JULY 17. The temperature has been in the high twenties for the past three days and I have promised Mary I’ll water. She is taking a break in Cornwall and I want the plot to look well in time for her return. Howard and I head up before breakfast. I love the light at this time, fruit trees and bushes backlit by the low early sun. Our neighbour Jeffrey is an American banker with a passion for English cottage gardens. His fennel and hollyhocks are two metres tall. Bees stream from the next-door hives like Star Wars fighter squadrons. A fledgling robin, head cocked, watches us. Red amaranth and bull’s blood chard stand in contrast to the other, younger lime-green leaves. All is right in allotment world. Howard waters while I take more calendula, mildew at its base a warning signal of autumn. Time for the borders to breathe, time for beans. Of course we have too many (the seed finally pulled though). Feeler vines outstretch like a drowning man’s hand. Howard is buttoned up against bugs but still they get through. The anxious scratching starts.
SEPTEMBER 1959. The village school test for TB has alarmed Mum and Dad and me. My left arm is very swollen, with red streaks running down. And the doctor thinks I am ‘rickety’. Christopher is OK, which only means more mystery. Where was I? Where was he? The first clue we maybe hadn’t always been together. But why our amnesia?
Rickets. A Dickensian world away from the family life the Drabbles have been building. No vitamin D and now I am touched by TB. Capital letters writ large of lack of care. Where was family, where was safety, where was my other mum? It had been beaten into us at the home, this cross we carry. We are either unlovable or the cursed brood of an unloving mother. Either way, we need to be quarantined from the herd. Mums are meant to be like Mary, a loving Christian icon clutching her baby to her breast.
For the next 10 years I have an annual X-ray, looking for lesions. My sunken chest pressed against cold metal, standing on tiptoe on a box, straining chin on top. Would my past incubate? Would it return to disturb me? I have a large spoonful of cod liver oil every morning now, shuddering as it sluices down. I also have a memory of being given raw liver, but this may be elaboration or invention, a common failing for kids like me.
I invented my father once. There was a man who regularly used to watch as we played on the roundabout in the park at the back of the Plymouth home. I told everyone he was my dad. (I didn’t say he was Christopher’s; maybe my brother wasn’t there. My memories are sketchy and episodic, pixelated like worn VHS tape. No one to top them up.) The mystery man was watching over me, waiting, I told the other kids. He would be coming soon to take me away when he had found a place for us to stay. I didn’t understand when he didn’t come.
JULY 19, SATURDAY. It’s sweltering after two nights of thunderstorms, with temperatures hitting 32°C. There’s no more need to water, at least for now. I hit the plot in the late afternoon to check on progress. I have been sowing Mary’s ‘pumpkin plot’ with squash and courgette seed and I’m happy to see new plants popping through. I fork up a few potatoes, blushing Red Duke of York. As a child, I loved to dig the potatoes for weekend lunch, lifting them in the hour before eating. They were always King Edward’s, boiled with apple mint when new, diligently scraped and served with salty butter. We grew peas, runner beans, strawberries (Dudley’s favourite) but it was from potatoes I learned the joy of growing food for the table, taking as much as you need for the meal and no more.
JULY 20. Back on the first bus, early Sunday morning. The success of the squash seed has inspired me to weed the pit and move Mary’s bags of manure. It’s not yet 7am and I am smeared with insect repellent and horse shit that has liquified in the heat. It is steamy, mucky work as I stack the sacks. I hoe through the bed, move a stray calendula and sow courgette seed. I am prone to over-sow, almost as though my faith in things is thin and I still don’t quite believe in miracles. (I do. I think I almost am one.) I weed through Mary’s beetroot, beans and chard and cull the choking strawberry runners. The first beans are ready on the first wigwam: blue Blauhilde and Trail of Tears. I pick a handful to add to the potatoes. We will have them steamed and served with butter, just like Mum and Dad. My boots and trousers are smeared with manure. My shirt is soaked with sweat. My hair is sticking to my head. I am happy. A smart matron with two blazered schoolgirls pulls them closer to her as I pass. I am not dressed for Sunday society or even for the bus. Hampstead should have a tradesmen’s entrance.
JULY 22. Each garden in my life has its own identity, fulfils a different function, but the oldest and perhaps purest is the roof terrace at home. It was tiled with asbestos and packed with junk and dead bicycles when we moved in. I went a little mad at first, turning it into a country-cottage garden above an urban street. It was a riot of colour and contrast. The walls were trestled, none left bare. Roses rambled and added scent. Jasmine too. Early- and late-flowering clematis came next. We covered the floor in marble pebbles, brought in a weathered teak table and chairs. We eat dinner there on a summer evening, drink tea in our coats with the newspapers in winter. The roof terrace keeps me connected to the countryside. It’s an oasis of calm in Kentish Town. Pots are planted for colour, always brighter in summer.
Its identity has changed, matured with us. First to go were the trestles, the climbing plants and the once-white stones. Flowers became more individual, picked for personality, but there are always dahlias. Dudley thought them ‘common’ but I love them for their myriad shapes and strong colours as they ease the shift into autumn. There is a Magnolia stellata because its flowers signal early spring but mostly the roof terrace is a gateway to our piece of sky, a place to potter outside.
1959. We have our own bedroom, our own bed. But the truest sign of home is our dressing gowns. To be worn watching TV or after a Sunday-night bath, shiny for the new school week, downstairs for a goodnight peck, ours are brown wool, plain with a piped edge. My cord is blue and white, Chris’s is red and white like a barber’s pole, the colours of Manchester United, his favourite football team. Local Plymouth Argyll lose too often for his liking.
1960. Seven-year-old Christopher looks like Alfred E. Neuman from Mad magazine: gap-toothed, freckle-faced, wide cheeky grin. He is growing. The past is beginning to fade. He has slipped its grip. He is made for village life. It is more forgiving than Mum and Dad. He rediscovers his appetite. He comes in from outside (he is always outside) to wolf down fuel for the afternoon. Roaming like a puppy, seeing what he can find. He is what he says on the tin: an eager kid who deserves a break, who’ll adore you if you adore him. It almost works, in the heady days before Lilian and Dudley’s caustic disappointment becomes more marked. He is alert, senses it long before I do.
Christopher tells me stories at night as we lie excited in our matching beds with matching candlewick bedspreads. I am jealous of his teddy bear with its stitched black nose and articulated limbs. I have a stuffed white Scotty dog, its legs too stiff and short to hug. We wear matching Ladybird Cosijamas, fleeced inside, no strings or buttons, almost American. We can’t believe our luck sometimes, like we have landed on the moon. Safety like we had dreamed of, a family like we’d hoped. The storytelling lasts about a year, not every night but nearly as often as I ask. They are mostly adventure yarns: pirates. I am big on pirates. The river calls me from outside our window, occasional small boats elevated into three-masted ships, skull and crossbones flying, bearded ear-ringed men, heavily armed, sabres between their teeth. I am an impressionable child, overexcited in the summer light. Christopher is kind. We are close.
1961. Christopher is left-handed. Neither Dudley nor the school approves. Both try to train it out of him. It is suspect in some way, ‘other’, an unnatural, un-Christian thing. The teacher hits his left hand with a wooden pencil case. He walks up behind him. Sometimes nothing is said. It is as though left is a link to the wild, to be suppressed. With Dudley, it is just ‘different’. Fitting in is a thing