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

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      Sarah turns up from the advertising department of the Guardian where I work. Who knew wellingtons came with high heels? She helps me spread five tonnes of topsoil we’ve brought in to slow the slope. She learns to kill slugs and snails. She drives 300 miles with me to pick up a lorry load of cow manure. ‘Horses’ energy is too fast for vegetables but fine for flowers, you need cow’, was the opaque advice from Jane Scotter. The manure is a gift from a farmer who had answered a plea put out into the biodynamic community. It’s harder than you think to find organic cow muck in London. We drive back delicately in our hired, loaded-down flat-back truck (we have been a bit vague about what we want it for, failing to mention manure). We are barely making it up the hills, laughing, almost choking, in a heavy fug of farmyard.

      The slope is tamed now, the soil is fed. We are ready to grow.

      The Danish agricultural museum has sent us ‘lost’ seed, including Tagetes Ildkonge (for Christopher), the deepest-red, most velvety marigolds we have ever seen. Sarah and I plant a large bed of perpetual spinach. We have a wigwam of fragrant sweet peas and another of purple-podded Trail of Tears. The tagetes grow to a thick hedge. We have herbs, fennel, flowers, beetroot, carrots, kale, mustards, green manure. I set a national competition for school gardening clubs to design a scarecrow and have the magazine fashion team build and dress the winner. Soon a six-foot scarlet pirate, complete with eye-patch, hat and silvery sword, guards against the resident pigeons. They ignore him. We plant an apple tree, a plum tree, gooseberry and currant bushes – just like Dad. Everything we sow grows lush like rainforest, as though its energy had been imprisoned and is now unleashed. The allotment is happy and so are we, but I can’t bear to thin and throw the weakest tomatoes – maybe I identify with their need, preferring to give them more light and food and love. Soon we have 20 plants, tall and fruiting in the sunniest spot at the top of the plot. We don’t know blight is endemic on the site and that nurturing rain also spreads disease. Their leaves start to brown and buckle. The tomatoes too. Seedlings I have nursed from birth are sickening and dying, and there is nothing I can do. Throughout the site, tomato plants are failing. The weakest die first, of course, their fruits blistered, their stems and leaves discoloured. Seasoned allotment holders strip the leaves and spray them, like a field hospital for failing plants. Still they fail. Like plague before penicillin. In the end we pull them all and cart their corpses to the green bin by the gate. No compost renewal now. A gardening lesson in love and loss. But one I am reluctant to learn.

      SUMMER 1973. My first garden in London is in Elgin Avenue, a street of squats near Notting Hill Gate. I am 19, working for a garden centre in Kensington, selling window-box flowers to posh west London ladies. Here, it seems, everyone buys their gardens ready made, no time to wait. This is gardening as competitive sport. I have become skilled at persuading neighbours to upgrade over each other. If one has bought red geraniums and a three-foot window box in terracotta, I’ll sell next door a three-and-a-half-foot in stone and with better, bigger flowers. No one grows from seed. There is a lot of waste. This is new to me. I start carting home pots of dried-out azalea rescued from the bins. Soon I have buckets of rehydrating bushes inside and outside the flat, front and back. I nurture my waifs back to life. As the garden fills up, I start planting out the rest. The speed freaks don’t much mind as long as they don’t have to water. I spread down the street as fast as the dealers spread up. We have azaleas, geraniums, pelargoniums, magnolia, a bay tree slightly bent out of shape. There should be an award for the best-dressed street of squats.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ