Plot 29

by Allan Jenkins

  The river runs through me. The Devon Avon not 100 feet from my bedroom window, at the front of Herons Reach. It separates us from the village. Sometimes close by, sometimes far away. Twice a day with the tide, I watch the Stakes Road disappear, the river come to cut us off, transform our little world. Dad tells us the man who had the house before us was a farmworker, found drowned in the mud. He came home drunk one night, he said, fell face down. The more he sought to escape, the more he was stuck. I never knew if it was true but Dad wasn’t one for stories.

  Our twin paths to school are different, like the choices we will make. One is short and flat, perhaps seaweedy; wet and a little wild. The other, if the tide is high, is up a long, hilly lane by houses, high hedges, rooted in land. Christopher always prefers to turn towards the farm, his friends, the reassuring company of boys. I am drawn to the bank. The river means freedom, a place of possibilities. Curlews call me like the pied piper. For Chris, though, it means fishing. There are muddy grey mullet, impossible to catch, impossible to eat. Fishing isn’t about food for Chris. He hunts with his friends for rabbits. He shoots crows, pigeons, hares – the hardest to forgive. Genocide kids. I hate the hunters. There are otter hounds on the river, harriers in the fields, fox hunters everywhere. Worst is badger baiting, breaking the wild animal’s legs before sending the terriers in. Harmless village sport for boys letting off steam, but not for me. So I turn left out of the gate in search of magic and mystery. My tidal place of death-dealing mud, mist and unpredictable change.

  There are hares at the summerhouse. The next road is named after them. They lope through the garden if we are lucky, a flash of orange, brown and legs. Sometimes one will be sitting there when we arrive and turn unhurried away. We often see them on the path, an almost lazy movement like a loosely articulated dream. They seem wilder somehow than rabbits, more solitary, mysterious. Sometimes I spot one lying low in the field, ears flat. One shares the sunset with us once. Out of the trees on to the beach. Sitting bolt upright, facing west, the sun and sea. It sits still for a long time till the sun drops and the sky turns. Suddenly, explosively, it speeds effortless, along the long beach, wild and exhilarating.

  13.2.62. The school teacher had spoken to Mr Drabble who at the beginning had compared one boy with the other, pointing out how unfair this would be.

  There was the time with the watch. Christopher is given a Timex when he goes to secondary school. It is small, cheap, a little childish for his age, but he loves it and lords it over me. I will have to wait another year until I, too, am 11. It was a Dudley rule. Reward, I guess, not a random gift, not the Drabble way. So in 1965 when I pass the 11-plus I am handed one too. Except mine is bigger, shinier, almost adult. I am ashamed to say I am proud, though smug might be more accurate.

  Sometimes I fear that for Dad we were a mixed pair, buy one, get one free. I often felt he was harsher with Christopher, less patient than with me. There is a thread through the records, a constant drip of disappointment: when Christopher didn’t excel in school, when he was less eager to endlessly please. When he kept his name, though Dad shamefully didn’t insist. Perhaps Christopher had a stronger sense of who he was. He harboured hurt for longer. He couldn’t help it. His world was painted black and white. I dealt less in certainty. In the Plymouth records Dudley writes repeatedly of handing him back and holding on to me. He is looking to cut their losses. Christopher must have known. He must have felt it. They pushed him into the army when I went to private school. In the end it switched. When I turned troublesome, they kept with Chris. There is an admiring note about his shooting five hares one morning. Maybe they just didn’t have the energy or appetite for both boys. I wish they had found out earlier. Christopher might have felt more wanted. We might still have been together. I cling to him like seaweed now that there are just shards of him left.

  1968. Mum is confused by vegetarians. There must be meat on a plate. A life of Edam looms in front of me – cheese and two veg. She cannot understand not wanting gravy. A few bones can’t make much difference. A half-moon slice of bland cheese, boiled potatoes, most likely cabbage, day after day. The Edam is there for Dad’s cream crackers after we have gone to bed. I am always trying tastes I can’t find at home. They rarely work well. The tin of ‘meatless goulash’ is a disappointment, poorly matched for lunch with Mum’s pudding rice. I lurk around the health-food shop on Kingsbridge quay. It is packed with tins and foreign voices and flavours. My friends all talk about yogurt so I start with that. It is essentially milk that has turned in the sun. Later I find out that the yogurt other kids like is Ski: pink or purple with jam. Raw sheep’s milk isn’t yet a thing. I have been reading about olives, too: spies and other sophisticates have them in martinis, perhaps in Monte Carlo, playing chemin de fer (Mum and Dad don’t hold with cards, so we avoid local whist drives as though they are white-slave dens of vice). I buy a jar of olives on my way home from school. This can’t be right, I tell myself: unspeakably briny and bitter. Disappointed, I dump them in a bin. My feeble rites of passage reach their peak with whisky. I retch. This cannot be it? It will be 20 years until I try again. Too much reading and not enough living is taking a toll. Sex is the same, and cigarettes. I stubbornly persist with these.

  FEBRUARY 14. My breathing is shallow. I want to comfort. I want to be comforted. It is Valentine’s Day and I have spent the afternoon with three of my sisters. Mandy lives in South Carolina. She and Lesley have met only twice. We are all meeting with Susan, who is also in therapy. Over lunch and later at a bar, Susan and Mandy’s stories of living with my mother spill out. Of being young and vulnerable in her home. Of rape and predator parties. The prostitute working from the front room.

  Lesley thinks she is a hermit. She fears she is unlovable. She doesn’t remember me showing her photos of Sheila. The memory has burrowed down into the place where the crusts are kept. Loved-up couples come into the bar for Valentine’s Day drinks. I walk my sisters back to the station and take Susan’s arm. As we cross the road to Charing Cross, her hand reaches out for mine. I squeeze it. The shattered childhood we never shared. All the while, my wife Henri is in our kitchen making marmalade. The house smells of home and oranges. The scent of Lilian. I want to hide.

  FEBRUARY 15, MORNING. A night of shallow sleep, of lying awake. It is before 5am when I get up. I drink tea and start with marmalade. Mum made two jams: strawberry in summer, from fruit we grew. It was the only jam Dad would eat. At South Milton, he swapped a piece of land for another plot for strawberries. She made marmalade in winter. I remember coming home from primary school. I was small. It was raining. The kitchen was alive with exotic steam. I had never had marmalade and now I had a mum in a kitchen preparing something serious. It smelled exotic and it smelled of family. It is the only jam I eat. At boarding school we had it with sausages and bacon, my first ‘foodie’ experience. Now there are jars lined up waiting to be filled. There is a large pan covered with a chequered cloth, steeping overnight. Love is sleeping upstairs.

  FEBRUARY 15, NOON. It is the second instalment of the pond working party and I am relieved to have something physical to do. We bucket out the last of the muddy water, rehoming the confused frogs. We uncover a baby newt, curled up, golden eyed and half asleep. We re-line the pond. The mains water is turned off for winter so we refill it with buckets from butts and tanks scattered around the site. We ferry and fetch. We admire our efforts. We stop with the water about two-thirds full. The forecast is for rain. There will be another work party in a couple of weeks when we will replant flowers around the edges and trim more trees, but for now there’s hot carrot soup and spicy sausages. We sit in the nearly warming sun and talk about Wolf Hall. It is very Hampstead. I am happy. Howard and I will be back in a week to clear the plot and sow broad beans. We will debate whether to grow potatoes. The gardening year starts here.

  16.2.59. The boys are settled into their new life, and appear to be agile little fellows. Christopher is very small considering he is the eldest of the two. Both are proud
of their being brothers.

  2005. It is Lilian’s funeral, in Bedford near her niece. She had spent her last year here, in sheltered housing, after being conned out of £3,000. They had come to clean her gutters, they said, then driven her to the bank where she drew out cash for a new patio and, of course, they never came back. She was 95, she had a good life, a good marriage, a good death. She had been loved and now it is over. We were better together in the five years after Dad died. More at peace. I used to pop down to Devon to see her, trying not to show concern while she shakily poured me tea. For her I would be Peter again, tell her my news while she’d serve the cake she still made. After the funeral service, her niece asks about ‘your half brother’. It hits me. Everyone had known, just not Christopher and I. The first of my mother’s seven children by seven fathers (almost sounds like a film). We clung to each other as long as we could. Now I am the eldest of six survivors who share some of the same blood, much of the same pain. You can sometimes see on their faces that something bad has happened.

  FEBRUARY 17. There is a small handprint in the therapist’s sand. Another child hurt, too young to know the words to describe it. Too small to talk about the betrayal, the feelings so big they stick. Some silences are screams that haven’t yet found their voice. I have heard them. I cry, of course, in the room today. There is no smart way to avoid the hopelessness of not being able to protect my brothers and sisters. I reach for a tissue, spill the terrible secrets and tears. Some things are buried under an amnesia blanket. Maybe medicated away. Susan and Lesley’s lives in some ways mirror each other, like an experiment with separated twins. They are on the same anti-depressants. They both have large memory gaps. Susan says she doesn’t remember much before she was 12. Mine start at five, Lesley’s much later. Sometimes memories stir like crocodiles. Sometimes in the right company or with the right professional, they can be exposed.

  I waited for Sheila for more than 30 years. I had hoped that if only I met my mother everything would heal. I never had a yen for a father. It was my mother who would hold me. I imagined she would be wild with big breasts, big hair. She wouldn’t hold back like Lilian. She would be the opposite of Ray. There would be no secrets. We would share stories. We would talk. We would hold hands. We would cook, sit in the kitchen, laughing. We could be friends. It was, of course, childish fantasy but nearly true for a few days. The phone call from Susan and the one when my mother and I first talked. Her voice and tone close to mine. It was there on the train to Portsmouth. The hope I would be folded into my mother’s understanding arms. I knew it was dangerous, my Hollywood dream, all my eggs in her basket. Cue soft colours, roll credits. It lasted up to the front door but it couldn’t survive her standing there. Be careful what you wish for. She is in my blood, a sluggish slowness, a hateful hating rage. She is my virus to be inoculated against so it doesn’t pass to my children’s children.

  FEBRUARY 20. I have been heart-sick all week. Feelings trapped like indigestion, as if everything would be all right if only I reached for an antacid. It is hard to swallow my sisters’ history. Some truths, once seen, are seared. Was Ray right all those years ago? Was it better never to know? I need to break the spell. There is a plant fair today at London’s Horticultural Halls. The streets are packed with people. Hellebore, hepatica, snowdrops bursting out of bags. The halls are fragrant with early flowers from specialist nurseries dealing in spring. Here are primroses, wood anemone and iris. I soak it in as if I had woodland and acres of meadow to plant. I stop by the violet stand, remember the posies I picked from hedgerows in the days when it was still OK. I buy two pots as though they are for Lilian: one deeply coloured, the other Viola odorata, smelling of old ladies and sweets. I watch kids potato-printing. On the tube back to work, I stick my head in the violet bag and breathe.

  FEBRUARY 22. I place seed potatoes in an old egg tray to chit, keep them in a cool spot. It is only four weeks from the spring equinox; there is heavy work to do. The rehomed battered planting hasn’t taken at the plot. The trauma was too tough, the soil too wet and unwelcoming. Sometimes I imagine I can hold back winter like Canute. I decide to clear the plot. I am digging a replanted chicory bed when I discover potatoes, lots of them. I’d left them there last summer when Howard was away; I wanted his family to have them. They have been in the soil ever since. There is a bucketful by the time I have dug the bed over. I bag them up and cover them. I can’t take them with me into town.

  FEBRUARY 23, SUNDAY. Back at the plot, I set to work. The forecast is for rain. The sun is out, though there is a frosted silver crust on the ground. Both ponds are iced over. I hope the newt has forgiven us the eviction to the smaller pond. The frogs will be spawning soon and it is going to get crowded. It is 10am and the site, as always, is empty. I clear the netting, lift the pegs and poles, grub up almost everything, though I am a little uncomfortable with only garlic and onions growing. I need small spots of colour to break up the brown. I turn the claggy soil. It is winter work with serious tools. By lunchtime, it is as though last year’s plot hardly happened. The ground is ready for growing. I have saved a bright pink radish from the last autumn planting with Polly. I brush off the mud. It is crisp with a little heat. I pick a radicchio and put it in my pocket to add to a cheese sandwich for lunch. It is food fit for gods and gardeners.

  FEBRUARY 26. I keep losing things or, more accurately, I think I do. I am going through a fretful phase, forever emptying out bags and drawers or pockets in a frantic search for stuff that isn’t lost. Boarding passes, my passport, tickets, cash, memories – nothing is safe. I spill out the contents repeatedly. I guess what I have lost is me. I have always been strong or so I liked to think – comfortable in my own company – but memories are undoing me, like scraping away paint on a door, stripping comfort like layers of clothes until I feel smaller, colder, more naked and alone. Am I revealing a new (old?) fearful me? Is the voice I hear a child who’s late for loving, a fearful man with early-onset dementia, or is it simply a response to picking at the scab of my life till it bleeds?

  FEBRUARY 27. A late-night cinema changed my life and luck for ever. I was 27. I was with a friend who needed drink and company. It was almost midnight in Hampstead; Saturday-night movies in an art-house cinema with a bar. I was a little drunk when I saw her. Blonde hair, an amused smile in a mirror, ice-blue eyes that saw (through) me. She was with someone who was inattentive and I couldn’t understand why. Our glances caught a couple of times. Then, too late, she was going in. Except he went first. I stepped in, stopped the door to talk to her, some feeble chat about vodka, whether she would carry in orange juice for us. We didn’t want to drink it neat (those innocent days). She smiled and agreed, so I asked her to sit with us. We watched Kurosawa’s Kagemusha. We kissed. She slid down the chair to hide from her friend. She moved in with me three weeks later, 33 years ago, sharing decades of happiness I never thought I’d have. It is her birthday tomorrow, February 28, the last day of winter. Sunday will be spring. I will sow seed and thank my lucky stars for Henri, my wife, for my life, for love.

  8.6.60. Christopher is gradually losing his nervousness and does not talk so much now about when he lived in Portsmouth.

  If Plymouth was purgatory, Portsmouth was hell. I am tormented by thoughts of what might have happened to Christopher with my mother and her men. He was seven now, his life misshapen, his twisted destiny too tough to escape, though he would fight until exhaustion and age and cancer tore him down. I cannot break away from something my sister Mandy said about hernias in three-year-olds being mostly caused by crying. I find comfort at first in the hope that perhaps he wasn’t raped. Why don’t I remember he came to me as a child from Portsmouth? Why didn’t he remember he had been with Sheila or her proxies all that time? She had stuck to her line that she’d had to run away with her baby. Was she never concerned the truth would out: that Christopher would remember, break the spell of forgetfulness she’d spun for all her children? I’d thought I must have made up my dark memories, embellished them,
but there is a truth at their heart that holds to scrutiny, threadbare though they are. There are worse things than disease and being locked in cupboards. Increasingly it seems Lesley and I have survived by being kept from my mother.

  March

  MARCH 1. Allotment, early. I am away later for a couple of days and it is the start of spring: time to sow the first seed. I can feel the shift. There is warmth in the air. I check for spawn. The new pond needs finishing and the irises replanting. The plot is looking bare, impatient; a teenage boy with a fresh trim for a first date. I hoe a bed at the southern end, make a dibber from a piece of hazel pole. The soil is still wet and cold, the earth slow to follow the sun. I have brought Brown Envelope Seeds broad beans – old-variety crimson-flowered, the most alluring bean I have seen. There was also calendula at the bottom of the tin. I check the secret spot for wild garlic and sure enough it is there – a shock of pungent green in the bank.

  MARCH 4. Therapy. We are at the choking, broken heart of it now, the space of tears a rushing torrent taking all before it. There is nothing I can do. There was nothing then. I was too small to save my sisters. I wasn’t there. We had never met. I think about this room and how many here have cried. The tiny handprints in the sandbox, today a little finger pattern like leopard spots. I get my coat and carry on. There is a magazine to get out and family to love.