Sheila is a mystery, clear as mud. I have pored over her pictures, read about her in my records. Sifted my memories. She is elusive. A shy, awkward child at an early family wedding; triumphant, earthy, sexual at her own. Still aged only 20. She and her husband appear mismatched, ill-starred, trading sex for salvation. Ray is here in his navy uniform, grinning, holding Christopher. Even here she is hard to read, impossible to divine. I may as well cast cards. Was it the war that shaped her? A Plymouth bombsite kid, her mother having a breakdown, her father in a Japanese prison camp. What went so wrong? No way to know when. She had something that drew men to her, other than availability, rarer though that was. Whatever it was it died. She was a shell by the time we met. A host to something dark. You could almost see it lurking, lazy, comfortable, dangerous, in her shadows.
MARCH 1995. I am watching Sunday football on TV when the call comes. It is my sister Susan saying my mother had died from a ruptured hernia while she was in hospital. It is unexpected. She is just 60, but the shock for me is that I am not in shock. I want to feel more, to mourn her but my eyes remain dry, my tears stubbornly stay away. I return to watching Spurs on Sky Sports 1. The next morning on the way to work, I collapse getting off the bus. I fainted, I think, and lie sprawled on the pavement like a beetle on its back. Stunned. I go into work and tell them I won’t be coming in. I need time, I say, my mum has died.
I had hardly known her. Hadn’t scratched her surface. We had talked mostly about food, about what we were eating, what she was cooking. She craftily steered me away from secrets. Any chance of knowing what had happened and when – and why – has died with her. There is a huge crowd at the funeral: neighbours, family and friends. She was a power in the Paulsgrove community, an elder of her tribe. Ade, another brother, sings. (When I met Sheila, I thought she had helped heal the hole we had left in her life by adopting Ade and his sister Tina, but it was of course more pragmatic than that.) The song is heartfelt, beautiful, about the perfect love of a perfect mother. Ade teaches singing. He has a voice. It seems everyone cries except Christopher and me. I see his hurt, feel his loss. We are interlopers in the family car. Uncle Mike has come over from Sweden with his Mercedes and its personalised plates. He films all the flowers, records the tributes, until my brother Michael asks me to warn him off. Michael has turned up like a character in The Sopranos, in a group of heavy men in heavy cars. They have come to pay their respects, they say, as people came to pay respect to them. I haven’t seen Christopher for a long time. He introduces me to Sylvia. She looks like Sheila. He looks like Ray. The next family gathering will be our wedding, he says. The tone is odd. It will never happen. The imprisoning walls between us are too high. Our ladders too short and shaky.
OCTOBER 10, EARLY. Ebeltoft. I was woken by moonlight, like a cop shining a torch on a park bench, but it is cosy firelight inside now. I am back in the Danish summerhouse drinking English Earl Grey tea. We are here to plant tulip bulbs. Unusually, there has been no frost as yet, but autumn is advanced: the grass is flecked with jewelled leaves, copper, old gold, ruby, rust. There are mushroom parasols in the meadow, an occasional stubborn dandelion, herb robert, ragged robin. Lazy, kippered smoke snakes in among the misty trees. The air smells almost sweet like heather honey. Dew pools together on the terrace like splashes of monsoon rain. A seagull passes, lit golden by early sun. Indignant crows call their dissatisfaction. Hedge birds gather by the feeder, disturbed by a jay that walks down the skinny branch to the seed balls like a wary tightrope walker. Spider webs spread on every doorway in a determined bid to wrap the house up like a fly. It is the time of abandoned nests. The blackbird has freed up the woodshed; the climbing rose reveals a front-loading wren’s house, hidden until now. We marvel at the intricacy and the idea of offering the tiny bird a family home. A goldcrest, minute as a baby mouse, crashes into the window. We watch, concerned, as it lies stunned for half an hour; its anxious mate swerves late from another pane. The fallen bird recovers and flies away.
Other birds are gathering to leave in swirling flocks. Geese and ducks crisscross the skies. A lone heron flies by: a memory of Dudley and of Devon. The quiet is occasionally broken by the crack of a gun; hopefully the hares are safe. The sun rises through branches of trees I have planted, shaped like happiness. We watch the sunset over the sea. The house is lit by vases of chamomile and daisies, gathered in armfuls from great banks in the fallow fields, a waving sea of white and green in the wind. We eat breakfast outside, basking in mid-October sun. Later, we clear smothering ivy creeping into the meadow. We make room for naturalising tulips. They may take three years but this isn’t a goal-orientated exercise. Leaves float in the light breeze like paragliders coming in for landing, catching light like coloured glass. We buy sunflower seed for the hedge birds and strew feeders through the branches like lanterns. Two mice stare at us in the shed. They are preparing for the cold by eating our gardening gloves. They will make a break for the house, though the pine marten will beat them to it. Mist comes in on the last day; the Danish flags in the town hang limply now. The rain, reluctant to leave, settles over the old plantations. The branches drip, the temperature drops. The last pale garden rose of the year holds out till our final morning, petals dropping among the cherry leaves. Winter is coming.
OCTOBER 18. I haven’t been to the allotment for a fortnight and it shows. The last bean sticks have collapsed (of course), crushing chicories, their greens turning slimy brown. Slugs and small snails are scattered through the leaves like scouting parties. There is an air of lack of care, of rot and decay, of the sick and dead and dying being dragged beneath the soil. The courgette stems have turned translucent. The leaves are exhausted. The pigeons have battered the late seedlings. The sunflowers are bent like old men. I have to train my eye to spot the stubborn life but it is here, shyer now, less obvious. I strip the velvety cover off the face of fallen sunflowers, marvel at seed patterns. I leave them on the table for birds. I pull the more hopeless plants and take them to the compost; they will return to the soil in the spring. I gather nasturtiums, still spreading, climbing, colonising (their oranges and rusty reds are picked out in the morning screen light as I write). I spot a last corn I have missed and strip it back to its astonishing ruby kernels and silks; it tastes of warm autumn and nuts. I will save the rest for seed, though I already have too much. I pick bull’s blood, ochre-stemmed chard, puntarelle chicory, assorted colourful leaves. I will return tomorrow with intent, perhaps with Howard. It is time for an intervention.
OCTOBER 19, SUNDAY. The overnight rain finally stopped, the sun broke through, it is unseasonably warm, nudging 19°C, humid. Ruth and Annie are ferrying buckets when I arrive. One of the water tanks is leaking into Ruth’s plot. Their plan to lift the tank is aborted when I point out it is fixed to the stand-pipe and we don’t have a screwdriver. They empty the tank and carry on with busying around their plots. A large pile of Jerusalem artichoke stems lie at the top of our path by the pumpkin pit. Mary has been active, a corner has been turned. She is refocused. Renewed. I cut fallen sunflowers and start tidying, moving through the plot, thinning through sickly kale. Some beetroot plants have fallen, their sweet roots eaten away. Mary arrives with her nephew and starts clearing: piling up overgrown undergrowth which he wheelbarrows away. It is a good afternoon, the three women back being active at the industrious end of the site. I like being part of their sisterhood, though they might kill me for calling them that. Howard is still stuck in town buying a raincoat for Rose, so my plans are revised. I rip out the fallen beans and strip them of pods. I’ll add the last borlotti to an autumn soup (I can’t resist podding a few to reveal candy-striped fruit, like kids’ sweets). Three hours fly by. Spaces are opening up. There is still much to do, but for now I have held back the fall, slowed the decay.
OCTOBER 21. Back with the therapist in the room of tissues, sandbox and tears. Halfway through the schedule now, still no nearer or clearer an understanding of why I’m more haunted now 50 years on. What is it I want to kn
ow, what does it matter what happened and when? Isn’t it enough to know that the more I know, the less content I am? How can a note from a children’s home in 1959 unman me? I see Christopher’s nervous tic, his twitching, fearful smile. It’s not that I think this thing can be fixed; it’s not that I cannot ‘cope’ – though at the moment, I am hurting as if from flu, an insistent, nagging ache. The therapist listens patiently, she makes engaged, insightful comments. But why am I compelled to keep waking up as though in a piss-wet bed? I had thought gardening had freed me. And truly more than whisky, food, sometimes even love, it speaks to me of healing and happiness. I am concerned, I think, that somehow my past is a burden from which I might never be free.
OCTOBER 23. I lose myself for a few hours in the morning. The amaranth is fallen, its deep crimson colour contrasting with amber conker leaves, vivid green chicory, chocolate-cake soil. The late French radishes are crisp, plastic pink. I am joined by a curious magpie intent on stealing birdseed; a blackbird scurries past. I think I may be more at home here than anywhere. Perhaps Plot 29 is a feeling more than a place. There is belonging here on my own, hoe in hand. My mood subtly shifts as quiet steals over me. I used to think it was all about Dudley but whether it is nurture or nature feels less important than growing peace here with potatoes.
OCTOBER 24. Devon, Aveton Gifford hill, the one I used to race down on my racing bike overtaking nervous cars. They have widened the road now, the banks are steeper, I can’t see the house from the crest. We cross the bridge over the Avon, take the sharp turn on to the tidal road, turn the corner and there it is, set back from the river, North Efford, known by us as Herons Reach, nestled into the hill. I have passed by here, slowly, a handful of times since I lived here but I have never stopped. Today is different. I turn off the road and through the gate, past the squat, shale stone barn, the drive to the house paved now, not gravel. The apple trees are twisted, gnarled and lichened. The planting has matured, the garden has been Gullivered. It’s closed in and spread out, like me. I walk down the steps to the front of the house. They feel too small. I have run up and down them a thousand times. I need to re-orientate and adjust my sight. The porch has been glazed into a small conservatory. I knock on the door, there’s no answer. I knock again. Windows are open, there is bedroom light but no sound. We are close now but still no answer. I feel my anticipation leach. I walk out on to the riverbank. It feels odd to be in the garden. A white egret flies lazily in, like the herons of my day. I wonder where it’s come from. The familiarity shimmers, becomes fragile. I am standing deep in my childhood here – T-shirt and shorts, always blue for boys, fishing net in hand.
Here is where we had our rowing boat. The bank was home to Nelson, the one-eyed swan; over there the rushing, hissing geese that guarded Josie’s gate. Round the corner I would wait for the kingfisher on the bank by the quiet eddy, hours coloured by an iridescent second. But the river has shrunk. There are new mudbanks with reeds. The wobbly stepping stones where we would cross if it wasn’t too deep have been replaced with boards and sturdy blocks; Lilian, pewter hair freshly done with her shopping, would gingerly feel her way across while we surefooted boys skipped over like goats, only very occasionally falling in.
A melancholic mist has come down now, insistent drizzle blurring the boundaries between times. It feels like a lifetime since I stood here, this place where I discovered family, the animal joy of running free. Someone is coming down the steps to talk to us. She has a politely anxious look. I tell her I spent a happy childhood here, point out the trees we planted, the flower beds, though there are no more nasturtiums now. She tells me she has lived here 30 years. Her daughter’s three-week-old baby is in the parents’ bedroom, her 90-year-old mother in mine. She asks us in for tea. I walk over the threshold for the first time in more than 40 years. I am almost tearful – fearful – now. There is the small window seat almost carved out of stone, where I sat reading Robert Louis Stevenson, looking out over the river for my cat Tuppence coming home, watching out for white owls, like spirits, flying by. We sit for an hour, urgent memories flooding back. Of farm boys, now like me, old men. I can hear James driving the tidal road on his tractor. Names I had no idea I knew bubble up from memory mud: Josie had just died, Frances married a Tory MP, Tina still lives at Icy Park, Richard is running his dad’s farm by the church. Continuity is easier in the country, though the ceiling beams are lower than I remember. I stoop into the sitting room where we watched BBC, where I read to Lilian’s mum, where Dudley failed to follow through with beating me for making a hole in the hedge. This is the house of hope, of Christmases and birthdays and endless summers, of raking grass and sowing seed, the place I learned to be a boy. Sticklebacks and eels, cockerels crowing, the dog fox walking past the bedroom window, the donkey I could never quite get to Bigbury Bay, all here in my safe place, the Plot 29 prototype. But here, too, lurk darker memories – of the predator neighbour and the family member who abused me. I wonder now what signals they read, like Savile. Was there maybe a mark I carried that let them know I wouldn’t tell? Was it because I smelled of foster child? Did they molest my brother? Does it matter now they too are dead or even older men? The boy they touched perhaps forgives but can’t forget. My tea is cold; it is time to go.
I feel a familiar wrench, a tug on my sleeve, as I leave the house, past the porch where Lilian podded peas, down the drive where the fading ghost of Dudley smiles in his RAF beret, his grass-stained cords, past the croft where Christopher laughed and we played cricket. All gone. I won’t be back. But Herons Reach, returned now to its old Devon name of North Efford, has happy memories still to share, perhaps with the baby behind the bedroom window.
OCTOBER 26. I never took to Horswell. It wasn’t the house’s fault, but a small cluster of cottages was tough after the river’s solitude, and it never felt like home. Dudley’s plans to downsize were too obvious. There were too many arguments, the threats to send us back to the city too often said, and too easily. The spell had been shattered, the safety bubble burst. Puberty was a disappointment for everyone, a war between Lilian’s anger and our raging at the changing of the rules. Alan Jenkins didn’t exist any more and Peter Drabble was confused. After 10 years together, I had forgotten that love must be exhaustingly earned every day like a salary. Enthusiastic gratitude was the only default. My pass needed daily renewal. My name change could be revoked at any time.
The best thing about Horswell was the beach. South Milton Sands was half a mile away at the end of the narrow lane. I loved its teaming life in summer, the worldliness holidaymakers brought with their cars, their bikinis, but it was the winter I loved best. The last, fast-draining dregs of family were here, when we would walk to the abandoned beach with Tessa and let her run: her old-lady, Old English Sheepdog hair streaming behind her in the sea wind and fading light. Our life together was fragile now; being at boarding school hadn’t worked, wasn’t near enough. Christopher was in the army. I felt alone, like on a lilo, drifting in mist, out at sea.
The last time I was here I was 15 years old, a year after being exiled. I wanted to come home. I’d hitchhiked. I wanted my mum and dad. I didn’t fit in Basildon; my school was full of skinheads with Dr Martens boots. Me in shaggy hair and ragged espadrilles. I didn’t make it through the front door. Dudley let me sleep in the conservatory. Mum was in the garden when I woke. It was early. She was burning my patched Levi’s in a garden oil drum. She said I could maybe stay a few days but first I needed to cut my hair. It was touching my shoulders now. We drove towards Kingsbridge but pulled into a gate two miles outside. I couldn’t be seen looking like that with my father, said my mum. So I walked the last bit on my own. My first trim wasn’t short enough. I was sent back for another cut. After, Dad took me to the local outfitters while Mum did her shopping. He bought me blue cotton trousers, a coloured shirt. It felt like a breakthrough. The next day I talked about my plans to go to art college in Plymouth. They told me I couldn’t stay. It was too much to ask. It was over. There was no
going home, no going back. The new haircut and clothes weren’t enough: I might look the same but I’d somehow mutated. They would refuse to see me for nearly 20 years. In my Plymouth care records lies Dudley’s irritated note, impatient to be reimbursed for my haircuts and clothes.
Today I still know every twist of every narrow lane, every steep turn, every passing place, every barn or house before it appears. We pass by the cottages where we lived; there’s nothing for me here. Then we are on the beach where the Thurlestone stands in the sea, hunkered down. There are families, wrapped up warm, kids with nets and buckets, rock pools and sand. I can see over to Burgh Island, Bigbury Bay, the mouth of the Avon. A packed cafe offers Sunday brunch, no longer the wooden shack where I sold sandcastle windmills and striped windbreaks, ‘Hey Jude’ playing on the transistor. I walk a while, commune with memories, watch kids shrimping, but I am soon back on the train to Paddington, the one I took to meet Lesley, breaking the last, worn thread of the Drabble bond. Caterpillar Peter Drabble morphing into Peter Jenkins, butterfly species as yet unknown.
November
NOVEMBER 1, SATURDAY AFTERNOON. It’s time to turn the window boxes. It has been oddly warm for weeks, the hottest Halloween ever. The geraniums have hung on. They are flowering but November is here now. The house steps are covered in dried sycamore seed – helicopters we called them as kids. The roof terrace needs refreshing. The tomato plants have curled up as though sleepy; dry-leafed and darkened. Miraculously, there are still fruit. The summer pots are overdue for packing away or replanting, the annuals are over. We have daisies, primulas and baby-face violas to put in their place. Leaves need sweeping, the magnolia is budding. Later, I head to the allotment. It has been a fortnight since I was here. Annie’s swapping plots to somewhere with better sun. Mary’s here, too. The bean wigwam is down and she is clearing space for green manure. Our sunflowers are finished, the courgettes exhausted; it is time to tidy here too. There are radishes to eat and nasturtium flowers to pick. They are climbing, spreading spots of bright colour, the banks are full of them now. They have outlived the dahlias but their days are numbered. Soon there will be frost.
Plot 29 Page 9
