Allotment Stories - A tour of inspection

Allotment Stories 05.06.008




A tour of inspection



A man dressed almost completely in black, despite the hothouse heat is pushing a yard brush backwards and forwards over a single paving stone. The object of his brushing appears to be a small pile of soil.
The paving stone is one of six leading up to his allotment shed. Semi-satisfied, Malcolm Wood stands sentry-like, propping up the brush. After a minute's contemplation he begins one of his regular tours of inspection round the perimeter pathway encircling the Arundel Park Allotment Society. He marches, arms and legs swinging, black pants thrust firmly into green Wellingtons.
He is detained by Joyce and Jean at Plot 26 who are ministering to a collection of Courgettes. Joyce has flame-red, short, spiked and gelled hair. Jean has short blonde, spiked and gelled hair. They both work with identical trowels and would look pretty much the same if observed from the driver's seat of a car travelling behind theirs. They both wear latex gloves, the kind worn by surgical staff and car mechanics. They are surgical in their pruning, weeding and grafting. Joyce has a son who, she tells me is 'special needs.'
" Lovely day?" they chorus to Malcolm in unison. "Fantastic" he barks. I have christened Joyce and Jean the 'Laughing Cows.' Their tinkling laughter can be heard from virtually anywhere on the allotment site. They can usually be SEEN from anywhere too, browsing, moving appreciatively through their Nasturtiums or gathering Sweet Peas in a shallow basket. Both are Primary School teachers. Improbably, Jean teaches Physics, Joyce Mathematics. Their seeds and sandwiches are divided down the middle, mathematically. They both look stoically lesbian but in fact they are both married, with children.

The retired potter.


On Plot 28 next door, a handsome, olive-skinned woman in a gardening smock ladles parrafin generously onto a sheaf of sticks rearing up out of an Asda shopping trolley. Occasionally she mutters 'damn' or 'damn it.' She looks forward to seeing how many rats have been trapped overnight in her compost bin. She'd shoot them if she could. She'd shoot the damned Magpies too but Health and Safety or some damned Committee regulations had forbidden the shooting of any vermin. They had to be 'humanely trapped' which put paid to her plan to pot them in succession with an air-rifle her brother was going to lend her for the job.
Diane is a retired Potter. Coincidentally, she potters amongst half-finished pots, fussy strawberry beds, half-empty, crumbly hanging baskets. At lunchtime she stops to drink coffee from a flask and has been doing so for the past eight years. The pots which were failures over the course of her broken career are used to house straggling strawberry plants. She has even been known to use pieces of failed earthenware to cram chives onto ('why waste space' )and every ledge and hook in what she calls her 'pottering shed' and her greenhouse is occupied by the hanging baskets, which often contain nothing except the strawy remains of seedlings she has experimented with and cannot bear to turf out. Then there are the trails of plastic carrier bags flying from ceiling hooks and the Dreamcatchers and Greek Eyes that twirl ominously in Diane's greenhouse, betraying her Hippy past. Diane specialises in watercress grown in plastic half-gutters fed by plastic drip tubes that sprout from her blue plastic water butts. Her old fish tank, its sills coated with algal bloom has been decomissioned and now houses a few cherry tomato plants.
The magpies seem especially fond of striding over her plot when she's not there.



Old Tom.

At Plot 30, an old man, stooped as a mushroom cap sits on his haunches like a soldier in a World War One trench. He is Eighty-Four or thereabouts with a wood-carved, kind face like our Dad's. Most days he wears the same baby-blue-eyed shirt, frayed on one side of the collar. Some days he wears a sage-green, padded anorak that has faded over time. He's beginning to fade himself.
Tom has been growing the same Savoy cabbages, Desiree potatoes (pronouncing them in best Liverpool accent as Duseeri), French Beans and onions in his trenches for twelve years solid in orderly rotation. He has grown ‘Onward’ tomatoes, spaced at regular intervals in his greenhouse for the same length of time. The length of time is like the length of green string he uses as a form of measurement. He measures everything from planks of wood to seed drills. On Tom's plot, nothing is wasted, not even sawdust. He has peered through the same square-framed, greasy glasses for this long too. Tom is almost the kindest person we have ever met. He makes a point of giving away everything he grows, gives away wood, paint, nails, glass, cuttings, seeds, even his own meagre ration of Heinz vegetable soup in its stopped-up tartan thermos-flask. He gives away more onions than he can realistically afford, preserves them lovingly in his shed so that he can carry on giving them away all year round. He thanks you for everything he gives away and the phrase he says most often is 'thanks very much.' He always hits the nail on the head but never hurt a soul in his life. His hands are always steady on the tiller and his woodworking aim is true.
He planes a dry, gentle wit the same way he planes wood, till it fits. I told him I was
growing Rocket last year. "Watch it doesn't take off then" was his answer. I asked him "how long should my canes be?" when planting my row of runner beans.
"Long enough for Jack and The Beanstalk" came his answer. When I commented on the size of the onion harvest he had just garnered he told me '" I'll be crying till this side of next week."
Tom's wife has never visited the plot. She is a reference point only in an occasional conversation. She has given him a miniature mantel-piece clock for HIM to refer to.
Tom is often called upon to fix other plot-holders sheds, re-pane their greenhouses, dig over their plots while they take Easyjet flights with their families to Madrid or Toulouse for obscenely low fares. Tom's grand-daughter went to Madrid three times in her gap year.The Easyjet flight-path to Madrid is pretty much over the Arundel Park Allotment Society.
Tom has never seen an Easyjet plane at close quarters, let alone been on one. Nor has he ever been on a plane, except in World War Two.
It was Tom who crafted our shed, painted it with remaindered, sage-green paint, duct-taped the cracks between the slatted walls, laid the concrete flagstone path between his plot and ours, then re-laid it. It was Tom who re-roofed our shed, the nails flying in ram-rod straight, Tom who re-painted it sage-green and Tom who was sorry he couldn't have given us more onions. Tom it was who was twice-thankful for the pallet we'd acquired but given over to him. He had dismembered the pallet carefully, re-fashioning parts of it into a compost bin lid, painted it sage-green, let it dry out in his greenhouse then fitted it to the compost bin using the nails he'd prised out of the pallet.
One day, scratching around for work, he painted his heavy wheelbarrow sage-green for something to do.
Tom likes to do things the hard way, takes the stony path. So his tools are as old as himself and of a heaviness eschewed by lightweight plot-holders like the moody, overweight family on Plot 40 or the young couple who have just taken over the corner plot and who met each other at a software conference. He comes and goes on a heavy-framed black gent's Raleigh bicycle.
Tom works like the seasons used to work, diligently and in rotation.

The Absentee.

My sisters and I are on Plot 32. Then comes Phil, an absentee plot-holder, owner of a flat-bed truck, a spattered yellow racing bike, a spattered jacket ripped as a dog's bedding, spattered work-boots and thin, worn-out shorts. Phil winters in an Anglesey caravan, catches lobsters, freezes them ready to sell back in Liverpool. Phil has a lobster complexion and spends a good deal of time in the Brewery Tap at Cain's. He makes home-brew too. Last year he was going to make a cider-press from the gubbins of an old engine and a crankshaft, use up all the wind-falls. The process would have resulted in a whole brewery-full of cider. But he abandoned the idea and gave up the windfall collection.
Pete likes to be there when no-one else is, sits grandly at daybreak on one of his white plastic chairs, tucks in to pork sausage fry-ups made on an old, rusty barbecue set on a pile of wonky bricks. In spidery writing he has scrawled 'if anyone has been in my shed, I'll chop their hands off' across his shed door, even though not even a rat could penetrate the accumulation of broken spade handles, twisted-up barbecues, old engine parts, giant catering soup cans filled with diesel and other unmentionable things.

The Gentleman.


Next up on Plot 36 is a dapper gentleman with a pale spade of a face, a Methodist expression and tented eyebrows under a titfer which he presses down on his head occasionally as if it were about to blow off (it never does.) He is immaculately preserved from the Fifties, He is John Davies, an honest one too. He does a lot of striding and hammering, moves with precision, pulls on the same yellow gardening gloves in the same spot outside his shed every day, climbs the same V-ladder every year (in early March to be precise) to get the bean-frame ready, lays the cross-bar atop it spirit-level flat, sets a fire twice a year and dips into his Terracotta red shed now and again with a mysterious bowl which we have now decided that he pisses into. He is an intensely private man but he will speak when spoken to with a quiet gratitude. You can tell the time by him (and probably the phases of the moon) but if you still don't know it you can always ask him.






Mothers Number One and Two.

Up from John Davies at 36 is Muriel, who tacitly expresses a preference for the same sex. Not to be out-done by heterosexual women though, she wants a baby too. Why shouldn't she? So she's been planning for the turkey baster and grooming her lumbering girlfriend for the position of childminder and what she calls 'Mother Number Two.'
Muriel works for The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which has now been audaciously re-branded the 'Centre for Tropical and Infectious Diseases'...you feel you might acquire one or two by going there). She is something of an expert in Sickle Cell Anaemia (her affections for a Ghanaian girl in her First Year sparked off her interest. She was going to present a thesis on Sickle Cell in the Ghanaian Diaspora but changed her mind when the Ghanaian girl left ). Muriel knows all about disease, health and how to have a baby without having to have sex with men, face to face. She is determined to have one, determined too that it will be a girl.
Muriel was friendly to us at first, offering us trays of cabbage seedlings and telling us her spinach was 'cut-and-come-again'. I suppressed hilarity at the double-entendre. She was completely blind to it.
As the pregnancy wore on she began to dress in dark clothing and made more infrequent appearances on her plot. A hump, then a pillow fronted her. Her rose-tinted cheeks, arms and face bloomed and plumped up and she became preoccupied, diffident. She disappeared for three months. Her sudden re-appearance with a mewling, red-faced dot in a plastic baby-carrier over one arm like one of the vegetable baskets she was fond of toting read like one of those three-strip, time-lapsed cartoons or the before and after of an advertising feature. With it came the sweet-and-sour happenstance that the baby was not a girl.
Muriel indulged every tearing scream and piercing cry that the red-faced dot threw at her, So, like Muriel's marrows, it grew in its bed, becoming enormous. Unlike Muriel's marrows, it often heaves into its Huggies disposable nappies. Muriel would have opted for terry-towelling ones but, as she tells 'Mother Number Two' she just doesn't have time.
So soon enough, Carmel, the lumbering girlfriend comes down to Plot 36 to hang around the compost bin, help Muriel scratch out a sub-plot for lettuces and a peck of Camomile which they plan to make soothers out of for the now moon-faced red dot. They don't want to take on too much, she tells Muriel. As if it reads their thoughts, the baby cranks up into a Force Nine howl and Numbers One and Two Mothers are yanked back to the business end of their plot. Now they are both lumbered.


Naomi Wiseman.


On the flip-side of the Allotment site, dissected by the spine of the Central Path (which all plot-holders are entitled to use) is Naomi Wiseman's plot, Number 40. Naomi stuffs pork-sausage fingers into designer garden gloves, leans over a stainless steel and tungsten spade with undulating handle (for better grip she says.) The spade cost a cool fifty quid (but you can't put a price on comfort.)
Naomi is built for comfort. She is huge and bluff. Last week she imported three large yellow building hoppers, bloated with acrid, dense peat compost onto the site. They were winched by Mini-digger onto her plot .The digger gouged its Caterpillar ruts down one side of her plot, further disfiguring the place. She believed the peat compost necessary to feed the already very healthy Braeburn Espalier saplings she had fetched from down South last time 'there was a crisis with Nick's Mum' (her doughty, nonegenarian mother-in-law Nancy, who lives in Bournemouth). She had decided that since they had to go all the way down there
she 'might as well pick them up on the way back.' This meant she didn't actually want to go. The nursery where she bought them wasn't on the way back but instead entailed a further forty mile drive off the main drag. Naomi knew about the detour but neglected to mention it to Nick.All her years as a Barrister had taught her the craft of omission.
Unlike Muriel's black period of black dress, Naomi has a more permanent bulk to dress down and wears black at all times. Her backside is enormous so she stoops like a nodding donkey at an oilfield, her rear occupying pivotal position. She 'rarely has time' to work her plot, appearing roughly ten times per annum, rolling down the perimeter path in a clapped -out old Mercedes that spits leaded petrol exhaust. Or else her bulk is sandwiched against the dashboard of her 'other vehicle', a Smart car in black and cream whose environmental credentials she is fond of boasting about. She boasts with the whole of her being. In the Smart car her big, red face is pressed up against the windscreen.
Most of Naomi's crops, most of everyone else's crops goes to rot, never reaches dinner plates. Inside her greenhouse, a whole tranche of cucumbers has come and gone. The luscious things filled out, dangling themselves seductively, then became grooved, scabrous, disappointed.
Her raspberries, huge and freakish ripened and fell and her Braeburn apples flushed and fainted, despite all her fixing brackets to hold the crucified espalier branches to their horizontals, despite her identifying labels marked with indelible ink and her acrid peat compost hoppers.
Her quest for exotics like the Franchi Leek, a pale, soldierly variety and Provencal Garlic reaches new heights with every passing season.


Naomi's husband Nick is a pint- pot of a man, tiny but practical. He beavers away quietly at splaying the espalier branches along their lateral spars, digging potato trenches or re-laying the greenhouse floor. He doesn't make a fuss, just gets on with it. Both he and Naomi are in the Cathedral Choir where they sing their respectively angry and unfussed old hearts out.
Naomi's perpetual feeling of sour grapes means she will never satisfactorily resolve her border wars with the Moody Family even though she is a Barrister. All her strident intervention, conducted through the Committee and her co-opting of other plot-holders into her fighting corpus are destined to fail. Sour grapes and their green-ness will see to that.

Inside the Containers.

Notwithstanding, and because of her profession, Naomi files a complaint with the Committee.Thus, at 11.15 a.m. on a Sunday morning, Item 2a) 'Complaint by Naomi Wiseman (Plot 40a) against Karen and Ellis Gardener (Plot 40b) ' is being windily aired by the Arundel Park Allotment Society Committee meeting inside two containers knocked into one which serve as the Committee Meeting Room.
Item 1, the Northampton Exchange Visit is used as an opener to set a feel-good, humorous tone. The labyrinthine report of the visit is rolled out by the Chair, breezy Annie McCullough, a smile always playing on her lips, even when she's been maddened. She knows how to make a point and has therefore held the Chair for the past five years. She is diminutive, chain-smoking Annie, Aubergine-dyed red hair scarecrowed under a faded baseball hat, maroon turtle-necked sweater encasing a bony frame. She wears elfin gardening boots and, when in meetings a pen shoved behind her ear. Otherwise she chews, waves or stumps the pen on the table. The pen stands in for a cigarette. After long meetings, she steps outside the container, lights up, inhales deeply, throws back her head, pauses dramatically then exhales a long funnel of smoke. She knows she should give up but has no intention of doing so. 'What the hell' is how she feels.. Her whiskey, smoke-filled voice and her way of touching people on the arm when she's talking to them means she is erotically charged and crackles with warmth. Her oratory fizzes too. She seems to speak for everyone. She is in the habit of using certain phrases a lot. 'We like', 'listen guys' and 'Yeah?' tacked onto any idea or comment uppishly will always win over any waverers. So Annie's idea to increase the sales of Paraffin and Italian seeds and to install Security lighting around the perimeter fence following the theft of gardening gloves and two harrow rakes (Naomi suspects the Gardeners) is waved through by the strategic placement of 'listen guys' and 'we like.'
The meeting winds on, slower than the River Nile. Even the A.O.B. takes up an hour but the members don't mind as this feels like a signature does at the end of a letter and is generally the meatiest bit.

Malcolm Wood's world.


The minutes are kept ( to the letter) by the Treasurer. And who could be more suitable for that position than the military Malcom Wood with his passion for columns, tables and orders? Look at his plot and you will see the passion burning through the staked Onward peas, the potato drills, the paper-brown-skinned onions shouldering themselves out of the ground. Listen to him talk excitedly about the menace of Mares Tail and see him shudder at the inward thought of the anarchic underground labyrinth of what look like bootstraps ( 'Oh yes it can grow to a depth of six metres you know- and that's not all. You see those pointed heads, they can thrust up through the soil, pop up all over the place.They're almost designed for it. You literally have to be ready and waiting to behead the damn things or they'll take over the whole plot before you know it.') Or listen to him berating a new plot-holder for not hoeing enough.
Malcolm speaks of Mares Tail the way that Dick Cheney speaks of Al Queda or the way Senator McCarthy used to speak of Ed Murrow and his fellow travellers as Pinkoes, Reds under the Bed or Bleeding Hearts.(' You've got to nip 'em in the bud.' or words to that effect.)
He has nurtured this healthy hatred for the past five years. He even dreamed about the underground Mares Tail network with its lateral mainlines as transporters of a poisonous fluid and its verticals as capillaries to carry the poisonous fluid up through the soil. The spear-like pollen-bearing tips of the Mares Tail were the means by which the poison was dispersed, aerosol-like into the air and he, Malcolm Wood could do nothing to prevent his lungs from inhaling the deadly stuff! After that dream, the plants took on an even more sinister look and meaning.

On the whole, Malcolm Wood comes over as a mild-mannered man who fights only with plants, the seasons and the Treasurer's figures. He is always sure to give out a hysterical burst of laughter after telling someone how to hoe, what month to sow Pumpkin seeds in or how much Parrafin they need per Annum. His self-parody lurks in his waving arms and the quick step he takes backwards to indicate shock or disbelief when someone confesses to a gardening mistake. Most of all it lurks in the hysterical laugh that says 'I'm only messing.'
He strides about the place in his wellies. The check shirt and black tie he wears are somehow at odds with them and seem to speak of passion overruled by order.
Malcolm feels a great sense of belonging to the Arundel Park Allotment Society. It is as if he is its cornerstone. Something would go wrong if he did not march every day to the site and post himself in the sentry-box that is his shed.


The Seasons.


The seasons at Arundel Park now blur into one another like wet-on-wet paint. The arrival of climate change is a fact which the plot-holders remain infuriatingly oblivious to (but then we are in Great Britain.) Deeply disturbed at the freakery of a Red Admiral butterfly staggering out of our shed in mid- February, I told Diane that she’d never believe it but that I had just seen a butterfly. Her response, without a flicker ofdisturbance was ’how lovely, looks like Spring has finally decided to arrive.’ My horrified look failed to shatter her beatitude. Even the old-timers like Tom and John Davies don’t get it, as when during a clear Indian summer February day that felt like an old September school day (temperature 13 degrees Celsius) Tom had hunched his shoulders and said ’gone a bit cooler’ to me. If the old-timers didn't find the way that Nature was being fought tooth and nail deeply disturbing, what hope for the
rest of them? The personal thermostats of the British have broken down irretrievably and they have as much understanding of weather patterns and climate change as a dog does of Socrates.
Consequently, no-one complains that a butterfly has been seen at the beginning of February or almond blossom in mid-December but only that 'it's gone cold again' or that 'it's raining again' or that 'it looks like rain.' The sun is always welcome even when it's pushing 80 degrees in April. Weather forecasters, on such a day as this are likely to tell us that 'another fine day is forecast' or that there is 'plenty of sunshine on offer' like a commodity one might order online, Conversely, there are 'a few spits and spots of rain to bother us' or a 'heavy band of rain sweeping over Cheshire, threatening the Northwest I'm sorry to say.' whenever conditions favour rain. The fight against Nature is carried into everyone's home or through their car stereos. Rain and coldness are the enemy. The common knowledge vented by weather girls is as far removed from the Met Office as Britney Spears is from J.S. Bach. It precipitates the everyday greetings of people all over Great Britain.
This is nowhere more apparent than at the Arundel Park Allotment Society where a veritable microclimate of opinion on 'weather' is spouted forth from around shed doors or at the Society's shop.


Special needs.

Last year Malcolm Wood and Annie McCullough had to move heaven and earth (but mainly earth) to put the brakes on the Society's ambition to provide a whole plot to Forward First, an organisation for people 'with learning disabilities’. There are hundreds of such organisations in Britain. They have mushroomed over the past twenty years.and now make up a muscular raft of ‘charities’ ( which are in fact businesses) whose hands are rarely out of the public purse. Once the seed had been sown at the Steering Committee meeting the 'project' as it was known was 'rolled out' and the leviathan of political correctness duly flattened any dissenters, quickly scenting out (with it's new default nose) the 'Old School', the Luddites who were 'resistant to progress’. I was one of them.
Even the unreconstructed Annie was forced to debate the minutiae of matched funding.
The sum of £8,000 was gifted to Forward First who laid claim to Plot 80 and two Caterpillar bulldozers moved onto the site, their drivers alternating between slouch-seated destruction and two-hour lunch breaks in their respective cabs.
The giant Sycamore that had greeted and shaded plot-holders, yielded its branches for their fires and lean-tos, homed a pair of Mistle Thrushes and several pairs of Dunnocks, breathed out generous supplies of oxygen for the last seventy years of its lustrous life was felled in less than half-an-hour.A yawning, concentrated hardness took its place and my eyes and heart smarted. All eyes and hearts were forced summarily to forget that it had stood in its place,
done all those things, been the great Sycamore.
I thought that this would be the end of the 'restructuring programme' but my horror and dismay were to deepen as two new containers were winched into place and then a block of toilets and a septic tank. Next the old pathways were concreted over and grab-rails, a huge polytunnel and two stout, plastic-lined compost bins were added. Thereafter, every Monday and Thursday afternoon a group of six adults with 'special needs' were to be seen loitering around the edges of the Forward First plot, clinging onto mugs of hot tea or rising and sitting down again in one of the new containers. Periodically, one would emerge from the toilet block. This loose collection of people appeared to be supervised and shepherded by a man who arrived separately in a small white van which he insisted on driving through the gateway
and parking just inside the Allotment site. The man had a clipboard and spent much of those afternoons filling in details while those in his charge milled about on Plot 80


The Fox Family.

Some of the plot-holders are not people. There have been folkloric sightings of an adult male fox, some actual, others imagined. I first saw him sauntering down the Central Path on a July mid-afternoon, brush dropped low in the stifling heat. He was an unorthodox fox in other ways too. For his night-time wanderings took him to all corners of the allotment site. It looked like he was inspecting every plot most nights for whatever delicacies he could find, scraping and grubbing up the bare soil. Arriving at our own plot one morning, we found each
parcel of land pitted with a criss-cross mosaic of his spoors. These were renewed throughout the Autumn and Winter months so that a different Kaleidoscopic arrangement of paw-prints presented themselves to you whenever you visited. Occasionally he would begin hollowing out a new den under wooden walking boards or at the edges of flagstones and then think better of the idea. He and his vixen and cubs, forced to move home and hounded from pillar to post, lead what must be nomadic, disturbed lives. Once they took up residence in a long-abandoned shed. The owner, a retired electrician paid one of his bi-annual visits and was affronted by the hole that marked the entrance to the new den. Enraged, he blocked up the hole with bricks and stones and the Fox Family, seeking asylum in their own country, moved to the perimeter. There, amidst a bonfire pile surmounting a clay bank, they settled until the appropriately name Bill Thorne decided to move his bonfire pile and dig over the bank. The adult male sought another home and dug under a pergola owned by the Laughing Cows. They were not amused and threw water down the hole in order to turn the den to mud and block up whatever was down there, cubs or no cubs. I wish for the foxes to build their den under our shed. What a privilege that would be.


The Moody family.

About four times a year the Moody family appear on their half-plot. Moody is not their real name. They are, respectively Karen and Ellis Gardener and their children, Elly and Thomas and in fact know nothing whatsoever which could be considered as gardening. The family own a chocolate Labrador with a pink nose which they named Toby and which they consider to be part of the family. The Gardeners are rather obese ( Toby included) and waddle rather than walk. One could hardly avoid the pendulous, huge bosoms that Elly was prone to dangling over her polytunnels of rocket.
Ellis barks out the orders to his wife and kids, who mill about the several square yards that make up their half-plot or else stand still on it. Either very little happens or else rather a lot. A lot happens if Ellis has brought his petrol strimmer or chain-saw down. A whole apple tree was reduced to a single stump on one occasion. On another, a fearsome pallisade was erected angrily to screen off an abandoned trampoline, some doll carts, an outgrown pushchair and an old Playstation that had been piled on top off a heap of unshaken clods. Ellis in a foul mood had gouged out the bottom end of the plot, leaving an equally purposeless pit. Elly, Thomas and Karen had pretended at the time to be busy pegging down a Polytunnel and snipping pieces of rocket off one of the parent plants that had grown quite by chance when one of the children had spilled a packet on a drill meant for lettuces. They had stood still while their father had heaved the sods onto one another.
As you discovered earlier, the Gardener's half-plot borders Naomi Wiseman's and is hotly disputed territory. The ad hoc solution has been for the Gardeners to use a row of raspberry canes to mark the beginning of their plot ( the end of Naomi's.) For reasons which will seem obvious to us, the Barrister is never seen on her plot while the Moody family are on theirs, and vice-versa. In fact, so acrimonious does Naomi feel towards the invasion of these urbanites ( almost as acrimonious as her peat compost) that she has stopped coming down to the site altogether, whether in the Mercedes or the Smart car. Her pale, soldierly leeks have all bolted and her Braeburn Espaliers have artfully sent out new shoots in all sorts of illegal directions such as even her Barrister's brief is unable to arrest.








Drainage.

A very old stream which has flowed through Toxteth down the centuries (but which is nameless) has had the audacity to course through(or rather under) the Arundel Park Allotment Society's site diagonally from South to North, bisecting it as it were.
Its coursing and its temporary stagnation, far from being a welcome source of irrigation has, on the contrary been one of irritation for all those plot-holders whose 'little balls of dirt' (to quote the Capek' s from their 'Insect Play') the unfortunate watercourse crosses; Plots 20, 34, 48 and 76. Ripples of anxiety had swept over the entire site flooding minds with visions of vegetables being washed away or else over-watered. The first complaint, by Bill Thorne on Plot 20 precipitated the next by Gisela Hardy, a sextegenarian as tall as a Delphinium who deals in clean lines and boasts a mixed thyme border and an Alpine wall. Gisela is Spanish.( I had got it into my head that she would be Swiss because of the Alpines but like many things she would turn out to be not as one would have at first suspected. She married Gerry Hardy, a Wirral Councillor. Gisela's long arms are often to be seen fussing amongst the Alpines. Like the Laughing Cows, she collects her Victoria Plums in a shallow basket.She is very fond of Vermiculite, sand and gravel (she even enjoys saying the word Vermiculite as she believes it confers gravitas on her.) She has several buckets of the aforementioned stored at any one time in her neat greenhouse and has embedded a few wise old cacti in pots of the stuff. She loves it principally for its capacity to drain and for its 'clean-ness.' For someone who enjoys good drainage, an underground stream that sometimes threatens to flood the piece of land abutting her greenhouse is total anathema. (akin to the threat of an axe-murderer being let loose in a convent.) Gisela was sure to attend the emergency meeting called by the Society's Committee to deal with the 'underground watercourse and drainage proposal'
Bill Thorne was there too, having first taken it upon himself to visit the Local History section of Central Library to look for topographical maps of the area. Once there, he was easily distracted by satisfying an interest that had been burgeoning within him; the history and meaning of his own name.



The plot-holders at 48 and 76 were sure to attend the meeting too. The trickle of complaints that had started off as informal remarks (because this was always the tributary down which complaints reached the doors of the two-containers-knocked-into-one that were the permanent meeting place of the Society's Committee and Sub-Committee. Once the village pumps had started up, the matter of drainage was bound to surface at Committee level. And so it proved. The Sub-committee( who were responsible for all structural work) swiftly decided that the stream needed to be re-routed. They found an eager contractor from amongst legions of stump-grinders, block pavers and drainage engineers that surfaced on the Internet. The contractor was an outfit called Soakaway.com.
On July 21st, 2007, the first three Soakaway contractors arrived in three large, spanking new Mercedes vans. They wore blue boiler suits and khaki builders' boots. After they had unloaded the vans of blue plastic piping, concrete mixers, mini diggers, chain fencing blocks and builder's spades, they took a well-earned break and the clamour that marked their arrival was succeeded by a sort of suspense, rather than a silence which was punctuated by coarse laughter. Soon the Soakaway men were to be seen floating round the perimeter pathway on the mini-diggers and a mini-Caterpillar. Pretty soon too, the pathway lost its pleasant verges and became a rutted quagmire. A bulldozer arrived and the Lleylandi that formed a screen at the edge of the site were bulldozed and their stricken bodies lay athwart the fencing. They were left to die slowly as though their proximity to the offending stream was somehow to blame for the stream itself. The Soakaway men dug ditches down the central pathway, then filled them with gravel, then dug a drainage channel near the original stream-bed. At the place where the unfortunate stream exited to flow under the Arundel Park Cricket Club they built cement structures with lids. You had the impression that neither they nor the plot holders who watched them out of the corners of their eyes knew what they were doing or how to do what they didn't know they were doing. Roughly-speaking though, their object had been to divert the stream so that it would not periodically rise to flood plot-holders land. The stream, put out by this human interference now flows with renewed vigour down the far pathways and collects in large puddles. Some plot-holders recently remarked upon the 'river' that they said was flowing down their pathways and the remarks became complaints which then streamed their way in written form to the Sub-Committee's meeting house. The next meeting there was called to discuss 'the unresolved issue of structural drainage problems.'
So, as my Mum is always fond of saying, water always finds its own level.


Patrick McCarthy.


One of the longest-serving members of the Arundel Park Allotment Society is Patrick McCarthy. He's a large, barrel-chested man with a dog's lead worn round his neck like a talisman. His hands are large but surpisingly delicate with their long, fine palms and fingers. 'Paddy' as he refers to himself is bluff, like an old washerwoman and likes nothing better than to gossip, his voice dropping to a sanctified whisper when speaking of anyone's habits or misfortunes. His favourite topic of conversation is illness, whether it be his own or someone else’s. He was born 'an the wrang side o' Cark' and when he's talking, you are melted away by his accent and never want him to stop, so delightful is its lilt and lisp, its burred edges. As he unfolds his words, you believe yourself to be listening to the last living exponent of 'th'Oirish Brogue'. What a privilege this is and how honoured you feel he will never know. It's a blessing but a shame that he is so blissfully unaware of its silvery effect upon the soul.
The dog lead around Patrick Mc Carthy's neck does have an owner. She is Connie, an old Border Collie who hobbles after her master with her tail at half-mast. Connie is meek and will either sit or stand to look first at the face of her master, then at the face of whoever he is talking to for the next twenty minutes or so. She will move her head almost imperceptibly at the rise and fall of his voice.
Connie is quite used to such intervals which she uses to rest her arthritic frame.
Paddy disappeared for a few months. One morning I found him outside Tom's shed where he was depositing a saddle he had wrenched off his disused bike. He rose from a bent-over position and greeted me. I enquired after his health and he told me he'd 'been away for t'ree munts wit' a triple heeart bypass.' Looking at his great barrel-chest, it seemed hard to imagine this gentle giant needing any kind of by-pass, let alone a triple one. 'It's an the mend now' he told me, tugging the dog lead gently and adding, as he palmed the side of Tom's door 'touch wood.' Next he regaled me with the story of how, early one morning he had felt a huge weight bearing down on his chest, that he knew something was wrong; how, 'as fartune would hev it ' his son Michael (normally living in Australia having landed a big engineering contract but on one of his three-yearly visits to his father) was sleeping in an adjacent room; how Paddy had managed to rouse Michael who had then phoned an ambulance, which had 'whisked' him straight to Broad Green Hospital.
"Will you give that saddle to Tammy-I pramised him ‘tlast year I was gorrnt' gie it to’m. His old one's arl worn troo an' I cain't use it enny more and Tammy won't be down here 'til efter two" Paddy came closer to me and adopted a confessional whisper. "To tell the truth, did you know that Tammy is bit of a night-owl. No, I don't mean that. He's gat soom sart o' condition that means he cannot sleep of a night. So he stays up an' watches telly 'til farr in the marnin' or else until he falls asleep. The funny thing is to look at you'd say he was a regular sort o' guy. The way I found out was this; I went round to Tammys about the saddle an' his missus answers the door. I says 'is Tammy in?' an' she says' Tammy's in bed'. It was twelve noon by that time so I says 'Is he awlraight' and she says 'yes, but he won't be up 'til two.' Thats when I thart 'that's a strange t'ing. But y'see he cannot help it, it's a condition he's gat’.

Later that year I came across Paddy leaning forward, hands on hips to tell his plot neighbour, little Jan Metcalfe, the story of Tommy and his nightwatch..Her mouth fell open as she listened with incredulity. I heard the tail-end of the story.’Y’see, he canna help it. It’s a condition he’s gat.’.

Last month, Paddy decided to re-build his greenhouse, brought his workman’s bench down, hammered the whole thing together. He had sequestered the pieces of wood from various skips around Allerton, creosoting each piece of wood before nailing it to the next. I stopped to ask him if he needed me to hold the pieces in place, asked him how he was, how Connie was.
‘There’s a small dog efter her’ he told me.’Oi t’ink it belanngs to the big,fat lady on that plot down there.’
It was only a matter of time, I had conjectured, before Naomi Wiseman would introduce a dog onto the site. I imagined it to be a Jack Russell as I had her down as a fox-hating, meat-eating, Clarissa Dixon-Wright type of a woman.
He waved dismissively in the vague direction of Naomi Wiseman’s plot.’Her with the little care.’ He leaned his head towards mine. And not wanting to have the kind of accident he was going to tell me about, the big man climbed down from his stumpy step-ladders with delicacy.
He adopted the confessional whispering tone again.
‘She’s nat bin down fer a couple o’ munts.’
Sensing a tragedy was about to be unfurled before me I drew it out of him by way of a question.
‘She hed an accident .‘Twas the strangest thing. She tripped over her dag and broke her leg. There’s nothing down for a big woman like that. She went down like a ton ‘o bricks-BANG.’
I raised my eyebrows. Connie raised her ears.
‘You see I t’ink he was blind, the dag’.







Missing, presumed lost.


Every now and again plot-holders complain to the Committee that a pair of gardening gloves, a spade or a wheelbarrow have ‘gone missing.’ Or else ‘gone walkies.’ In this way, they avoid accusing anyone of theft while letting the Committee, and thereby everyone else at the allotment site know that they were not born yesterday and that the malfeasant will be nailed, eventually. Most plot-holders have experienced the unexplained disappearance of fruit or vegetables in the same way that we have all caught a cold at some point in our lives. To have had something stolen, to have had one’s shed broken into is a rite of passage. A patched up shed sporting a new hasp or lock is a kind of badge of honour.
My own spade vanished overnight and my sisters and I cast about for a suspect. I never believed that it could have been of any interest to any plot-holder since each one had his or her own spade. I must have left it lying around.Someone must have seen it, handed it in to the container offices, I reasoned.
We never found it. My sister bought me a new one, with a beautiful, traditional wooden handle and a smart, keen, steel blade with the B+Q tokens she had been given as a leaving present from her last job, a job whose years of effort and dedication were summarily rewarded with the ‘Home and Garden’ gift option.
So I set to with the new spade, tried not to feel too aggrieved at the loss of my trusty friend, and all the work it had done to earn me a crust!


Causing Offence.

A ragged St.George’s flag fluttered defiantly at the apex of a shed on plot 18, the one corresponding to ours across the perimeter path. The shed itself seemed little used, with darkened, cobwebby windows. Whenever I came early to work at our plot though, I would see the door of that shed thrown wide open. Then, at the far end of plot 18, I would catch sight of a man in his fifties sitting on a plastic shell chair by his brick-built compost heap or standing, leaning slightly on a spade or hoe while he appeared to gaze at an abstract point in the distance.If he was looking at anything, it would not be me.
The man had given most of his plot over to the growing of onions and potatoes. He had what I called a ‘working plot.’
I never took much notice of the man until one day in mid-summer when I was gathering runner beans from the sage-green frame which Tom had built and had kindly made available to us on his plot.
The man at plot 18 saw me, craned his neck and became agitated. He cleared his throat as he lurched towards me.
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’ he bellowed. ‘That’s stealing. They’re not yours.’
I was ready for him, having sensed his agitation and launched my reply..
‘I think you’ll find’ I shouted back in acid tones ’they’re our beans which Tom very kindly let us grow on his frame, alright?! And if you don’t believe me, you can ask him yourself.’
‘Oh don’t worry, I will.’ came the rejoinder, ending the ugly exchange.
After that incident I never saw the man again.
In September, laminated notices were tied to the allotment railings at regular intervals. There was nothing remarkable about this. People were always being warned about slow worms and corrupted seeds, plant sales and Hallowe’en Pumpkin suppers by notices of the same type of laminated A4 paper, tied to the railings, usually at the entrance gates to the site .One was almost forced to read them. This particular notice was headlined in capital letters. The reason soon became evident. It described the arrest of a Stan McLoughlin on three separate charges of sexual harassment of two plot-holders at the Sefton Park allotments. The offending member had been served with an order terminating his membership of the Society. The laminated notice came with a warning not to let anyone on site unless they could prove their identity and membership of the Society. The man had ceded membership, and with it his plot, 18.