by Nigel Dennis
It was about the fourth day without my glasses, and me in the middle of one of these ravings, when I found one hand all wet and saw that drops of rusty water were coming from the brass tap. Next minute, the dirty drops turned into a trickle and the ice-block on the tap-head fell off. Two feet away, right under my nose on the staging, appeared my glasses, and no sooner did I put them on my nose than I was covered with sunshine. I was too amazed to know what was happening: outside, there was only snow as far as I could see and the whole prison camp lay in such humps of snow that it looked like squares of white mountains. But here in my greenhouse, icicles were running and falling from the roof and even the black ice under my feet was melting into filthy trickles. I couldn’t understand what was happening: it must have been about St Valentine’s Day, when words like ‘thaw’ and ‘springtime’ are impossible. But still the water ran from the tap, faster and clearer, and the sun shone brilliantly and clouds of vapour steamed up all round me. I was staring at the guard, plodding up the path on his beat in his snowy great-coat and furry hat, when suddenly I found myself thinking: ‘Are you crazy? Aren’t you in a greenhouse? Of course, it’s spring for you – that’s what a greenhouse is – where spring comes sooner.’ I was so astonished by this revelation that I dropped onto my chair and watched the tap-water running in streams all over the floor, though how I, of all people, who have known a greenhouse all my life, could find ‘revelation’ in something I had always known, must sound incredible. But very slowly, hopes that I had forgotten the existence of began to rise inside me – the ice might go, my clothes might dry, I might get my boots off. Finally, after an hour of this amazement, the most impossible thing of all happened: my body began to feel warm, and though I howled with pain and felt sure I could never stand coming back to life, I knew that the thaw was real and would go on, and that though I would be frozen again every night for weeks to come the ice would never work back into my bones again. I had the sense to turn the tap off and even to open my bundles on the staging to steam themselves dry before the sun went, but I was so hurt by the sharpness of the light and the speed at which the change had come that I spent the whole day fuddled in my chair and hardly moved until the light went and the steaming glass turned into sheets of ice again. I talk of the suddenness of it all, but it is possible that it had all begun to happen some days before and that I only woke up to it at this moment. It may have been the cause of all my beautiful dreams about the prisoners in the camp, which I think I would not have had if I had been freezing, because one doesn’t dream when one only wants to die.
I counted seven whole days of this sunshine after the day the tap started running. They were not happy days, because I nearly collapsed under them, but they were a string of extraordinary surprises and discoveries, such as a baby might make on starting to recognize things. Not that I looked much like a baby: my hands were purple with blood and swollen up like meat, and my face in the glass was a horrible sight, with the flesh all broken and the veins showing and hair growing out in a tangle like a bristle broom or a thorn hedge. When I got my shirt off at high noon one day and the newspaper paddings underneath came off, my skin came away with the rest, so that I couldn’t tell it from newsprint at the deepest layer and saw broken sentences in my old skin. I didn’t dare to try and wash the shirt, in case the sun went before it dried, but I spread it on the staging most of one day and had a job putting it on again at night because it had dried as hard as cardboard. As for my boots, my fingers hurt so much that I couldn’t untie the knots for days, and when I did at last I hadn’t the strength to pull them off. I think I was terrified, too, by what my feet might look like – and sure enough, when I got the leather off at last, I thought I would die of the bursting pain and the poison: my hands were healthy compared with these stewed bags of plums. Reviving seemed as bad as dying, and just as likely to kill me, and my blood gave me no peace at all, playing up every nerve in my body and making every hair stand up with a tickling that was as bad as the pain. I was sure I would go blind if I didn’t get out of the sun, but there were so many other pains and chills in the darkness of the shed that I settled for swelling all day and contracting all night. Anyway, by the end of those seven blessed days, when torrents of a cold rain began, I could recognize bits of my old self – thumbnails creeping out from my flesh and spreading into their usual shape, skin staying in place, numberless pains changing into frantic tickles, and so on. I must have been better, because I slept through two days of rain, eating food that was mostly rain-water. After which the snow and sunshine came back, and I saw that my hands and feet were going down from purple to crimson with even an occasional streak of dirty, whitish red. I must have been getting better, because I remember thinking it unjust that where other men would be able to show wounds from their war, I, largely thanks to having lived a decent life before the war, might come home as healthy as when I left.
Another old habit, orderliness, began again too, though only concerning keeping myself as warm as possible. I laid my two blankets out on the staging every day to warm and opened my bundles onto them, so that I went to my freezing bed dry and even slept an hour or two before the cold woke me up. I was doing this business with my bundles one morning when I pushed aside one of the absurd paper pots in which I had taken such pride in the autumn. One of the wild storksbills I had dug up had been put in it and was now showing, like a tiny folded fan, the beginnings of a green leaf. Knowing that this was impossible, I picked up the pot in my sore fingers to look closely, and dropped it. Out fell the plant and the dry sand and there, before my eyes, were the roots. ‘So you have survived too, have you?’ I said to it.
It took me a good hour to get it back into its burst pot, my fingers hurt so much. I repeated: ‘Impossible!’ all the time, feeling that though nobody can be sure how much a human being can survive, one has a pretty good notion with a plant. However, there it was, so after shrugging my shoulders I gave it some water from the tap and put it in a shady place. I had no heart to look at the other plants and no wish to find out how utterly dead they were, nor did I care particularly, because they only reminded me of my idiot self in the autumn and the childish way I had imagined being looked after in winter: it hurt my dignity to think that I had been brutally punished for the worst stupidness of my whole life. But the staging ran all day as the soggy pots dried in the heat and toppled over when their icy bottoms thawed, and at last I began to pick them up and look at them contemptuously before I chucked them in a corner: I had not reached the stage where I wanted to kill anything alive, out of revenge. After chucking away a dozen of the dead, I hit on a second freak that had stayed alive, a storksbill of another sort, and eventually a number of others appeared, three in a row on one occasion, for some extraordinary reason. I saw all the first survivors as just crazy sports of nature – creatures that had done something impossible by chance – but after a while I began to remember that it was my hands that had made the thick pots and filled them with the right sand, and my skill that had directed things, so I began to feel proud and instead of greeting them as natural freaks or self-survivals found myself saying: ‘So my paper kept you warm, did it?’ and ‘So sand suits you, eh? I thought it would.’ Before the sun went, I had lined up three dozen survivors out of two hundred, including the house-leek of all things, which was black and rotten except at the core, where I found a green streak under my nail. So instead of looking back on my autumn self as an unspeakable fool, I started thinking of him as more skilled and clever than people would imagine, and I said to myself at last: ‘I would certainly like to meet the gardener who could do such miracles as I have done.’ That night I was warm enough to sleep for about three hours and in the morning was almost shocked to find that my mug of coffee was just warm to my lips instead of frozen and made them smart as if acid had run into the cracks.
Strewn about in the shed and tramped by me into the earth, I found scores of the plants I had dug up so wildly when I had been given the spade. I put the best of them into the dead o
ne’s pots, which was a long business because though my hands were half the size they’d been, my fingers were either dead to feeling or too painful to use. Then, it rained for a solid week and the whole greenhouse, well warmed by now, turned green and putrid, with water rising up the holes I had dug for gravel, so that a number of the plants that had stood up to the frost died disgustingly of grey mould. But now I slept for whole nights at a time and had no wild fantasies to drive me mad, except the fear that once the rain had driven out the ice, I would get up one morning to find that my toes or feet had thawed and dropped off. Instead when the sun and frost came back, I found that most of my pains were gone and that I dared even to pull the stuffing out of two of the squares of glass and encourage my icy enemy to come in and change the stinking air. I was even fool enough to take a bar of yellow soap and wash my shirt on the staging, as a result of which most of it turned into mouldy slivers of stagnant wool or just fell to pieces leaving me with the arms and some of the front but no back and shoulders at all. There was soap enough by now to scrub out a palace but scrubbing was more than my hands could manage and I used the soap for the leaves of the plants and the disinfectant powder for their soil. My inborn hatred of all little parasites that creep into greenhouses kept me steadily at this job, which turned out to be a real triumph: not a single member of the whole disgusting breed of sucking pests lived longer than overnight with me. And almost every morning, the temperature of my coffee rose, until one day I drank it almost hot.
Suddenly, all my changes of six weeks before arrived outside too. Four men came – the first I had seen in daylight for four months, except my guards – and carried away the shutter-boards round the verandah. The last snow ran away down the gravel path and hordes of sparrows ran behind it, pecking the thawing surface. Down the steps, driving the sparrows to left and right, ran the young officer, looking as trim as any soldier could and almost shining in the sun, and as he sped down the path with his lively step, he glanced in my direction and gave me a wave and a grin. This put me in such good heart that I felt like a new man all of a sudden, and what with that cheery wave and the wonderful warmth of the April sun I began to feel that a whole new life was starting. I was washed and clean from head to feet; my plants were going ahead as if their whole life had been one long sunny day; my hands and feet were back to size and my losses came to exactly two fingernails and four teeth. My guards not only appeared without their greatcoats but seemed not to despise me any more, as if I was on the establishment now and an acceptable part of life: they grinned when I took my exercise, walking briskly up and down my ten-foot length between doors. Everything seemed lax and easy suddenly: even down at the camp, they sang all day. And one day the ‘student of character’ himself appeared, with a visiting officer beside him and his usual escort laughing at his jokes, and they all started down the garden path to the road, where a car was waiting. But suddenly the Colonel noticed me and, touching his visitor on the elbow, turned him up to the greenhouse. The interpreter followed, and the three of them came in, while the rest stood amiably outside.
Q: The Colonel thinks you are looking much better than you did in the autumn. Is that correct?
A: Yes, I’m sure.
Q: He is pleased to see how much straighter you are standing and how much more presentable you look. Would you like scissors and a comb?
A: Oh, thank you – most grateful.
Q: This gentleman here is our country’s first agronomist. The Colonel has invited him to inspect your rural economy. Do you object?
A: Oh, no – very kind.
The country’s first agronomist gave me a polite bow and began a grave inspection of my plants. I knew from the first pot he picked up that he was not a fool: he knew what to look for in a plant. How extremely clever he was, in fact, I saw when he came to the one pot that was puzzling me, guessed that it was doing so and, after showing me with his fingers where and how to pinch it out, murmured ‘Magnesium’ in a soft voice. He gave careful attention to my little collection of storksbills and cranesbills, which certainly included at least three connoisseur’s pieces. But when he spotted the house-leek, he looked at it very closely indeed, and at last raised his eyebrows to me in surprise.
Q: The gentleman commends your work. He asks: would you kindly make a slice for him of the Sempervivum?
A: A cutting? Of course. With pleasure.
The Colonel listened to this with a pleased look, as if in keeping me alive in a greenhouse he had done something very clever and was pleased to see his skill confirmed by an expert.
Q: The Colonel is glad you have used your time in a responsible way because you are causing a great deal of quarrelling among the higher authorities. However, he hopes you will be pleased to hear that we shall be keeping you for at least some months to come.
A: I am most grateful.
Q: He warns you, however, that if you show too much agricultural ability, this gentleman here may put you in a large pot and transplant you into his department.
This was said with the door ajar, so the juniors outside were able to grin as usual at their witty Colonel. But the visiting expert didn’t smile at all: he only nodded his head gravely, as if the Colonel’s joke was a statement of what might be done. He then gave me a bow in a friendly manner and went off to his car, talking quietly to the Colonel.
As soon as they were gone, I picked up the house-leek to admire it myself, as one does, in a foolish way, when a possession has been admired unexpectedly by a stranger. I saw then for the first time what I had never dreamt of before – that the shoots from the base were not leaf-shoots but flower-stems, so that what I held in my hand could only be a plant that had not been seen for at least a century – the Sempervivum Melitense that was brought into flower each January in tribute to the Grand Masters of the Knights of Malta. This discovery so astonished me that I lost all the decency that marks the true grower and felt myself bursting with jealousy to think that I must share the glory, first, with the sluttish family that had brought the treasure here, and, second, with the clever visitor whose eyes had proved so much sharper than my own. But when this humiliation passed, I was ashamed at having felt it and got back to my better nature, because sooner or later all who love precision, conscientiousness and hygiene must swallow the toad of admitting that the slovenly and the carefree have virtues too, and that the eye of the casual visitor catches the very things that are missed by the daily attendant. It was easier to feel better, too, when I reminded myself that within a week at most, I, too, would have spotted the budding miracle, and that as for the grubby family, they had never known that they were restoring an extinct glory to the gardens of the world.
Next day, a corporal came to my door with an old but good uniform, boots, and comb and scissors. The day after, the interpreter came:
Q: The Colonel says you may go into the garden for one hour every day between 10 and 11 a.m., either for exercise or horticultural work. Do you give him your assurance that you will not abuse this privilege?
A: Of course.
Some days later, the corporal who had brought the clothes handed me a packet with an official label. Half of it was full of dozens of very neat collapsible pots that folded flat. I have attacked this sort of pot ferociously in peacetime, but I am ready to defend it when there is a war. In the other half were insecticides, seeds, bottled concentrates of fertilizer and an excellent brass-barrelled spray – the only kind I would ever recommend. On going away, the corporal spoke to the guard, who came and opened my door and, pointing to the hands of his watch, waved me out for my hour of liberty. So I stepped out in my new uniform and boots, with my beard and my hair cut and combed, but trembling all over under my spruceness and so bewildered by so much sudden luck that I hardly knew how to choose where to walk, or what to look at and what to do. The only ground my feet recognized by now was the ten-foot strip in the greenhouse, and the whole world seemed out of place without glass between us. After half my time, I started back to the house, but the guard, point
ing to his watch and looking indignant, made me stay out, and when at last he let me back into my snuggery, gave me an angry look, as if to say: ‘People like you don’t deserve liberty.’
The same afternoon, the young officer came and I was taken up the verandah steps and to the room they had questioned me in the autumn before. Only the interpreter was there.
Q: Sit down, if you please. I have certain questions to ask you in your capacity both as a cartographer and horticulturist. Do you understand the importance of telling the truth?
