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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 with him, no standing out. We are learning to be invisible, at the expense of Chris’s hand. It doesn’t work, of course. Christopher is good at being hit.

      1962. I like to scare myself as a child. There is a tree in the darkest part of the lane behind the house where I like to linger. It is tall, maybe malevolent, its branches and bark twisted like something from Tolkien. Christopher always hurries past (though he is braver than me with bullies). I stop and wait, savouring the moment of fear as scary branches wave in the wind. By about 10 or 11 years old, I have graduated to an abandoned badger sett I find on one of my long walks along the river. It is buried into the bank. I crawl deep inside, under the exposed roots, the heavy Devon clay. Burrow in as far as I can. I lie there daring the roof to fall, to bury me in red soil. The appeal is enhanced by the feeling I might never be found, the thought I can just disappear. After maybe half an hour of lying there I go home for lunch. By age 12, I get kicks from a piece of shaley cliff where the path had been eroded. I look down at the white water and rocks, and slide. You can’t walk it, do it carefully. The only route is surrender, to guide the drop to a piece of broken path with your feet. I love to let go, see if I can cross to the other side, stand where no one else would dare. I never do it with anyone else. Secrecy is the thing. I grow out of it when I become interested in girls.

      1963. Lilian’s mother has come to live (or more accurately, die) with us. Christopher has to give up his bedroom and move back in with me. It’s not going well. He is not happy and when he is not happy we fight and I lose. At least he is outdoors all day, while I am obliged to stay in and read to her. She sends me to the village to buy her bottled stout. Mum and Dad are teetotal, the only booze the Christmas cherry liqueur and Harvey’s Bristol Cream on the sideboard for guests who never come.

      Mum and Dad don’t read, except Dudley’s local Western Morning News. There is only a scant handful of ancient books in the house. The old grandma is a bit bad-tempered and I don’t like the smell of her or her beer, but I am fascinated by her age, her drab clothes, her thin, lined mouth and the thought that she is near to death. So we sit in the curtain-drawn gloom in the summer afternoon and I read her Heidi. She is 84, from deep in the nineteenth century, like my Victorian stamps and coins, too far away for a small boy to comprehend. She dies one night while we are asleep. We don’t get to see her or go to her funeral, though we are allowed to join the tea with Lilian’s good tableware. Christopher is soon moved back to his room.

      1964. Mum cuts our hair with clippers: old school, hand action, blunt. She is always snagging our necks. She is worse at cutting a fringe. I think she is nervous. So are we. Christopher screams like he is being butchered. He checks for blood. He hates sitting still. I think we are all relieved when crew cuts come in and we can go to the barber in Kingsbridge. They let me take a sneak through Parade and pore over its pictures of topless girls. They also have Health and Efficiency – smaller, less sexy pages of naked ping pong in a naturist magazine. I leave feeling almost a teenager, splashed with spritz.

      JULY 23. Of course I am now concerned about the baby squash and courgettes in the heatwave. The weather has been baking for days, so I am back on the first bus with today’s bleary-eyed postal workers. It’s bright, the start of a maybe 30-degree day, but there’s cool in the early-morning air, the first spectral tendril of autumn. The plot will need water and I can be back home before breakfast. Bill is there when I arrive, communing with his allotment, waiting for the day. We talk a little about the benefits of growing seed at home. It gives them a head start, he says. A heavy wave of sweet pea hits me as I pass the corner by the plot. A pigeon is feasting on the elder at the end of the plot, flapping its wings anxiously to maintain its greedy balance. The berries are turning now. Autumn won’t be long. Mary’s runner bean wigwam is flecked with flower and the bush beans are breaking through. I am more worried about the borders. Bindweed is creeping its way into the strawberry bed and the lovage is being tethered to the ground like Gulliver, sporting parasitic blooms. I grab a handful of beans. I have been bitten again and am starting to scratch. I soak the pumpkin bed, grinning at the new growth. Watering may be the best feeling in gardening. By 7am I am back on the bus, refreshed. I need breakfast and a bath.

      SUMMER 1964. I have an appointment to be beaten. It is my choice. Dudley had been renting the field to the farmer for his cows to pasture but some escaped. It is our fault. Christopher and I have made a den in the hedge, a hideout for outlaw brothers after robbing a stagecoach or train. But the cows broke through and one became trapped in the river mud. I remember it lowing down the valley as the tractor tries to pull it out. It is freed eventually, it doesn’t drown, but the farmer’s nearly lost a beast and Dad is incandescent. He decides we can choose our punishment: to be caned or to miss TV for a week. No great loss, I think. We have BBC until 7pm, Dixon of Dock Green on Saturdays, maybe Doctor Who. The only person who can pick up ITV is the local coroner, who is given dispensation for a giant mast in the garden for his aerial, maybe because he spends his days with the dead.

      Christopher goes for the TV option. I СКАЧАТЬ