Plot 29: A Memoir: LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD AND WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE. Allan Jenkins

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       August

      AUGUST 3. Plot 29. Two days of hoeing, digging, raking – clearing weeds from Mary’s beds. Her broad beans have gone over, pods fat and ripe, hanging heavy, waiting for her. The onion bed is also overgrown. Greedy calendula has taken over, with sycamore seedlings in support. Bindweed by the wheelbarrow-load has been creeping in, smothering other plants. Mary’s cold frame is nurturing weed. Attack is the best defence.

      Bindweed to the waste bin, calendula to the compost, seedy perpetual spinach too. I clear the frame and lay out a sack for onions and shallots. It is sweaty work in sultry weather but we need clean beds to sow. September is only four weeks away, the sun is starting to dip, sap is beginning to slow.

      By teatime Sunday, I am sitting, hands a bit torn, shirt a bit sticky, when I hear my name behind me. Mary’s standing there, a little tired. I show off the beds like a proud schoolboy handing in his homework. She smiles. We talk about her crop rotation. She has a plan at home she says she will send me. We admire the runner beans and the sweet peas I have just finished tying (the sweetest-smelling job). The pumpkin bed is thriving. Her courgettes are flowering and the rest not far behind. She gathers herbs and rocket and beans. I press her to take some of our chard and red-hearted lettuce. Howard and his family are on holiday and I am daunted by how lush everything is. Mary hands me seed to sow. I’ll be back in a couple of days.

      1968. It is decided I should go to boarding school. Plymouth children’s department will pay and there will be a scholarship. I am mostly messing about at Kingsbridge but coming top or near it in exams. My French master hates me for it. My writing is sloppy, a source of shame to Dad, whose copperplate is immaculate. The teacher makes me rewrite my French exercise book overnight. It starts neatly until I see it is too slow. He slippers me the next day. Punishment is measured in strikes of three or six, with the teacher’s choice of weapon (he favours a gym shoe) on your non-writing hand. The notebook is worth six, the small man almost jumping as he hits. After he’s finished, I smirk my contempt. He has me hold out my right hand for another six. I walk back to my seat in angry tears, girls are looking up at me, sad.

      It isn’t just schooling. Mum and Dad are worried about sex, about me spending time with girls in their bedrooms listening to Jimi Hendrix. Dad loathes Hendrix, his black sexuality. The girls’ allure is almost as much in the soft colours and fabrics of their pop-postered rooms (mine is austere, almost military) as the thought I can slip a hand in underwear. Mum particularly seems obsessed by the idea of sex. Maybe it is the fear of my feral other mother. Christopher, meanwhile, contents himself with football and fighting, hanging out at the village pub.

      Changes are coming, decisions have been made. The threats to send us back to Plymouth are more relentless. It is over. We are out. Boarding school and the army are presented as Mum and Dad’s only options for our future. I like the idea at first. It sounds like an adventure. I am good at new people and places. I have practice.

      Christopher pleads to stay on at school for agricultural college, his grades have improved every year. He loves our neighbour’s farm and farming, is dug in deep in the village. He belongs here like no one else. I am too smart-mouthed, too strange, Lilian and Dudley too stand-offish. But Dad is insistent. Christopher is packed off early to the army. He will never forget or forgive them and I am not sure I do. In the summer of ’68, as the rest of the world seems set to change, our family fractures. It is sudden, savage, the shift.

      AUGUST 5, 7.30AM. An early weekday visit to the allotment. I keep a shirt in the shed for watering or weeding, in case I have a meeting first thing and don’t want to be wearing mud. I am here to sow, easier in the morning air. I cut sticks and string, give the bed another hoe. There will be short rows, some with Mary’s seed and a couple of cavolo nero, lettuce, red mustard and rocket. A blackbird lays the soundtrack and a robin keeps me company. A few feet away, pigeons hang in the skeleton tree like vultures waiting for something to die. Within an hour or so the sowing is done. I water it in. The forecast is for rain but I can’t resist soaking the rest of the plot. The beans and squash are greedy and it relaxes me before the bus to work (no time to walk now). Mary will have her autumn leaves. I wander around, reluctant to leave. The corn looks as if it is ready to eat, the cobs are fat, but they will have to wait till Howard is back. A young black cat, no collar, passes by nervously.

      1968. Battisborough House is set back from a cliff not far from Plymouth. It is a Kurt Hahn school, the Outward Bound man, whose most famous school is Gordonstoun, where Prince Charles has just been head boy. Its reputation is based on character-building. No one goes to Battisborough for its academic excellence, though it is there in its small class size and dedicated teachers. It is founded on a Germanic ideal crossed with an English public-school ethos. There is emphasis on activities. We wear two uniforms: navy blue for the morning and grey for after tea. No ties or blazers but open-neck shirts and sweaters and corduroy shorts (tough if, like me, you think shorts are for summer or primary school), long flannels for church. There are no girls, except a couple of teachers’ daughters who live on the grounds. I wonder if they are ever as longed for again. I date one, the same age as me. We kiss. I rub her skirt and shirt. There is to be no beating, an ethos from the headmaster, David Byatt, who leads by example. I am to test this resolve. The boys who are good at boarding school are the ones unbroken by starting there aged seven (there are, of course, casualties), followed by the boys who start at 11. The odds are against boys who arrive aged 14 because they cannot live at home and still call themselves part of a family.

      I love my first year here, though it is at Battisborough I discover my Devon accent, a shock when the Sony machine replays my village burr, less of a shock when other boys mimic it. There is a maximum intake of 60 pupils, though it is down to 36, little more than a class at Kingsbridge. I absorb it all like tissue, the English classes of maybe eight, with a teacher who is interested. ‘You like Herman Hesse, try Günter Grass.’ Wives also teach. I am impressionable, eager, almost desperate to learn. It looks as if it will work. I jump a year in English, Maths and French (no psychopathic slippering here, a less messy exercise book). Every afternoon there are sports, though I am less keen on this. I hate rugby in winter. There are other activities – tennis at the courts of the local landowner’s house or gardening. I tend plants and trees and hide behind rhododendrons to smoke Player’s No 6, the schoolkids’ cigarette of choice. But the afternoons I like best involve cross-country running, unleashed like a lurcher over cliffs, across beaches and along my beloved south Devon estuaries, very nearly free. Battisborough is also where I learn more subtle social lessons, that class and cars matter. Frugality can be suspect. At the end of term a procession of vehicles comes to pick us up – wide Mercedes, fat American convertibles, and the air-cooled splutter of Dudley’s little Fiat 500, not yet the cult car it will become. But I am happy, I know I can adapt. I have done it before.

      AUGUST 8. Glorious. Crimson sky. Every day, autumn tightens its grip. Timing is important, crops for winter have to be established before the light and warmth fade too far and energy retreats. СКАЧАТЬ