This then is my journal and childhood memoir, though my memories are fractured like my family. So I immerse myself in the plot, in nature and nurture. I lose myself in rapture. I grow fresh peas for my peace of mind.
It’s not all about healing, of course, though it’s there in abundance like beans. Sometimes it is the simple joy of growing food and flowers and sharing with people you love.
Allotment family
Mary, Howard, Annie, Bill, Jeffrey, John, Ruth
Family
Henriette: wife
Christopher, Lesley, Caron, Susan, Michael, Mandy, Adeboye, Tina: brothers and sisters
Lilian and Dudley: mum and dad
Sheila: mother
Ray: father
Billy and Doris: grandparents
Terry, Tony, Colin, Mike, Joyce: uncles and aunt
Allan, Alan, Peter: me
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
Seamus Heaney, Digging
It is the month of early visits, of waking before 5am when the plot calls. The time of growth and hazel wigwams. Time to be concerned about seed. I lie awake – or sit at work – imagining the tender seedlings at the mercy of wind, rain, sun, slugs. Will they make it through infancy? With my help, maybe.
By 6am I am at the allotment, the air soft, the light too, the robin, maybe the fox, my only companions. The baby beans, only two leaves tall, are vulnerable now. Will they make it past the snails lying in wait like bullies? Within two weeks they will be free, snaking up hazel poles in a speeded-up film. Next month they’ll be two metres high, stems entwined, feeling for the next stick like rock climbers on a difficult face. Flowers will start to grow, pods begin to form. But for now I stand on the sidelines, a parent on sports day, calling urgent encouragement. Soon, like kids, they will be old enough to fend for themselves but for now at least I am here, not so much to do anything – the bed is hoed, weeded, pretty pristine – but as a friend, odd as this sounds, so they know they are not alone.
I learned, I think, to love from seed, much as other kids had puppies, kittens, fluffy toys. But it was the hopeful helplessness of seed that called, something vulnerable to care for. The urge to protect, to be there, was strong, like I couldn’t be for my brother Christopher when I left him alone in the children’s home; for my sister Lesley, out of harm’s way, I thought, with her dad, or Caron, whom my mother would abandon while she searched for new men, new sex, excitement.
SATURDAY 6AM. Sunlight has not yet hit the plot. Bill is sleeping less well since his wife died, so he comes here to kill time until Costa Coffee opens at 8am and he meets with his fellow insomniacs. His is the tidiest plot, manicured almost, everything neat in formal rows, plants perfectly spaced, celery blanching in brown paper, runner beans climbing up curly wire, blackcurrant bushes shrouded by nets. His seedlings are grown at home and transplanted into regimented rills. It wouldn’t work for me. I obsessively grow from seed in situ, needing the magical moment when an anxious scan along a row is rewarded by broken soil, a tiny stem breaking through like a baby turtle released from the egg before its dash to the sea. It has been two weeks since I have been here, and the salads have overgrown. Rows of rocket flowers shaped like ships’ propellers, land cress crowned with yellow spikes. The beans are under siege from slugs. Many inch-high stems are decimated, stunted, the baby-turtle equivalent of gulls swooping yards from the shore. Some have been simply obliterated. There is a sappy, fast growth to much of the plant life, perfect for predatory snails. Something has stripped a broad bean pod, though there are still many left. I walk through dew-soaked leaves and throw a few slugs over the wall. I will return later to pull much of the salad and let light in on the denser growth but the afternoon plan is to clear more of Mary’s beds.
Plot 29 belongs to Mary Wood, who has shared it with my friend Howard Sooley and me since 2009, when Don, her husband, died. Not because she couldn’t cope with the space (she is a gifted gardener) but because it produces more food, she says, than she can eat. Mary is poorly at the moment. As her energy levels have dropped, the weeds, the wild, have pressed in, strangling the plot. I am here to clear her green manure. Narcotised bees are everywhere, seemingly overdosing on nectar. They fall stoned to the soil as I clear. Sycamore seedlings infest the bed, the overwintered chard is blown, a metre tall, menacing nettles taller. I work quickly, scything, clearing, restoring order. It feels important now that Mary’s plot doesn’t also succumb to attack.
I clear the bed, transplanting a couple of short rows of six-inch chards, sowing another of beetroot seed. I return later to talk to her. She is here less than in previous years but sunshine and a need to replant sweet peas has drawn her out. She has a chair on the allotment now, and sits more often. We talk about what she wants to grow this year, and where. I cut pea sticks for a row at the bottom of the bed. With little time to work our part of the plot, I sow nasturtium on the border.
My gardening life, in some ways my life, begins with this simple seed. Most of my memories start at the age of five, perhaps because there are photos from then, perhaps because almost everything before then was chaos to be peeled away later in the therapist’s chair and in talks with members of my ‘birth family’ (a sly phrase we have been taught to say instead of ‘real’), when I found them many years later. Perhaps simply because that is where safety starts. With Lilian and Dudley Drabble.
There is a photo of my brother Christopher and me with Lilian as young boys. Christopher is lopsidedly smiling, proudly holding his new ginger kitten. It almost matches his hair. Lilian is crouched with Tonka, her Siamese cat. I have my arm around her, looking a little warily into the camera. The boys’ clothes are comically big. Not ‘you will grow into them’ big, but clothes bought while the intended children aren’t (have never been) there. We were small for our age. But these are new clothes for a new life in our new home with our new family.
Lilian and Dudley married in their forties. They met when she nursed his dying father. Too old to have children, they at first looked to adopt a baby girl but were denied, perhaps because of age. It was a loss Lilian would always feel. She wanted someone all her own, someone she could mould and make, who would wear dresses. There was somehow always a sadness we couldn’t assuage.
Meanwhile, the Drabbles offered respite to ‘damaged’ children at their picture-postcard post office on Dartmoor. Christopher and I spent a weekend there, shooting bows and arrows, learning to say please and thank you (we were ‘guttural’ Dudley would later delight in telling me).
Plymouth children’s homes were feral then. Snarling packs sniffing out fears, tears, blood. Not always only the boys.
We learned a lesson about caste here. First, of course, there were the Brahmins: the ‘Famous Five’ families with their normal ‘mum and dad’ (small words still able, occasionally, to conjure black holes of unhappiness).
The adopted were the ‘chosen ones’, mostly children of the over-fertile underclass taken in by the infertile middle class. The unworthy become worthy, if you will; a shift in status almost impossible to imagine – a parole from purgatory.
Foster families were holding pens – a sifting, shifting, near-family life spent waiting. Here we would practise being appreciative and loving, living under the fear or hope or threat of the knock on the door. A dread visit from the social worker,