The Lawnsman Cometh
It is mid-April, anywhere in suburban England, anywhere among a million courts, crescents, closes, avenues, drives, groves, ways; anywhere the ornamental cherries are in pink flower and the hanging baskets standing guard by the front porch are glowing with spring colour. It is a Saturday. Enough of the morning has gone for breakfast to have been eaten, for the newspaper to have separated into its dozen sections, for the dog to have been tickled behind the ears and the wife brought her tea, for the milk bottles to have been deposited by the step with a dissonant chime; for that breeze, carrying with it the first foretaste of the warmth of summer, to have rid the little kingdom behind the house of the worst of the clammy moisture night has laid on it. Already our man has found time amid his chores to go out and sniff the air. Its savour has brought a softening to his features, a shadow of a smile, while resolving them into an expression of purpose.
I say ‘our man’, because apart from his maleness and sense of purpose and the fact that he is likely to be between thirty and four score years, I cannot characterize him further. He may be shaven or stubble-chinned, regimentally smart or irredeemably scruffy, self-employed or nine-to-five wage slave, respectably retired, painfully redundant. His demeanour and circumstances tell us nothing. All we may safely say of him is that he cares for the order of the space by his home. We must see him in action.
By now he will, morally, have cleared the decks. He may have walked the dog, made the breakfast, got the paper, tapped the barometer, discharged half a dozen trivial duties; or he may have just rolled out of bed, grabbed a cup of instant and surveyed the scene. In both cases, he will have endeavoured to dispose of clutter. He will have organized himself to be free from distractions. Before his task is done, he will not wish to go to the supermarket or welcome guests. Demands which interfere are likely to make him extremely irritable.
There are preliminaries to the observances. He will dress, not necessarily with care, but properly: perhaps in a boiler suit, or ragged sweater and filthy oil-stained jeans; in what he calls his ‘garden shoes’, or just grubby trainers. Whatever the outfit, it will be indissolubly associated in his mind with the garden and the duties laid on him by it. With it belong the well-worn gloves, dirt behind the fingernails, the odour of bonfire lingering about the hair, an ache in the lower back, a sudden and virtuous need for tea, that particular expulsion of breath that accompanies a satisfied survey of a job well done.
At ease in the familiar raiment, he makes his way to the shed. To the ignorant observer, this structure will be no more than a utilitarian assembly of wood, brick or breeze block, surmounted by a corrugated roof. More often than not, its condition is decrepit, if not ruinous. But it would be erroneous to deduce deficiency of regard from this neglect. To our man, the shed represents a precious antithesis to the home. It speaks to him of an older, more elemental life. It is a place where he is master, where standards other than those of cleanliness and neatness and newness apply.
To our man, the harsh monosyllable – ‘shed’ – has a comforting, spiritual resonance. His secular self acknowledges that it is a dumping ground for tools, machinery, teetering towers of old flowerpots, cobweb-festooned stacks of garden chairs with rotted canvas seats, bags of Growmore, packets of ant powder, bottles of weedkiller with tops that will not turn, brushes rigid with ancient creosote, drums of unruly wire netting with last autumn’s leaves held crispy in the mesh, loops of wire hanging from rusty nails, saws with rusting teeth which he has intended to oil and clean these past five years, and a great accumulation of other relics.
But to him it is much more than a mere storage space. It is a sanctum, a private place where his soul is nourished. It should have the quiet of a chapel, although in a good cause that may be fractured by electric drill or thumping hammer blows. There is much dust, but it lies still, and the old flies caught in the cobwebs in the corners are undisturbed. The shed is like his mind, crammed with the forgotten, the half-forgotten and the redundant. In its recesses teeter piles of junk, which – if ever retrieved – at once spill their old stories. It is a place to pause, to contemplate, to sniff that rich, musty old smell, to pick up things and put them down again, to arrange and rearrange. It is a place with a force of its own; which he respects, because each time he rolls up his sleeves and becomes extremely dirty imposing order on it, it reverts in its own time to disorder. That is as it should be.
On this morning, our man does not linger among the shadows. He has pressing business with a machine in green. He finds his gloves, slips his hands into their familiar griminess, grasps the well-worn handles, and drags it forth into the sunlight. It may be a modest contraption, requiring no more than a steady push for it to do its work. It may be electric and murmur as it goes, or be powered by petrol, and roar. The motion of its blades may be forward or circular. It may be a foot wide, or four. It may have cost ten pounds at a jumble sale, or three thousand from a showroom. Its common characteristics are its colour – it is, or should be, green – and its function, which is to cut grass.
Although the fundamentals of the ensuing ritual do not vary much, the mood of the devotees does, in a way dictated by the condition of the machine. This has little to do with its cost or quality, but rather the manner in which it was put to rest at the end of the previous mowing season. Broadly speaking, there is a gulf between those who, recognizing that the season is at an end and that another will inevitably come, clean, oil, repair and cover their mowers; and those who do not. I make no moral judgement here, which is as well, for I belong in the second category. It is the case that those in the second category would often wish themselves in the first, while the converse does not apply.
That futile longing is usually at its most intense on this Saturday morning in April. Those who tended properly to their machines when the leaves were tumbling last November can now regard them with a virtuous smile. The metalwork gleams, the pale tops of the spark plugs wink, the cutters are dark and smooth and sharp (for they have been taken to the workshop in early winter, when they received prompt and unhurried care). This machine is primed and ready.
Contrast this to the shame of us in the second category. We view our machine, not with a self-satisfied smirk, but a grimace of horror. The plug is buried under a clod of slimy, decomposed vegetable matter. There is still grass in the box, mixed with dark, rotted leaves. The cutters are rimmed with accretions of hard earth and fossilized herbage; and, worse, when you scrape this off, you find the cutting edge itself mutilated and split by collisions with stones. You remember: how you swore, but a few months back, that this time you would cherish your loyal servant and attend to its needs; how you finished