Plot 29

by Allan Jenkins

  JANUARY 19. I find myself anxious about the Barnardo’s form. As a journalist, I have learned the five Ws – who, what, where, when, why. They are all needed to tell a story, we are taught, but too many are missing in my tale. I know the who. But when and where and why is harder to tell. I have lived with my lack of an early narrative, found strength in it, trusting my instincts. It has fashioned who and how I am. But it is not enough now. And I am not sure I understand why. Is it the Drabbles dying, my grandparents, my mother, my brother, each death cutting at my connection to the past? Each with chapters of their story untold. In Basildon, Ray sits sick, unable, he tells my sister, to talk to me. The past is too painful, he says – the story he has always stuck to. He is in his late eighties now. When he dies, his truths will be buried with him. For now, I am exhausting every other option, gathering clues like a private eye. My mother’s family have closed the door, just Uncles Tony and Terry left. I have told them I am writing about Christopher and me. Colin isn’t happy. No one remembers anything any more, so they say. Their gaudy sister bringing up bastard boys in the next room while they went to school; it is as though it never happened. The pride the family once took in me is clotting now. I was never much bothered before. I didn’t feel a need to know. But Christopher whispers in my ear, asks me to remember, and a louder voice inside is increasingly insistent.

  JANUARY 22. One month since the winter solstice, the temperature is averaging four or five degrees. There is night frost, it is cold, but the days are a little longer, the first signs of spring cannot be too far away. Seeds have arrived in the post. A care package from Mads McKeever at Brown Envelope in Ireland. Burgundy amaranth, Czech Black chilli, Amish Gold tomato, Lazy Housewife beans from Andalusia in Spain. Even the names are evocative. A colourful garden stirs. I plunder the catalogues and scour the seed sites. In truth, it is time to sort through the boxes, bags and drawers of seed to see what we are missing, what is too old, but that is so much less sexy. It is like turning the pages of a holiday brochure longing for blue seas and exotic cities. I order broad beans, snow peas, multiple packs of seasonal salad. Summer will be delivered in the post. I press send.

  Care records, Plymouth. 23.1.59. Tonsils and adenoids out last month. Quite fit for admission. Christopher good for admission, please can he be seen by a dentist fairly soon. Christopher had a hernia operation when about three. To see specialist in Feb. Boys out of hand. Christopher left with father by Mrs Jenkins. Christopher not at school.

  Christopher truly suffered from carsickness as a kid. Forever bent over ditches, into hedges, grass verges, retching while I stood helpless beside him, upwind, trying not to gag. The sour stink of fear and vomit flavoured our family trips. A care worker report of the ride to meet the Drabbles (we weren’t to know we were being auditioned) talks of little else. Medication didn’t much help. He huddled in the back. Driving was dangerous. Maybe he worried about where he was being taken, whether he would return. He may have had reason. Being moved about made him fearful. Did my mother farm him out like she did Caron? Was he in the way? Why was he so scared and small, why were his teeth so bad? Why a hernia operation aged ‘about three’. I pore over the possibilities now. I rewind the past to protect him. Back-to-the-future parenting. Dudley loathed the sickness. He hated weakness. He wasn’t good with it. But he loved cars. There was a new model every other year, always cash. The cloying smell of new upholstery polluted by Chris’s fear. He gradually grew out of it, I think, as the bad memories faded and he learned to trust and feel at home. He would later make a living from driving. I have only once been behind a wheel.

  JANUARY 24. Biodynamic gardening comes with theories and philosophies that we don’t much follow. It also comes with a lunar planting calendar we stick to. It maybe shouldn’t work but it does. I blame Jane Scotter. If her produce didn’t look happier, last longer, I wouldn’t be struggling to find time to sow beetroot seed at 5am on a summer Saturday morning or hand stirring cow manure in a water bucket in the rain. Biodynamics can be inconvenient. We didn’t just jump into it, we visited Jane’s farm, Fern Verrow. There was no denying it there. It’s a kid’s colouring book come to life: a fairy-tale farm, with bees, sheep, cows and field after field of extraordinary crops, well husbanded and healthy. It was from these first visits that I learned to let some things live a fuller life through to flower and seed, to ‘listen’ to the land.

  JANUARY 26. Another night of the hunted, another murder dream where I call hopelessly for help. My voice is thin, almost inaudible, no one can hear me or, if they do, they quickly look away. I finally get up at 4.30am. It is a relief to be awake, to make tea to take away the metallic taste and try to make sense of the recurring dread. Barnardo’s has replied. They are ‘pleased to confirm that we have identified you in our records’. I wish they weren’t so pleased. They have a waiting list of ‘approximately 14 months’, so are ‘giving priority to people aged 80 or older, those suffering critical illness or disability, and people who have suffered abuse in childhood’ – a hierarchy of hurt, the worthy unworthy, the dying and the damned.

  Sometime next year I will be invited to see the documents. Before the Data Protection Act, they were excluded from legislation entitling people to see their files. Meanwhile, I scope the internet for images of baby dormitories, addresses of Dr Barnardo’s Homes in Plymouth, stories of survivors. It is not a peaceful way to start a day.

  Anxiety deepens during the next therapy session. How old am I in the dreams, she asks. Why is my voice so small? Do they always hunt in packs? Are they always only men? She probes gently. All I can say with certainty is that my helplessness has coagulated into 40 years or more of a recurring dream: of being hunted and hurt, caught up close. It’s intimate, with blood. Back in the room of the tissues and tears, the childish pictures on the walls, the acting-out sandbox with traces of a child’s fingers, my chest burns. My voice breaks. I am anxious to avoid the cliff. I have a meeting at work in 30 minutes. They are expecting a dynamic editor, not a broken man, red eyed. Somehow I had been hoping Dr Barnardo’s wasn’t true, that I hadn’t joined the babies in their prison rows of iron cots. He was clever, Thomas Barnardo, a master of conjuring cash with a faked-up photo studio set up to look like a grubby street. Kids’ clothes not raggedy enough would be rent with knives. The Dr Barnardo’s Home collection box was shaped like a country cottage. This was a man with a refined understanding of the iconography of need. His appeal was based on a fresh start, wiping away the past. But what if he or she is a baby just days or weeks old? What if they want their mum? What then about the memories? The switch from therapy room to office desk, raging baby to adult, is tough today. It doesn’t help that it’s winter. In summer I would head to the plot, potter around at dawn, mooch about at dusk, pick a few weeds, a few leaves, a few flowers; a secret garden for my secret fears. It is unsettling, the not knowing, but the knowing is too. When my uncle told me I was there, it was just another chapter in my colourful tale, another note in my scrapbook. I don’t have all the dates yet but it must have been bleak to be that baby.

  JANUARY 27. It is four years today since Christopher died. Sometimes I feel my memories of him also slipping away. Perhaps this journal is an attempt to fix him before he (and I) fade too far. The images I have of him are becoming younger. I don’t see the cancer-haunted, hollow man so strongly any more, I see the strutting soldier boy with mirror-polished shoes, the hazel-eyed, freckled country kid, grinning and leaning on his cricket bat in the sun-dappled croft. He would batter the balls I threw to him, we would laugh as I ran to retrieve them. He was happy then, with his new kitten, his new friends, and I want to wrap him in that perfect moment before it started again to unravel. I had thought when I started this book that it would be mostly about Dudley, flowers, fruit and vegetables, and me. A thank you for family, where I learned to grow. At its heart, though, it is a candle I light for Christopher, my big brother who was too small for too long, whose flame flickered. I can’t bear the thought I wasn’t there for his
cremation. A cruel cut-off. Her words: we burnt him, burn through me. But I was there when he found his voice, when he laughed, when he learned what he was good at, when he was so close to being OK.

  JANUARY 31. The day starts with snow. Swooning, slow flakes, rare in the city. Ruth has asked for help, the big pond has been overflowing, flooding her plot. There is promise of soup. It is sleeting. There is much cutting and chopping, trimming of trees. I work with buckets. The half-thought plan is to part-empty the pond and see if we can spot a leak in the lining. One leg in the fetid water, one leg out, I fill and fetch. It is slow, heavy work but I am joined by a young boy who wants to take over. Soon we have a system: he scoops, I fill, his mum and others carry away. It works. The sleet is heavier now. I lend him my gloves. He grins. Men stand around discussing plans while women work. We resolve to replace the lining, making ever more extravagant guesses at the size of sheet we will need. We uncover a batch of fat frogs nestled into lining folds. It feels like a signal to stop. The site has been cleared, the weeds, reeds and cut-up branches wheelbarrowed away. The soup and sausages are hot. We huddle under leafless trees as the sleet sheets down and talk about spring planting plans and lemongrass. It feels like community, a gardening family. We drift away to our homes and Saturdays.

  February

  So, her hands scuffled

  over the bakeboard,

  the reddening stove …

  the scone rising

  to the tick of two clocks.

  And here is love

  Seamus Heaney, ‘Sunlight’

  FEBRUARY 1. A cold, wet Sunday walk over Hampstead Heath. I am hooded and gloved, the mud sucking on my boots. First, as always, straight up the middle of Parliament Hill, stopping briefly to look out over the City, to see the Shard and spot St Paul’s. Past the kite-flying dads looking to impress uninterested kids, through the gap and the clump of beeches, the first fallen tree. Past the family posing in the branches, a small girl laughing if she can stamp in a puddle. In summer I stop at the water fountain. I always linger on the viaduct. Sometimes I head north here to the allotment site; other times we turn right for a secluded spot where we buried the cats, wrapped in Kashmiri scarves that were later seen shredded by a fox. Today it is tea and cake at Kenwood. Past our picnic spot, the murder of black crows, the shrieking parakeets, down by the reeded lakes where there may or may not be a heron. We turn by the tennis courts, the lido and running track. Last, back over the bridge and home.

  FEBRUARY 2. I am sitting at my desk, feeling disturbed. This is an open-plan newspaper office, with close seating like a call centre. I have been in a side room for a personal call to Barnardo’s ‘Making Connections’ team. I want to make my case for reducing the waiting time to see my records. Fourteen months seems a lifetime away. I am not 80, I don’t have a serious illness, so I need to know how they quantify abuse. Do I need proof and if so what kind? I have been practising. A helpful voice answers; I tell her my names: I am Allan Jenkins enquiring about the records for Alan Beale. With maybe one L and an E. I tell her I believe I was in Barnardo’s as a baby. Yes, she says, too quickly, you came in at two months old. You are here in the computer. The air around me stills. I believe I stayed about a year, I say, treading delicately now. Baby steps. Yes, she says, before you were restored to your mother. ‘Restored’, I can’t help thinking, a strange use of word, more common for a faded painting or a rundown cottage. Something needing work. I ask about the early-access rules, what criteria they use for ‘abused as a child’. She says she believes it has to have been in Barnardo’s. She puts me through to a social worker for clarity. The phone rings empty. My heart hits loud. She will have them call me tomorrow, she says.

  I step out of the room, my legs light, my head unheld. I wasn’t ready. I have no defence against this stuff. Two months. In caged beds. I don’t know whether it is better than being a day old. I have Observer work to do, magazine pages to pass, stuff waiting for my approval. I read proofs, change some things, while her words turn around in my head. Like an unfamiliar taste, too salty, too strong. Luckily it is late, in an hour and a half I am home. I wasn’t newborn in my Dr Barnardo’s Home. I had (maybe) been with my mother. Long enough to bond, to need, to become familiar – with her smell, her feel, her taste, to be breastfed or bottled, who knows? Likely no one now. Long enough to know the missing. And why at two months? What had changed? Was I inconvenient?

  FEBRUARY 3. I wake to snow on the roof terrace, plant and leaf outlines are softened. Old people struggle in the street, walking tentatively with sticks. I’m not liking this, says one to no one in particular. As I walk to the therapist, I too am more careful now, more aware of falls and hurt. Committed to excavating my story, unearthing my brother, I left it late. Unable to confront my mother, not ready to doorstep Ray, I rely on secondary sources: scraps, memories, clues from my uncles, records written never to be read. Too late to stop, like an old man out on the ice afraid of breaking something.

  As I shuffle through Kentish Town I remember the carefree snow of ’63, trudging to Aveton Gifford school, my last year there with Christopher before he bussed into Kingsbridge, two boys on the long walk, snow soft as Tunnock teacakes. There was a coal stove in the classroom surrounded by a cage. Dudley bought chains for his tyres and drove us to Dartmoor to marvel at the moonscape. I loved to run into the snowdrifts, arms outstretched, making me-shaped holes. A magical flamingo appeared on the river for a few days among the white, an exotic, incongruous pink. Denmark has that feeling for snow. It falls, it stays. I have another room with a stove to warm. Here, too, it lasts like Narnia, sculpted by the wind. I wrap up, I walk, I feel at home. I watch the swans appear out of the mist.

  FEBRUARY 7. Most of my arguments happen in cars, confined, claustrophobic, catastrophic. Nought to 100 in short seconds. No way back. It took a psychoanalyst to point it out. I guess that’s what I paid for, the search for patterns. Was it the old uncertainty, he asked, the child not knowing where he was going, what would happen, would he return? Did cars signal uncertainty, that you were no longer safe (was that why Christopher was sick)? Awareness cooled it for a while. But it is back now as I peel away my carefully crafted life, the Allan Jenkins onion, the pass-the parcel kid. Uncovering my avatars like a Russian doll. I am driven now by a need to know. To know more at least, though it sometimes spills into molten fury, barely capped. This is what the therapy is for, to avoid Pompeii. I used to see myself as an occasional melancholic. Calmed by the cello, songs of loss, whisky, food, walking, and gardening of course. I didn’t acknowledge anger. Maybe because it wasn’t allowed as a care kid. It didn’t fit with the lovability formula: the ever eager over-gratitude. Now I try to spot the tsunami alert, be more aware of seismic shifts before it explodes in the confines of a car.

  1964. Food isn’t a thing for Mum and Dad. It is almost always fresh, there is always enough but it is for fuel, not pleasure. There are no people dropping by to feed. There is no fish for somewhere so close to the coast, except the occasional herring for tea, fried in oatmeal with its roe, my favourite thing; an occasional plaice for Dad’s ulcer, steamed on a plate with milk. There are home-grown runner beans, peas and potatoes. There is cake, ginger or parkin (fruit cakes are for Christmas), but best is Victoria sponge. Dusted with sugar, two halves with homemade strawberry jam, a smaller slice for us. There are rice puddings, plum pies. Peaches are tinned, so are pears, though we have a number of trees in the croft. Our tastes are muted and polite.

  Shrimps are my undoing, my Damascene me-moment. It is the Sunday School trip, a day on Paignton beach. I am aged maybe 10. The sun shines. The sand is inviting. The sea is warm. I never leave the seafood stall. I have half a crown to spend. I mean to buy an ice cream, perhaps a 99. I have never eaten shrimps but the smell is enticing. There are winkles, cockles, the sharp hit of vinegar. I’ve never had vinegar, never had chips, I have never had shrimps. I buy a small cone for sixpence. I peel each shrimp slowly. Undress it. Put it in my mouth. Sun and sand and sea. This i
s better than a Wall’s wafer. I order another cone, and another after that. I am hooked. It is kiddie heroin. There is a briny sweetness to them, salt explosions going off in my mouth. Some I can’t be bothered to peel, I like the crisp crunch and the coral eggs. My brother and the other kids are building castles decked with paper flags. Light dances on the waves. I buy five cones one after another, though I try to slow down, like saving the ending of a favourite book. And then it is over. My money has run out. I don’t remember being on the beach but I remember this moment. The taste of the sea, eaten by the sea, a sensual world away from Aveton Gifford. I don’t know it at the time, just that these flavours are mine. They tell me something of who I am and where I come from. The next summer trip it rains, so we go to Kent’s Cavern and eat ice cream on the coach. I still buy a small scoop of brown shrimps most weeks from an old-school stall at the farmers’ market. Now I dress them with a squeeze of lemon, a scant hit of Aleppo chilli. Sometimes Sunday school doesn’t seem so far away.