Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  Running this nursery has always been a precarious business, for the Wharfe breaks its banks every few years and plants are quite likely to be uprooted and carried off downstream when the waters are in full spate.

  Arthur Baxter would work here in between doing another job. You could see him at the weekends – a burly, fair-haired man in baggy khaki shorts and a singlet if the weather was warm – planting wallflowers and sweet williams for autumn sale in the raised beds of dark alluvial earth that he’d built to accommodate them. He’d be bent double among the rows with a trowel, picking his way carefully between the plants in his large hobnailed boots.

  He grew alpines in white plastic drinking cups and sold them for a few pence each. Anyone in Ilkley who had just made a rockery with lumps of local stone could plant it up for a couple of pounds with Arthur’s generously priced alpines.

  It seemed to me an idyllic existence. Arthur never said much. He seemed rather shy. But he’d smile and offer advice if you asked, to make sure that you had success with your plants when you got them home.

  The two nurseries inspired me to open my own. I had no money, and anyway, I was far too young to have a ‘proper’ nursery, but the garden, and my polythene greenhouse, seemed like a good start.

  I found a piece of timber in Dad’s supply of offcuts in the cellar, brought home as kindling wood for the fire in the front room, and I made a sign with my Flowmaster felt-tip pen. ‘Corncrake Nursery,’ it said, and I nailed it to our rickety garden gate.

  I might have joined the Wharfedale Naturalists’ Society, but I’d never seen a corncrake. I didn’t even know what one looked like. But it sounded right – country-like and rural – and it gave our tiny back garden an air of importance.

  I did broach the subject of having beds of earth where I could grow things in rows and sell them come the autumn, but Mum was too partial to her hydrangea to allow me to do that, and she also liked the patch of grass on which she could park her kitchen buffet on sunny days for her morning cup of milky coffee. You couldn’t do that between rows of wallflowers and sweet williams.

  So I settled, instead, for growing pot plants in my greenhouse, and taking more cuttings of Cookie’s spider plants and coleuses and busy Lizzies. I decided round about now that I would be a gardener when I grew up. It was really the only thing I was good at, and the enjoyment of raising my own plants gave me a thrill that nothing else could match.

  Mum said, ‘I think you should be a propagator.’

  I wasn’t at all sure what a propagator was, but thought that it sounded a bit technical.

  Mum said, ‘He’s someone who grows plants from cuttings and seeds. Someone who raises plants.’

  I liked the sound of that, but thought that with a name like ‘propagator’ it might turn out to be a bit beyond me. I’d be happy just being a gardener.

  I told my dad that evening.

  ‘What do you want to be a gardener for?’

  ‘Because I like it.’

  He didn’t look convinced. ‘I think you’d be better off with a trade.’

  ‘But gardening is a trade,’ I protested.

  ‘I don’t think you can get very far, though. And there’s not much money in it.’

  I let the matter rest. There was no point in carrying on. Anyway, Dad hadn’t said no, he’d just not sounded very encouraging. And now he was reading his paper.

  I went back out into the garden and tried to think of a way of making my nursery pay. Perhaps then I could prove to Dad that there was money in it. But as yet I had nothing to sell – only the plants that I would be able to take cuttings from, and if I sold those I’d have nothing. It seemed as though I was stuck.

  And then I noticed the mint. Apart from the ‘Dorothy Perkins’ that grew over the chain-link fence at the end of the garden, it was the only plant that really thrived in our garden. (Even Mum’s hydrangea had a bit of a struggle.) There was a great swathe of mint growing out from the privet hedge, and it was spearmint – the tangy sort that nips at your nose when you squeeze it between your fingers. I checked it for holes. It was fairly clean without too much slug or caterpillar damage, and it had grown to about a foot high now. Yes, that would do.

  I made an amendment to my sign. In the gap below ‘Corncake Nursery’ I wrote in felt-tip pen ‘Mint 1d a bunch’. I stood back to admire my handiwork. It wasn’t the neatest piece of sign writing but as it was already nailed to the gate it would have to do.

  The following morning I got up early to do my watering in the little greenhouse, and left for school at half past eight, checking with Mum that she would be in all day if I had any customers for the mint.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a penny a bunch. I’ve put a tobacco tin by the gate.’

  ‘All right, go on, then, get off.’

  All day I wondered what I would find when I came home. A tin full of pennies might be being a bit optimistic, but three or four pence would be handy. At least it would buy a few seeds and allow me to increase my stock a bit faster. And it was the time for new potatoes, so people would need mint to drop in the pan when they cooked them. I congratulated myself on this piece of logic. It seemed that my timing was perfect. The mint was also growing fast at this time of year and would quickly renew itself.

  Through maths and composition I speculated on the outcome. At ten to four, I bounded out of school and up the road to check on my success.

  Before I climbed the back steps to the kitchen, I dropped my bag and opened the garden gate. The tin was not there. And neither was the mint. It had all gone. There was no sign of it at all. Crikey! So many people must have wanted it that we had run out. The tin would have been so full of pennies that my mum must have taken it inside for safe keeping.

  I jumped down the garden steps and bounded in through the back door to find Mum. She was standing over the stove, stirring a pan of custard. I was surprised that she didn’t look a bit happier, bearing in mind how successful we had been.

  ‘Did a lot of people come?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, without looking up.

  ‘But the mint. It’s all gone.’

  ‘I know.’ She raised her eyes and lifted the pan of custard off the gas. ‘Sorry, Sparrow. I’m afraid we had a bit of a disaster.’

  I wondered what could have happened. Normally it was I who had the disasters, not Mum.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, pouring the hot custard over a bowl of sliced bananas, ‘you know Mr Wright – from the bottom house on the other side of the road?’

  I confirmed that I did. Billy Wright was about ninety and was always busy doing something – mending people’s fences or garden gates, or digging a patch of their gardens for a few bob. You could see him at all hours in his orange-brown bib-and-brace overalls, worn navy-blue jacket and flat cap, pushing his bike to his next location. He had a squeaky voice and a white moustache, and spoke in such a broad Yorkshire accent that sometimes you could hardly understand him.

  ‘Well, Mr Wright came and knocked on the door and said, “Is it right that your lad’s selling mint?”’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said that yes, you were, but that as it grew so easily I didn’t think you’d really want to charge him a penny a bunch.’

  ‘Oh, Mum!’

  ‘Now don’t interrupt. Mr Wright said that he wanted some, but that it was only right he should pay the going rate. So he gave me the penny.’ She put her hand into the pocket of her pinny, pulled out the penny, and handed it to me. ‘Here you are.’

  I took the coin and turned it over in my hand. It was, indeed, a penny. A single penny.

  ‘But the whole clump has gone.’

  Mum looked apologetic. ‘I know. Tight old so-and-so. I suppose I should have stood over him while he took it, but I never thought. He dug up the whole clump and took it to plant in somebody’s garden.’

  And so it was that any commercial horticultural aspirations I
might have had evaporated on that one summer’s day, thanks to Billy Wright and the disappearing mint.

  I decided, in the end, that if I wanted to be a gardener, then I might as well do it for the love of it, rather than for any significant financial gain. My dad came round to the idea in the end, but I can’t help thinking that the Billy Wright episode proved he had a point.

  The Wharfedale Music Festival is famed locally for its high standard of musicianship and the fact that it is a great showcase for local talent. I never appeared there, though I did help out each year as a parks department apprentice, with the floral decorations at the front of the stage.

  Occasionally, on the last night, there would be a family outing to hear the finalists perform and to join in with the singing of ‘Jerusalem’ – my dad always singing loud enough to embarrass my sister and me.

  That I never learned to play the piano is a lifelong regret, and I lay the blame fairly and squarely at the feet of my mother.

  The Piano

  We never had the luxury of a hallway. Not on our side of the street. Our front door opened directly on to the sitting room, which meant that when the wind was in the west, Dad’s newspaper could be blown out of his hands. For the first few years a sideboard stood against the left-hand wall as you came in. Somewhere to drop the keys in a glass bowl next to the clock. It was a graceless sort of coffin-on-legs; a treacly dark oak with sculpted fleur-de-lys motifs of dull copper attached to the two doors at either end – a nod in the direction of William Morris. But only a slight one. It lasted about as long as most of the furniture in our house, thanks to the proximity of Dacre, Son & Hartley’s saleroom at the bottom of the street. After a couple of years, three at most, my mother would decide it was time for a change, and swap a set of chairs, a table or a sideboard for something new, which was actually old.

  These changes usually happened in spring, when the sun sneaked over the slate roofs of the houses opposite for the first time, slanting in through the kitchen window and highlighting the swirling motes of silvery dust in the air that her lavender furniture polish had failed to capture. Like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, Mum would feel the pull of the outside world, which translated itself into a change of scene inside.

  These bouts of spring fever would be preceded by a sort of restlessness. ‘Alan,’ she would say to my father, ‘these chairs are getting really tired,’ and she’d point to some patch of wear on the arms, or watch as my father would nail back one of the long supporting springs that had come adrift from the wooden frame of a more ‘contemporary’ easy chair, allowing the seat cushion to slither halfway to the floor while the occupant clung on to the wooden arms for dear life.

  My parents were never great movers. Apart from the couple of uncomfortable years with my father’s mother when they first got married, and their first house in Nelson Road a year after I was born in 1950, the move up to a pebble-dashed semi in the smarter end of town in 1965 was their last. But my mother made up for this lack of daring in the housing stakes when it came to furniture. Everything from Ercol to reproduction Carolean, from arts and crafts to G-Plan graced our front room over the years. You would just get used to the shape of one chair and adjust your posture to suit, when another appeared, but the most dramatic change of all was the replacement of the ugly sideboard that nobody liked with a piano.

  Quite how Mother managed these changeovers is unclear. There would never be a gap where one piece had been removed while we waited for another to appear. No. We would go to school in the morning and when we came home the change of scene would have been achieved as if by magic. From our point of view at any rate. We were spared the frantic scenes of removal men staggering out of the front door with one piece of furniture and carting it off down the bottom of the street in the morning, and then staggering up with something to replace it in the afternoon, but that’s what must have happened.

  The sales were held once a fortnight in the Victoria Hall Saleroom at the junction of Nelson Road and Little Lane. It’s still there, a facelift or two later. Mother would hardly miss a sale, doing her best to keep the family home in good shape, and vying with other ladies of the town for the best pieces. Not that she was ever into antiques or remotely knowledgeable about them. To her, the word ‘antique’ was a euphemism for ‘second-hand’. Mum had grown up with too much ‘junk’ to ever be enamoured of things that were old. She’d have bought brand new if she could have afforded it, and in later life her house was full of teak, rather than mahogany, but for the first twenty years of their marriage, new was out of the question, so she’d brave the salerooms and try to avoid the likes of Mrs Hatch – ‘I’m looking for some superior carpeting; I’m tired of my Wilton,’ was one reported remark.

  Only beds and prams were bought new back then. The rest – sofas and chairs, sideboards and tables, bicycles and blanket boxes – all came from the saleroom. Today, it was a piano.

  It would have been moved by the two brown-coated men employed by the auctioneers: the loping, ever-cheery and bespectacled John Freeman with his daily greeting – ‘’Ello, young Alan. Have you started plumbing yet?’ (As my father was a plumber, the question never varied. If I met him tomorrow, I’ve no doubt that the question would be the same) – and the older, lugubrious Teddy Woodrup, who muttered a lot but said little. I picture them heaving the instrument up the gravelly road to our house. It would be a steep climb for a piano, especially on one of those little two-wheeled trollies they used. There would be John shouting instructions at one end and Teddy grumbling at the other, tilting the piano this way and that, puffing and swearing under his breath (I don’t think John knew the words), and finally manhandling the instrument, to the accompaniment of assorted twangs and zither-like chords, up the three stone steps that led into the front room.

  When Kath and I came home from school, there it was, sitting against the wall, threateningly. The only thing I liked about it were the two brass candlesticks that jutted out from the front. I thought they gave the front room a touch of class. Mum didn’t agree. ‘They’re too ostentatious,’ she said, and removed them one day while I was at school.

  I always wanted to like that piano, but it did its best to intimidate me. To be fair, it was not as large as some upright pianos. It was what my mother called a ‘cottage grand’. It seemed a grandiose title for an upright piano, especially one that lacked candlesticks, and it seemed to give our stone terraced house an extra air of gentility. It was of highly figured walnut; the plush-covered mahogany stool did not match.

  There was never any mention of my being allowed to play it. Instead, lessons were booked for my sister. When I asked my mother in later life why I was not given the opportunity of discovering whether I was a pianist in the making, her reply was brief: ‘You’d never have practised.’

  My mother could play, but she had a sort of vamping style that made one piece of music sound exactly the same as another. She played by ear. You could hum a tune and she could instantly play it back to you – invariably with the same rhythm, and with the same sort of movement of her hands – the lower one would play one chord in the centre of the keyboard, and then one down at the bottom end, then back to the middle and so on. Her movements never varied. She looked like someone miming playing the piano, but music did come out of it.

  My father could play one piece only. He would sit at the piano, crouch over it, and with his thick plumber’s fingers bent to resemble the legs of fat spiders, he would play the first few bars of a deeply resonant sonata that I can still hear in my head but to this day I have heard nowhere else. It has, for the last ten years at least, been totally ignored by both Radio 3 and Classic FM. He only knew the first dozen bars or so, and then it fizzled out. He would smile to himself, pleased that he had been able to recall even that after a gap of perhaps twenty years, and go back to his paper.

  Kath agreed to the piano lessons with little more than a murmur of reluctance, and into our lives came the elegant figure of Mrs Clayton. She wore floral-print dresses and r
imless spectacles and spoke posh, which was a bit of a surprise as she lived nearer Leeds than we did. Mrs Clayton charged seven shillings and sixpence for three-quarters of an hour and was engaged in preference to the more local Miss Martin, who charged five shillings for half an hour. This, maintained my mother, was much better value. Maths had never been my strong point and I presumed that I was missing something.

  Every Tuesday evening, as soon as school was finished, Kath would come home and perch on the piano stool with Mrs Clayton at her left elbow, offering encouragement and pointing at the little tadpoles that were swimming between the lines on the pages of music.

  Kath never learned what the pedals were for. Her musical career was over before she grew tall enough to reach them, though she did manage to win a medal at the Wharfedale Music Festival in the trio section. She would sit there, night after night, frowning over some tricky piece of fingering, her little feet with the white ankle socks and peep-toe sandals dangling in mid-air.

  Mrs Clayton would have earnest conversations with my mother at the kitchen door while she drank her cup of tea and ate the sandwiches she had brought, wrapped in greaseproof paper in a neat little box. It was ‘Fanny Waterman this’ and ‘Malcolm Sargent that’ every Tuesday night outside our kitchen.

  Having regaled my mother with her week’s musical exploits, she’d go on to her next engagement with a girl who was always described as ‘my most promising pupil’. It was a title Kath was unlikely to inherit. One evening, alone in the house and waiting for Mrs Clayton to arrive, she set all the clocks a quarter of an hour fast – the sitting-room clock, the kitchen clock, she even adjusted the clocks on the bedside tables in case the teacher spotted them on the way to the toilet on the first-floor landing. Mrs Clayton finished a quarter of an hour early and Kath ran around the house resetting the clocks.