from New Delhi when she was a girl of seventeen. Her father had given her the choice of marrying a local and staying in the country, or marrying a man she’d never met before in England, and coming to live with him and his family. She wanted the adventure and came to England with little English and none of the particular Indian language that her husband spoke.

They invite me to parties in their house. At first I’m afraid of accidentally offending them. Should I take a proffered can of beer from the tray carried by a woman, when the rest of the women in the gender segregated room where I’m sitting are clearly not drinking alcohol? It’s quickly apparent that they don’t expect me to abide by their customs. Ousha and her sisters in law sometimes come round to my house to offer me a sample of a new dish that they’ve cooked. “Is it very spicy?” I’d ask cautiously. “No, no, very mild” they’d assure me, then laugh themselves silly when after two seconds of enjoying the mouthful of minted lamb, the fire hit my mouth and I gasped and ran for water.

My younger son is still passionate about the piano and plays a lot of his own compositions. I wonder if the Birdies can hear his renderings of teenage angst through the wall. When I ask, they assure me that they can’t hear anything, then say “He’s getting much better at it isn’t he?”

Around this time Middle child leaves school and home to begin a degree course. After waving him off I wrap myself in a duvet with a glass of whisky in one hand. Then I curl up on the floor and weep. What a muddle. So relieved that I don’t have to be responsible for him any more, but the loss of this dear son who’s somehow grown up when I wasn’t looking, leaves a howling gap.

Standing in the garden on a Saturday when Younger son is at his dad’s, I look around, restless, I need someone or something to look after. Maybe I’ll adopt the garden. I need something to fix the emptiness inside me.

For the first time since being a young teenager I’m without a partner. It’s strangely peaceful, and I feel strong and independent. At the same time I’ve been brought up in a family where it seemed that a woman was considered nothing without a man. I feel a failure. As a feminist which I seem to have quietly become, my constant fear of displeasing men, or indeed anybody, doesn’t make sense. As well as reading books on how to function better I decide to see a counsellor. With her support I begin to understand the ways in which my childhood has shaped me.