Stand by Your Man

by Gil McNeil

  3

  March

  Dig for Victory

  Garden Diary

  Lift and replant snowdrops, deadhead daffodils. Prune summer-flowering shrubs and check fruit trees. Dress lawn with spring fertiliser.

  I’ve spent so long finishing off the plans for the new garden that I don’t have time to do anything at home. Some daffodils have managed to come out in the front garden and look very jolly, but torrential rain and hail threaten to flatten them completely so I decide on a rescue mission and run outside in a torrential downpour clutching my umbrella and hoping that I’m not about to get hit by lightning: you’d feel so stupid being taken to hospital after having been electrified by your own umbrella while rescuing daffodils. They’d probably treat you like a complete nutter, and all the nurses would wander into your cubicle for a quick smirk. Just like they do if you accidentally Superglue a chunk of wicker to your arm when you’re trying to renovate an old cane chair, which is much more painful than you’d think, and isn’t actually funny at all. I still think that nurse shouldn’t have laughed quite so much.

  ‘Mr Channing says I can plant seed potatoes now, and peas and carrots, and he’s got some seedlings he’s going to bring round.’

  Mr Channing has taken to popping round to help Molly with her vegetable patch. He gets on really well with Lily too, even though she filled his wellies with soil last week, while he was still wearing them.

  ‘He says he’ll help me make a start on my herb garden, and I’m to call him Bill from now on. So I must have passed the initiation test or something. What about you?’

  ‘Well, nobody’s asked me to call them Bill, but I’ve been getting loads of gossip. Old Elsie’s a scream – she’s been telling me all about Mrs Baxter, you know, the one who works in the shop sometimes. Apparently she had an affair with a flamenco dancer last year in Spain, and she’s never been the same since.’

  ‘Well, good for her. Is she the short one with dark hair?’

  ‘Yes. I must get Alfie to take his castanets into the shop with us and see if she goes all funny.’

  ‘I wonder if she knows how to do that stamping and clapping thing. Maybe she could teach me – it’d be really handy for school.’

  ‘Yes, and I bet they’d love it at playgroup. Actually, Alfie’s already quite good at the stamping. I know, we could start a class, Flamenco for the Under-Fives. It’s got to be better than ‘Here We Go Round the Bloody Mulberry Bush’.

  ‘Yes, and so multi-cultural – Ofsted would love it. I might suggest it to our head of music – she’s completely hopeless. Last week she told one of my kids to practise a piece of music at home, on saucepans. Can you imagine the racket? I don’t know what planet she lives on sometimes. His mum was furious.’

  ‘I bet she was. God, I hope nobody sends Alfie home in a few years to practise ‘Jingle Bells’ on my saucepans. Actually, I’d better go. He’s putting his cars into the washing machine again and if I don’t take them out now I’ll forget and they make a terrible noise on fast spin.’

  ‘Have you finished the plans yet?’

  ‘Not quite, but nearly. I’ve changed it round again and I think it works better now.’

  ‘Well, ring me later if you need a hand. I can come round after school, if you like, and Dan says he’ll have the kids tomorrow, when we’re at the meeting.’

  ‘Great.’

  I spend most of the day working on the plans. I’m feeling extraordinarily nervous about presenting them to the Garden Society tomorrow. Alfie’s had a busy morning too, and when I collect him from nursery he’s covered in paint and glitter. He spends most of his afternoon watching videos and playing, and demanding snacks every five minutes, while I get increasingly frazzled trying to finish everything. By bedtime we’re both pretty tired and grumpy, and I’ve got a sinking feeling that bath time is going to be a bit of a challenge.

  ‘Can I have a biscuit in the bath, a chocolate one? I need a biscuit.’

  He tends to need things rather badly when I’m trying to get him into the bath, especially if they involve going back downstairs.

  ‘No, last time it fell in, remember? And then it went all soggy.’

  He looks at me for a bit, and I try to look determined, but he launches into a massive wobbler, hurling himself round the bathroom, stamping and shrieking, and the fact that the bathroom’s so tiny only seems to magnify the noise. I’m trying to do the positive-parenting-ignoring thing, where you stand by with a kindly smile on your face ready to reassure them when they’ve finished. But it’s easier said than done when you’re pressed up against a towel rail.

  ‘Stop it, Alfie – you’re being very silly. Get in the bath and you can play with your toys. Look, I’ve put all your boats in.’

  He announces that he doesn’t want boats, in fact he hates boats, and then he gets into the bath and chucks them out on to the floor, along with gallons of water.

  ‘Stop that right now – the floor’s getting wet.’

  ‘Stupid Mummy.’

  ‘Stupid Alfie.’

  There’s a shocked silence. The usual drill is that he calls me stupid at least six times a day, but I never retaliate.

  ‘You can’t call me stupid – you’re horrible.’

  ‘Oh yes I can. Stupid people wet the bathroom floor on purpose. That’s a stupid thing to do. I’m not being stupid, I’m drying the floor. Look.’

  Another boat comes flying out of the bath, only just missing my ear.

  ‘Right. That’s it. No more bath.’

  I pull the plug out. He makes the kind of noise I imagine people used to make in the days before anaesthetics when the doctor got his saw out. I try to ignore it while he thrashes around in the bath. He’s still got quite a lot of glitter on his knees, and now there’s no chance of me having a quick dab with a flannel unless I can rig up some sort of restraint harness.

  Actually, I’ve often thought some sort of mini straitjacket would be very handy, a sort of Naughty Coat. Something soft and fleecy, maybe with rabbits on it to make it look friendly, that you could fling on in meltdown moments. Never mind all that bollocks about Time Out and sitting on the Naughty Stair. I reckon if you’ve got the kind of child who’ll actually sit on a stair at the bottom of the staircase and think about how naughty they’ve been, then they probably haven’t been that naughty in the first place.

  Whereas if you’ve got one like Alfie you’d have to lurk by the stairs and make sure they actually stayed sitting, and didn’t grab the chance for a quick spot of Peter Pan, or have a go at dismantling the telephone. Some sort of Velcro garment would be really useful, and you could just pop it on, and then sit them on the sofa and watch them having a Houdini session while you had a nice cup of tea. I’m sure it would be illegal, but I bet Baby Gap would make a fortune. Maybe I could ask Mum to knit me something.

  All the water’s drained away now but he’s still thrashing about. I wish I’d waited until I’d got him out of the bath before Making A Stand: last time I tried to get him out of the bath mid-meltdown I nearly dislocated my shoulder. He’s soaking wet and slippery, and getting a grip is not going to be easy, but just when I think I’m going to have to give in and go and get the biscuit tin, I’m suddenly inspired. We watched a wildlife documentary at the weekend with some twit wrestling a crocodile by wrapping a sheet round it and then sitting on it and holding on tight while it bucked him round the swamp.

  I drop a large bath towel on to Alfie, and then grab him, still wriggling, and stagger into his bedroom. At least his shouts are now slightly muffled. He emerges from the towel red-faced and outraged, with his hair all sticking up, but at least the glitter’s come off his knees. He is speechless with fury, but before he can launch into another magic moment I nip in quickly and declare a truce.

  ‘There you are, all lovely and dry. Let’s put your pyjamas on and we can have a story. But no more silly shouting, OK?’

  He gives me a filthy look, and flings the towel out of the door, just to make the point
.

  ‘Which book would you like, penguins or bears?’

  ‘I nearly couldn’t breathe all covered up.’ He shakes his head sadly and gives me a long woeful look as if to emphasise his point. I decide to ignore this because I’m rather impressed by my new emergency swaddling technique and I might be using it again; although taking a large bath towel round Sainsbury’s might look a bit odd.

  ‘Or we could read Winnie the Pooh?’ I know this will divert him, because yesterday he announced that he hates Winnie the Pooh.

  ‘I could go and get you a drink of water if you put your pyjamas on nicely.’

  I wonder if I can risk insisting on teeth-brushing. Returning to the scene of the crime might trigger him off again, but on the other hand there is another towel in the bathroom. Perhaps I shouldn’t overdo it, though. He might become phobic about towels, and that could get rather boring after a while. I’d have to dry him with a tea towel.

  ‘I want juice.’

  He puts his pyjamas on without too much trouble and is sitting up in bed looking angelic when I return with his drink. He settles down quite quickly, clearly exhausted after all the excitement. His breathing slows right down, and he’s nearly asleep as I’m turning off the lights.

  I notice that the towel rail is empty, and come to think of it the towel he chucked out of his door earlier has also disappeared. I finally find them under my bed, covered in dust. He must have run round trying to find somewhere to stash them while I got his juice, just in case I fancied another bit of swaddling.

  As I get back downstairs Lola rings, which tends to mean she wants something. It turns out she’s also had a fairly exhausting afternoon, and her PA Sophie screwed up her lunch booking, so she sent her some sort of email telling her exactly what would happen to her if she ever did it again, but she must have pressed the wrong button because she somehow managed to copy it to the entire office and most of her clients.

  ‘And then ten minutes later I got a stroppy message from Penelope in human resources, asking me if I’d like a chat about the company’s policy on bullying at work. Fucking cheek. Human resources, Jesus, they’ve got to be joking. Anyway I told her, if she thinks a simple little email counts as bullying then she’s in for a big surprise. And the traffic was murder this evening – the sooner they bring in road-charging on every road in the entire country the better, if you ask me. Anything if it’s going to force people back on to buses where they belong. And then when I got home Charles announced Mrs Bishop couldn’t come in today, again, because her mother’s knee is bad. I don’t know why she doesn’t just stick her in an old people’s home or something. Or just leave her at the doctor’s – she seems to spend most of her time there. We’ll have to get someone else, I can’t have the place looking like this. It’s the exact opposite of calm when I come home. And I’ve just eaten a large tub of vanilla ice cream.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. And I’ve got my eye on a family-size bag of crisps. And Charles is no help at all. When he’s not talking about fucking fennel with half the village he seems to spend his time making as much mess as possible. Anyway, I’ve just been reading about this fabulous herb place, and it’s quite near here, so I thought we might go. I mean not for the village thing obviously, I’m still keeping well clear of that, but I thought a herb garden outside the kitchen might be nice. They can’t be that tricky, can they?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  God. I bet she’s going to ask me to design her a herb garden next.

  ‘Well, Charles is bound to pick up some tips. He’s reading loads of books so there’s bound to be something he can copy. Or you could do him a little drawing? How’s the plan going, by the way?’

  ‘Oh nearly finished, I think.’

  ‘I saw a fabulous thing on Channel 4 last night, a sort of wooden pavilion suspended over water. Really stylish. Maybe you could do something like that.’

  ‘I think that might be slightly over the Garden Society’s budget.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I hope it’s not going to be too boring. I mean it is practically right next to our house. I’m sure your plan will be fabulous, but if they just fill it with boring suburban plants it’s going to be dreadful. Let’s go to this herb place and see if we can’t find a few classy things you can slip in without them noticing. I’ll find out where it is and let you know, shall I?’

  And somehow I end up saying yes, that would be lovely, even though I really don’t want to go herb shopping. Perhaps she’ll forget, although somehow I’ve got a feeling she won’t.

  * * *

  I arrive at the village hall with Molly to find half the village has turned up. People seem very excited, and Mrs Pomeroy’s gone quite pink. Everyone gathers round the table as I lay out the plans, and then Mrs Pomeroy claps her hands and asks everyone to be quiet. Christ, talk about building up the tension.

  I explain that I’ve gone for a fairly formal kitchen garden, with a sort of secret garden Alhambra theme, with a new curved wall which will enclose one corner of the existing garden, and we can use old bricks so it looks like it’s been there for years, and it will be high enough to hide the garden completely. The doorway will be screened by trees and bushes so it’ll feel like you’re entering a whole new space.

  The basic plan is pretty simple. There’s a central circle with six paths running out from it, which all join the main path that runs round the entire garden. There’ll be a border running all the way round, planted with fruit trees and lots of flowers and bushes to make it feel slightly overgrown. I want some of it to overhang the path slightly, and break up the lines. The paths will be a mixture of gravel and bricks, and all the beds will be edged with different things: I’ve seen pictures of lavender, and marigolds and nasturtiums, as well as the more traditional green stuff like box, and I want to try to persuade the Garden Society to use a mixture of all these, so it feels quite informal. Though obviously within limits, or it’ll just look mad.

  I’ve put a small summer house in one corner, and a children’s play house in the other, and opposite the doorway we’ll have a raised pond with a fountain, lined with slate and linked to two smaller pools on each of the other two corners, with a shallow rill of water running between them on a slight incline down from the main pond so the sound of trickling water fills the garden. The rills will be edged with brick and slate too, and I want the light from the water to reflect on the walls, and I’ve planned lights set into the paths and the water, just flat white ones to keep it simple, so it will look completely different in the dark. We might even go for some dramatic central lighting in amongst the plants if we can afford it.

  I want to break up the garden with tunnels over the main pathways leading out from the centre, with arches covered with grapevines and climbing roses, or whatever else the Garden Society thinks will make the tunnels shady and cool. Basically, you won’t be able to stand anywhere and see the whole garden, and as you walk round you’ll keep finding new bits.

  By the time I’ve finished everyone has gone rather quiet and I’m feeling rather sick until Charles says he thinks it’s going to be fantastic, and he never imagined anything so wonderful, and then people start to clap and I go so red even my knees feel hot, and then everyone joins in with different ideas about what to plant where, and Mrs Pomeroy says she’s sure we’ll win the competition if the real thing looks anything like as good as the plan.

  ‘Just think, we’ll have an award-winning garden.’

  Charles seems really excited.

  ‘I wouldn’t count your chickens, you know – them judges are famous for being daft. Last year one of them came down from London to give us a talk, and you’ve never seen such a sight. As I if needed telling about soft fruit by a man in leather trousers.’

  Mrs Pomeroy gives Elsie a rather a pointed look, and seems to be hoping she might pick up the hint and be quiet.

  ‘Oh I speak as I find, Mrs Pomalloy, as you well know. I don’t have nothing against them – each to his own. My sister’s b
oy was never a hundred per cent in the trouser department, but you couldn’t find a nicer lad, you really couldn’t. Moved in with her when she got a bit forgetful, and he took care of her lovely.’

  ‘How nice.’

  Charles is clearly trying not to laugh.

  ‘Yes, it was. Nice to see children taking care of their parents, I mean with most of them you could be dead on the floor for weeks and they’d never know. My June’s good though. She comes in every week, and always brings a bit of shopping, although she will keep getting me ham, and I’ve told her, I’ve gone off it. Mind you, it’s how you bring them up. What goes around comes around, I always say. If you bother with them when they’re little then they’ll do the same for you later on. Not like men, less you bother with them the better, in my opinion.’

  ‘Treat them mean and keep them keen, Elsie, is that it?’

  Charles seems very relaxed around the rather formidable Elsie.

  ‘That’s right, Mr B, although I wouldn’t treat you mean, oh no I wouldn’t. If I was ten years younger I’d give you a run for your money, that I would.’

  Everyone laughs, including Elsie.

  ‘Oh yes, you can laugh now, but you should have seen me in my heyday. I was a heartbreaker all right.’

  Charles tells her she still is, and she blushes.

  I haven’t really talked to anyone properly about the budget, although we can use different materials depending on how much they want to spend, and I also need to make sure we’ve got someone who can be around every day. I decide to start with Charles, who says he doesn’t really care what it costs, and he and Mr Channing can share running the project, if Mr Channing will put up with working with a complete beginner. Mr Channing’s obviously very pleased to be chosen as a project leader, and one by one people say they’ve been growing on little plantlets especially for the garden, so we’ll only need to buy the bigger stuff.