Notes on 'Growing up in Heswall'

Growing up in Heswall.




What is often remembered of childhood are the smells and sounds, the sights originally viewed through the great lens of newness that accompanies that passage of time.

We might remember the warmth and faint musk of a privet hedge that we brushed against in the beige Barathea coats with chocolate-brown velvet buttons we wore, helped on by our mother, over arms and shoulders. Or else the sound of wrought-iron gate latches at shoulder height and the white curl of the gates themselves, for example as we were ushered into the drive of a neighbour's home.

We might recall the idea of being resigned to quiet play, half listening to the 'visit talk' unravel for what could end up being two hours or more. There would be the arrival of Iced Sports biscuits or Battenburg on a tea tray with an aluminium pot of narrow spout and cups and saucers that shook as they were brought through from the kitchen for our sakes. There would be fidgetting at the seemingly large, shiny-stockinged and dependable knees of our Mum. We would notice our own shoes, or Maud's shoes, or else the particular swirls of Maud's carpet. Other things at foot level would be noticed too.
Then there was the crazy paving or the gatepost stones pebbledashed like great sugar loaves.

There were the evenings too, when, leaning out of the top bedroom window, the acrobatic arching of swifts with their magical screams would entertain us; dear birds we dared, hoped would come closer, closer to our window ledges that they might alight, that we might brush them, touch their trembling, electric wings as they went swooping and swooning past the H-shaped TV aerial. Dear birds that we envied as they carried on screaming and arching in the balmy air whilst we must be closed down for the night behind curtains because it 'was bedtime.'
These were birds whose antics were yet mixed up with our having watched Dad play for Heswall C.C. on Whitfield Common that same evening and  with the heat trapped from a day's-worth of sun, musty behind those blue velvet curtains, warmth that made the wool carpet smell ropey.



There were a thousand things recalled about school too. The hot-cold oozing of grazes to gravel-pitted knees following a fall in the playground. (these to be worn as a badge of honour as indicated by the crimson blood and attendant scabbing that must be preserved at all costs). The refusal of the boys to let you into their makeshift game of cricket because 'girl's can't play.'The gritty taste of the milk in its half-pint glass bottles , brought out into the school corridors in aluminium crates, along with orange juice as an alternative. The glazed brown bricks of the corridors, the pastel green and the coat pegs. Rows of plimsoll bags, some with stitched monogrammed names.The doors with their frosted glass quarter-lights. The assembly hall, parqueted in beechwood flooring upon which we squatted, cross-legged or with our knees tucked up, examining the grazes and the landscape of our legs, fiddling with socks, tucking frocks into knickers or mouthing the words to hymns whenever the eyes of teachers sidelining the assembly hall would seem to rest upon us onerously.
At dinner hour, the trestle tables that lined both sides of the hall were put out, along with the forms that we slid along, ready for pale pink roast beef slices,cabbage, soapy roast potatoes and diced carrots, stewed apple and custard or spotted dick .The dinners were dispensed from aluminium troughs with aluminium ladles. The roast potatoes were always a huge favourite and those who pleaded with the dinner ladies would be offered more if they were lucky. Rhubarb crumble, with its undercooked toppings, generously sugared, was also a big hit with us kids.The mash usually contained grit of some kind.

The incidence of kids being sick on the parquet floor at morning assembly, before or after 'Music and Movement' was one of the mysteries of school life that is not forgotten. Such incidences were always followed by a parting of the paticular line of schoolchildren at the site of the occurence. Then there came our school janitor, Mr. Leadbetter, an old man (or so we thought)with slicked , back faded ginger hair, a wrinkled and reddish face and a pair of dark blue denim overalls. Mr. Leadbetter wore a resigned, mute expression. He would bring a yardbrush and a pail of sand into the hall and sprinkle the sand over the patch of vomit before sweeping it up with a shovel. The children who were wise avoided sitting there for asssembly the following morning although sometimes it could not be avoided.
The hymn sheets that lined the hall were larger than they needed to have been so that all could read from them. 'Let us sing Hymn number 202, 'When I survey the wondrous cross', announced from the stage was accompanied by tiny groans and whispering as the huge sheets, made of something resembling chip paper were turned over by a teacher stationed there for the purpose. Windows that opened outwards on hinges or else tall sash windows would be opened with long window poles with their brass hooks when it was 'stuffy' and the world outside might as well not have been there when teaching was in progress.

There are the endless sublime memories of home life, too, such as the smell of fag-end tobacco in soapy water and a mysterious swoosh as our Dad relished the freedom of the bathtub.

Or the application by Mum of the gas poker with its blue flame and metallic smell to the dankness of the waiting coal hearth at 36,Grange Mount, the semi-detached house that was our first home, pebbledashed over redbrickwork. How Mum would lean down to the hearth with her dark hair in a French Roll, her lovely brown eyes intent, intelligent, guarding the fire, pushing in the newspaper whorls, chucking the coals forward in their scuttle with a measured dexterity, clenching her teeth lightly as an unconscious aid to concentration.

Our Grange Mount, our house was in Heswall. The town you fancied would some day be 'on the map' (if you had anything to do with it, that was). Our child's landscape was mapped out in Heswall according to the Sunday chore of collecting the papers, which necessitated running down May Road to the paper shop. Playing out and Primary School were other landscapes, hallowed places.

There were outer limits. Poll Hill, for example with its wildness and the mystery of gorse bushes that popped in the evening's summer heat, the unchartered sandy pathways threading through them to the far side, to forbidden territory, to the edge of something adult.

Or Telegraph Road as far as the library and the magnificent Castle Park whose manicured borders and flower beds with their scarlet Begonias, Snow-in-Summer and Aubretia gave off that Municipal smell. In the park, all was sandstone edged, all was close-cropped, springy lawn. Around the edges of the manicured borders, separating the park from Telegraph Road and Sandy Lane were the sighing beeches, some of which were Copper. Their masts crunched under the feet and the dust arose from swept paths as we children ran around the place. Here, in the centre of those springy lawns were shallow ornamental ponds lined with dead leaves and often dried-up. These had their own mystery and had to be run around in their figure-of-eightness. In the ponds, which seemed large at the time in a kind of continental way, you hoped to find tadpoles during the late Spring. In the caked mud of the summer months, when there had been no rain for the past ten days or so, these ornamental ponds and their caked mud revealed themselves in a new way but lost none of their strange charm.There was the feeling that one might find some halfpennies in the foreignness of the mud, might find something.

The council offices overshadowing the park were grand and had a stillness about them, though doubtless something went on in their cloistered offices. The deep summer shadows of their sandstone and pebble-dashed walls were thrown over Castle Park. We would run around that empire of park in our glazed cotton summer frocks, the ones that Mum had made for us, cut out of shapes pinned to tissue paper with its instructions, the selvedge cut with her special pinking shears grinding against the kitchen table, the frayings left in the wake of those cuts.

The Kitchen table.

This beautiful table, oval, of dark wood with its four straight-backed chairs, they having upholstered seats full of horsehair that used occasionally to poke out in periods of examination during deep thought served us all throughout our lives, the entire lives of our family and much of the lives of our Mum and Dad. It is with us still, homed at my sister's flat where it continues to creak when sat at, continues to shine and throw its sanity and sobriety, its longevity, its ingenuity at us for our enjoyment. We can still feel and rejoice in the exquisite craftsmanship by which the drop leaves and hinges swing back and forth and the gates dovetail into their housings.

This was the table that was used to rub pencilled in homework out whilst it creaked underneath our Physics notebooks or General Note Books.This was the table whose barleytwist legs and carpented struts were rubbed and itched by the feet of our selves in the act of concentration on homework, frustration at the thorny questions. This was the table under which the two Siamese cats owned in succession used to hide when in high dudgeon or to escape a drubbing for not having eaten their Whiskas, or else for dropping a dead shrew on the kitchen doorstep.The cats knew it was not easy for us to prise them out from between those struts and legs, although we always tried.

This was the table around which all meals were had, around which all of our Christmases and Boxing Days swirled. On which, later, our father sat us for the sake of the 'production line.' A table which, when not in use for taking primary school lunch breaks might have been polished afresh by Mum and a vase with flowers stood upon one of its raffia mats (mats we had made at school). The flowers would be studied and painted by Mum's loose, water-filled brushes, brought to fine tips with her agility over the paper and by her sucking them lightly.

The Production Line.

We never tired of taking the small notices from a freshly printed batch, folding them in half- while she held the pins between her teeth, still talking to us, still answering our questions.

May Road (unadopted) was a kind of dried-up, sandy riverbed with, at the far end as a destination, the paper shop.

The early evening with those swifts screaming and wobbling past the eaves were about the poll of Grange Mount itself, the summit at the top of our world where boys dropped the almost forbidden plastic bombs, bought from the tuck shop, whose greeny caps exploded, leaving tiny puffs of cordite and a small, faint black mark where the bomb had detonated itself with a kind of miniature explosion. All was gravel and grey, sock-high view.

Wooden plank and rope used to burn your palms when the home-made cart your brother had made ran away with you, you steering it wildly into the kerb to stop it going all the way down, stop it picking up momentum on the way to another outer boundary, Pensby Road.

Pensby Road was busy, was where the adult world came and went on its way to work (or wherever.)

The names of shops and businesses there were resolutely themselves to our childish perception, so that 'Rose Brae Nurseries' were just that, the name having a sing-song quality and being as dependable as the potatoes that were sold inside the dark, musty interior of the store.

The produce arrived, it was presumed, from the nurseries behind the store in a never-ending supply. The savoy cabbages were lined along their wooden shelves and pulpits and the yawning potato bins were always semi-filled with their earthy delights. The steel potato scuttle was never idle for long. Cloth bags, shopping trolleys and leather sac-style bags were filled from the rumbling hoppers with a good weight of spuds. Eagerly, the potato scuttles poured the things amidst clouds of dust. Us twins were sent to Rose Brae Nurseries for things, rhubarb, cabbage, potatoes mainly.

There was a particular excitement about being asked to go to Rose Brae Nurseries, as there was something untoward, perhaps criminal going on in the upstairs landing of the shop.

There was Mrs.Kingdom, next door but one who smelled of Kit-E-Kat and had an unknown number of cats( scores were suspected) and always a flowered apron for some purpose, though surely not for cleaning as the doorway of her house was dark, rank and smelled of Kit-E-Kat too. Mrs.Kingdom had whiskers, practically a beard. You knew that you were not supposed to laugh at her rankness or whiskers, but you did anyway.

Then there was Hilda next door, who was either in or out near her back door, one that was mainly in the shade unless she came up to the all-important sandstone wall that divided 36, Grange Mount from her house, 34.
Hilda had empty stone planters that lived in the shade cast by the back of her house over her tiny yard. Most importantly, she had one well-fed tabby with clear, dramatic markings and a pristine-white chest. Hilda's tom cat was enormously heavy. We would take turns trying to pick him up when we dared. He, with his clear-glass eyes that would show the whites and his prolapsed gut. Picking him up would cause his claws to emerge from paws protruding from the ends of ramrod straight legs in a protesting manner. Once picked up, the claws would retract into his down-soft paws. Invariably, he would wriggle out of our child's expectancies. Kitty had a low moaning voice and had learned to sit on Hilda's window-ledge and rap the brass door-knocker with one paw. This meant that he touched the knocker with one gingerly extended paw and that Hilda probably knew he was outside waiting to be let in. She, with her whispy, ginger hair and square-framed glasses and fine hairs protruding from a well-formed chin used to wipe her hands on her pinny and laugh breathlessly, asthmatically, nodding towards Kitty and his genius for knocking on the door. She saw how it amused us.

It's a small world.

It’s a small world.



The dental practice was situated on a busy road that housed not only Tranmere Rovers football club and the Ducklings nursery but also numerous medical practices of uncertain status.
A huge plastic banner resembling one of those ‘all you can eat’ banners that buffet-style restaurants like to display was draped across the front of one of them.‘NEW PATIENTS WELCOME,’ it announced.
The Buckingham Dental Practice was in fact a large,Victorian house which had been converted, so that patients would frequently wander into rooms not meant for them. In vain might one try to imagine the original character of the house and of those who once lived there, so heavily impregnated was the whole place with its present purpose and its pink mouthwash smell. It was impossible not to run one’s hand along the smooth curved banisters without a frisson of dread at the horrors to come, nor use the Niagara bathroom toilet without the sense of a relief so temporary that it was no comfort at all, and with only the certainty that this was merly an ante-room. Neither could the waiting room, with its gaudy women’s magazines spread on the low coffee table reassure.

The morning of my appointment to analyse a flaring tooth pain was a bright, brisk, December morning. Sunlight faded in and out of the waiting-room (coinciding with the flares of pain, or so it seemed)and illuminating the low table in the centre of the waiting room. The lady sitting opposite me was about fifty-eight. She was seated on a black, studded, leather chair. Out of a sense of duty, she leaned forward on the creaking shell of leather, picked up one of the fluorescent chat magazines, held it at arm’s length for an instant before dropping it cautiously on the pile of similarly pink and yellow chat magazines that boasted ‘Britain’s first pregnant man’, and whose features, including ‘My doughnut shame’ and ‘In a Klass of her own’ were so garish that they seemed to be shouldering each other off the page.

The woman was dressed down slightly, in order to resemble someone much younger; her own daughter perhaps? Her feet were crammed into black, chisel-pointed boots and the chain-belt she was wearing cinched a waist that was barely distinguishable from her hips. At her throat, she wore a pashmina, tie-style scarf. Reactolite, square- framed glasses topped her head( she felt that glasses like these took years off her). She had lately been considering laser eye surgery after she’d had her veneers done.

A few minutes elapsed in the disturbed, private sphere of the waiting room, during which time she took a packet of Dove tissues from her handbag, blew her nose in a self-satisfied way and lifted the main body of the Daily Telegraph which someone else had cast aside. She appeared to read the main headline in a desultory fashion, her face retreating from the newspaper pages in affectation of distaste, then she let it flop back onto the low coffee table as though it was too heavy for her to hold.

As is so often the case in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room, it was hard to discern the exact reason for her visit. Nonetheless, she was to be seen swiftly.

The dental assistant, whose badge read ‘Kirsty’ was wearing a pastel green smock. She waved me down the landing to an empty practitioner’s room and swiftly backtracked along the corridor to usher another patient towards a door marked Dr.Lindsay. I stood for a minute in the empty room before realising that it was the wrong one.

I soon found the correct room with Kirsty now installed by the dental instruments cabinet. The tall Dr O’Brien hovered near the yawning black dental chair while I contemplated the statistic that dentists, followed by farmers were members of those professions most liable to commit suicide. I wondered what it was that induced such despair. I could understand farmers, lonely, communing with their Fresian herds at 4 a.m., then deriving less than a penny a litre for their milk from the ruthless supermarket chains in the face of soaring grain prices. I could feel their despair at having this year’s wheat crop flooded at the crucial harvesting time, but dentists?!
Dr. O’Brien took an x-ray then sent me back to the waiting room, where a conversation was now flowing between the fifty-eight year old woman and a new, middle-aged woman with thinning, magenta-coloured hair, a tailored denim jacket and Ugg boots. They seemed to have some sort of connection between them.

‘We were in Cuba too last year’ said the first woman. ‘Isn’t that strange. I think we stayed in …I can’t remember the name of the place... I think it began with an H?’

‘Havana, so were we, but we had the second week in Puerto de los Sablos. That’s on the coast.’
‘Did you? Oh yes, we found the hotel in Havana was alright but they’re like, very laid back there.’
‘Mmm, that’s right, we found that too, but the month before we were in Thailand. They couldn’t do enough for you there, and right away. Everyone is so friendly.’
‘Well, they do say that don’t they? A bit too much sometimes with the men!'
‘And I think it was in 2005 that we went to Jamaica.’

‘ Now that’s somewhere we’d love to try, but Brian’s not as keen as me.’

Both women laughed and there was a kind of gurgling satisfaction in their laughter.

‘So how are you fixed for Christmas?’ the first woman asked the second.

‘Oh we thought we’d go away again but I’m not so sure with all this, you know, the credit crunch. My daughter’s asked us over to Sligo, that’s where she met her husband.’
‘Oh that’ll make a change. We’re off to Florida. We DID do the shopping trip to New York a few years ago, it was amazing but…’

At this point a small, tinny shout seemed to leap out of her handbag. She stared at the bag, wilfully pulled it towards her, whipped out the offending mobile whose ringtone was a pre-recorded male voice which shouted angrily ‘message!Message! MESSAGE! M-E-S-S-A-G-E! She swiped at the thing, pointed it away from her, shot me a withering look in reply to my obvious scowl. Staring incredulously at the screen, then cupping the mobile against her cheek so she could fondle the bag, she told the mobile, the waiting room and its occupants that she had done the rest of the shopping but would be late, repeated the word ‘Prenton’ twice, then squirelled the mobile away into her bag. She picked up the dropped thread of the conversation almost immediately.

Yes, we DID the shopping trip to New York too’

'Did you stop off like WE did on the way back in London?’ the other woman interjected.

‘No, no. God, no. Anyway this year we just want to be somewhere warm, so we thought Florida.’

During the course of their conversation, I had been holding the pages of the Daily Telegraph open on page twenty-seven, retreading an article that bristled not with its content but with my annoyance reflected back at me from the page. I fulminated at the thought of the air-miles they had blithely clocked up over the past few years between the two of them. The tall Dr.O'Brien appeared in the doorway. ‘Mrs Jean Robbins.’ he called, appearing to examine the sheet of paper he was holding out in front of him.
The first woman stuffed her Dove handkerchieves into her handbag and waddled to the door. After she was installed in Dr O’Brien’s room, the woman with the thinning, magenta-coloured hair turned to me approvingly.

‘Isn’t it a small world?’ she remarked. ‘Would you believe that that lady and myself were both in Cuba over a year  ago and then we both turn up at the same dental practice? Unbelievable!’

The cactus and the money plant.

The cactus and the money plant.


Cacti, like tortoises live to a ripe old age. Like tortoises, they lead unhurrried, peaceful (one might almost say still) lives. In general, they trouble no-one and no-one troubles them; they've seen to that! They maintain unruffled, deadpan lives although they must bear silent witness to all manner of upheavals; when their owners move, for example or when someone they share their home with falls down the stairs at their feet, becoming as still as the cacti themselves.
The strange affair between a cactus and a succulent growing in the same terracotta pot began on my window-ledge about a decade ago. It was I who bore testimony to the affair, to the twists and turns of this menage a deux. As I was an unattached woman, the affair had to stand in place of a human one.
The relationship between the cactus and the succulent took place in several majestic acts which unfolded first in my kitchen then, when the two plants had gained height and I had seen fit to move them, in the bathroom on the window-ledge overlooking my white, enamel bath.
At first, the cactus was a modest four inches tall. Its spines were arranged along its eight double-seamed ridges in pairs, sprouting from nodes spaced at regular intervals down those stitched seams like the legs of a caterpillar. Its near neighbour was a money plant with pinky- green, fleshy leaves. Over the course of time, the money plant began to gain height, reaching that of the cactus. There was nothing remarkable, you would have thought, in the coexistence of plants in the same pot. However, you would have been underestimating the ingenuity of these two creatures, of their shared lives, as I did.
Once, in the bath, I had glanced up at the terracotta pot, noticed the proximity of the two plants and found myself wondering how they planned to share the environment, for it seemed that they had started to lean towards each other. I dismissed the question to begin with, invoking one of my Mum's sayings that 'water always finds its own level.' The fluidity of this assertion ensures that one can apply it to almost any situation with pleasing conclusions.
After a few months the spines of the cactus had grown perilously close to the fleshy leaves of the money plant. Was this a case of 'opposites attract' or just waywardness, happenstance?
I waited for the two plants to pool their ideas about how they would maintain their distance or else become conjoined, or perish.
There can be no room for strife whether you are sharing an island, a street, a house or a pot, yet the bristling animosity that can arise over territorial claims, is never far away.
In fact I was to witness both accord and animosity, diplomacy and deception over the ensuing months, the years. The poor succulent, who had the misfortune to be a kind of cellmate to the cactus, and in order to protect herself from the assaults of his spines had to pretend that everything was alright, that she was not hurt by his piques, his slow stabbings, his putting the knife in and twisting it. She could not, would not allow him the satisfaction of his torments, the final satisfaction of murder, or whatever it was to be.
Thus, whenever a spine from the seam of the cactus managed to penetrate the fleshy cuticle of the money plant's leaves, whenever a fencing move was made, she would faint so slowly that the injury would go unnoticed by the marauding cactus. Punctured by his apparent failure to make an impression , the cactus would then make a temporary withdrawal. After a few weeks, a new approach would begin to unfold.
Thus began an almost imperceptible dance; a dance of retreats and rapprochements that was to continue for many years.
I went away one September for a week and was shocked when, upon my return, I discovered that there had been a particularly spiteful, spineful attack on the money plant, whose plate-like leaves were now dull, wrinkling, dessicated. The whole of its being was atrophied. The plant was slowly dying. There was nothing for it but to remove it from the shared pot and hope that it would make a recovery.
I rehomed the money plant in one of the larger pots I had been collecting in my back yard (with the idea of introducing other succulents or cacti to my flat to join the five-foot tall Weeping Fig, Dracaena and the Mother-in law's Tongue all housed in the bedroom). I had been considering buying a group of Living Stones from the local nursery.
I placed the money plant on a window-sill in the kitchen where it would benefit from the morning sun that often poured through the sash window. The remaindered cactus was left standing on the bathroom window-sill, behind frosted glass. It looked stark, odd, growing as it was rather at the margin of the pot the two plants had shared for so long, without a fall guy. I was obliged to stand the cactus in its pot close to the wall, fearing it might topple over.
Almost as soon as I had moved the shrivelled succulent to sunnier climes, it began to flesh out, to regain its full stature and its pinky-green hue.
One evening, shortly after the transplant, I was preparing a meal for my two sisters and I. The radio was meting out its 5p.m. news coverage. The news items on the kitchen radio were being delivered in well-modulated, suave tones with breathing-space intermissions to separate them. A Parliamentary recess had ended and a trial at the Crown Court had dismissed the case of a mother accused of smothering her baby to death on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
A tiny crashing noise, barely audible, was attached to this news item. It hadn't come from the radio or even from the kitchen but from somewhere else in the flat, The hall perhaps, or the downstairs landing. I descended the half-flight of stairs to the bathroom and was startled by the contrast between the smooth whiteness of the bath and the matt, shock of ink-black soil, broken terracotta and,worst of all, the prone cactus, a dark green exclamation mark, finally unable to stand alone, a fish out of water.

The Incident.

The Incident.

Lodged in the M56 tailbacked dead lane, I was playing the usual games. Guessing whether the driver in front of me was a man or a woman from the silhouetted clues. Trying to hit on the cerebral driver in the next lane. Letting cars in, letting cars out with double wink of the headlights. Making words out of the registration plates within eyeshot. Leaving a gap between my car and the car in front so I wouldn't have to go through the gears in the idiot take-up space. Weaving.

The motorway parade was getting to the lurching phase at roughly five miles per hour. Drivers were distracting themselves. Making mobile calls. Reading texts and peering into Sat-Navs like they were mirrors. Adjusting ear-slugs. Half-turning to amuse the heads of tots swivelling round anarchically . Morging Subway sandwiches like there was no tomorrow.
I was contemplating the hinged arm of a driver behind me and the whumping of local radio news on someone's car stereo when a black and chrome S.U.V. which had been fast-tracking on the outside lane swept in behind me. Dark-red-faced, its driver began to push forward on my tail in an attempt to force me out of lane. In the rear-view mirror, I caught a soundless stream of open-mouthed vitriol from the squared face that was growing out of a dark suit.
Tramelled on both sides by moving vehicles, the gleaming horns of the S.U.V. bullied me down the M56.

Eventually, a gap wide enough for me to escape into opened up in the 'slow' lane. Over-revving, the S.U.V. driver lurched into the space that had been my vehicle, jabbing an 'up yours' finger from behind the smoked windscreen and glaring down from his bumped up height.
It seemed that, of all the drivers that made up the endless stream of fag-emnds that made up the M56 at 6p.m., he had singled me out as the object of some personal vendetta. I scraped around my mind for some transgression I had committed but the kitty was empty. Was there something that emanated from the back of my mind, my vehicle that this psycho had picked up on?
He reminded me of the unleashed Staffordshire Bull terrier that once hurled its compacted weight at my lower leg, inducing that queasy sensation as its jaws had closed magnetically over my calf muscle. The dog, it seemed, had already sensed my horror and I had accepted the inevitability of the slavering jaws with a kind of 'condemned man' mix of frenzy and resentment. This was to be the first of several dog attacks.
The S.U.V. driver's fury was gathering momentum as fast as his oversized Nissan. I did not dare to lock my gaze with his, especially in the crushing period of his obscene gesture. A dog attack might have ensued. I rummaged instead in the glove compartment for something imaginary. Other drivers were now falling within the orbit of his fury as they drew alongside him or he passed them like a slow ache.

The distance between me and the S.U.V. man lengthened, thankfully. So did the passage of time. I tried not to think about the episode, unsuccessfully. The image of his dark-red face kept imprinting itself on that imaginary plane between the forehead and the world in front of it.
Forty minutes, four miles down the M56, the upturned, cramped Stag Beetle of a car, surrounded by high-viz vest Support Officers and green-doublooned ambulance staff hove into the view of my lower-left windscreen.

In between the seething bodies, I could just make out a dark-suited man. He was crouched over a thin, white twisted body, ministering a stream of anguish. I thought his dark, red face looked familiar.

New Neighbours

New Neighbours.


Ron had started to notice a yellow-grey pall that hung over the town, even on Sundays. Acted's Granox factory was the culprit with its tall cigarette of a chimney. Ron also noticed the acrid smell that filled his nostrils at certain times of day. He thought of it as being like a boot , worn too long in the rain-ammoniac, rancorous and damp.
Ron noticed it but incredibly, no-one else seemed to. Nor did anyone talk about it. But there was no denying the way it pervaded everything, turned washing yellow. made breathing difficult.
There were many things, Ron felt, to which most folk were oblivious.Like the fumes from the passing cars, or the squealing of bus brakes on the corner of Albert Road.

Lily, Ron's wife used to argue with him about the effects of the sulphur emissions."C'mon Ron, don't exaggerate everything" she would say "It won't do you no 'arm. 'Asn't done so far 'as it...mind you the way you go on sometimes I wonder it 'asn't done summat to yer 'ead."
Ron used to swallow Lily's lame, carping remarks with a kind of sadness he felt she couldn't imagine.The ear-pinning, which invariably went on in public was like swallowing the sulphurous air. No-one else seemed to notice it.
"Don't ferget yer piece" she would shout after him sometimes as he left for work "Y'ould ferget yer 'ead if it weren't screwed on, you would."
Or "Don't be 'ome before me or I'll bloody kill yer"
Ron, crumpling inside, would pick up the heavy processed cheese sandwiches which Lily had mustered by duty alone. Curling, the sandwiches would sweat in their cling-film. As an added twist, Lily always knotted the carrier bag she put them in and there was mean-ness in the way she would double-bind the things in elastic bands. The cheese sandwiches were trussed up, the way he felt.
He would open the door hoping to escape before another careless,well-aimed barb struck him. It usually took a few hours at work before the killer remarks finally dissipated. A few jostling, matey remarks from one of the other tool setters at Farrah's would numb the pain, bringing him round in the same way a boxing referee he'd watched one night on television at the works club had brought round a semi-conscious boxer by yelling at him.


This Sunday, the rancid smell was throat-clenching. Ron's eyes smarted. He shrugged his shoulders in an effort to remove the source of the stinging sulphur.
As he made his way through the Cuts to Farrah's, the greater purpose he used to feel was now a blunted knife. He reached the gateway to the main works building, a rather plain, brick affair behind green, iron palings and a billboard declaring the name of the company.
Today, as he had been in the last few weeks, he was troubled by a great, unstoppable melancholy.That sadness seeped through his soul.
He tried to shrug it off by asking Pete Burrows, the tool-setter who shared his bench whether he'd seen a documentary the night before.
"It was fascinating...you know, the world behind the scenes at a police station."
"Oh-agh, must've bin watchin' summat else. Why, were it good?"
"Oh fascinating" Ron repeated.
The day wore on with its small satisfactions Like the time when he had leaned over the bench to assist Pete, whose machine had jammed. Or later, at lunch break when he'd shared a joke
about the stale canteen sandwiches.
"Make British Rail butties look like something they serve in The Mayfair hotel."
The joke was lost on the other three men. They had never heard of The Mayfair Hotel. So Ron opted for the tried and tested formula, rubbed up the accent"They knock my Missus' sarnies into a cocked 'at-yer could walk home on'em."
This time there was a crackle of laughter.
Finally Ron was walking home through the long, blue, end-of-summer shadows. The call of a
blackbird, rich as fruitcake filled him with a dimmed bliss. He remembered, in the flinch of a second his childhood, absurd things like the warmth and safety of a redbrick garden wall he'd leaned against as a child, the rustle of a thrush as she picked between the blades of tall Iris with its faint, warm odour and its dazzling spears. Or even the mystery of the hot snails creviced in dark seams which the thrush was seeking out, then the amusement of seeing their snot-like inner selves suddenly revealed.
But here, now the flinch-of-a-second memory was being overlaid with something else and the rancid boot smell imposed itself. Ron passed the open door of The King's Head. Gusts of laughter came from the snug and the lazy sound of glasses being collected mixed themselves up with blotched effect as Ron transferred his gaze from the bright pub walls to the deep shade of the snug. He wanted to go in but didn't.
He was home. Lily did not even look up.
"New neighbours" she informed him, tilting the back of her head. Her silence meant she was hoarding something, some resentment. Ron was crestfallen. He had bought a box of Milk Tray from the corner shop opposite The King's Head. He planned to run up the stairs with the box then come thundering down with it.
"And all because" he would begin, mopping a heroic brow, then throwing himself at her slippered feet in mock chivalry.
"Lily" he called through a darkened hall, hung with coats and jackets. The simple pronunciation of her name gave him a pleasure which he never would have tired of."Am readin' " she answered without looking up from a magazine. She wasn't.
"Lily, I bought you these...and all because the Lady loves...' he was rushing his words, trying to squeeze them in before she lost interest.
"Seen them Ron, the new neighbours.?"
"Who are they, Lil?' " Ron forced the business of the Milk Tray to the back of his mind where it lodged like a fishbone in the throat.
" A black lad an' a white girl, I b'lieve.". She shrugged defensively."Apparently they've got no kids...yet!" Ron laughed his staccato laugh. He knew only one thing. Whatever he thought or was likely to think of his neighbours, Lily would think the opposite.
Lily classified people by simple means, married, unmarried, widowed and so on. Bob and Anthea Simmons down the road had been 'married for five years, no kids'
The young couple over the road, whose names she didn't care to know were 'living over the brush'. Mrs Ainsworth had 'lost her husband in 1984...'Ron, on the other hand had never concerned himself with the marital status of others. For him people simply co-existed.


Having new neighbours excited Ron. He would meet them, show willing. He might even be able to chat to them when things turned bad between Lily and himself. He installed himself in the drawing room, or as Lily called it the 'parlour', peered through thick brocade curtains at the back of next door's house.
It seemed empty. Except that, from an upstairs window-ledge came the steady pounding of music from a large silver and chrome ghetto blaster that glinted at him. A net curtain like a broken gull wing fluttered uselessly. The room must have been empty.
Weeks passed and the redundant curtain continued to flap from the upstairs window. The thud-thudding, now grittier, still poured from the ghetto blaster. Ron had almost forgotten what, or who had been there before, so thoroughly had these new images imprinted themselves across the screen of his consciousness.The noise seemed to pervade everything that he could think of, followed him round the house. He tried to blot it out but it insinuated itself the more, driving into him with hammer blows.
Tonight was no different. At first the beat pounded into his temples as he lay in the darkness next to Lily. Then the quickening beat, with its distorted bass beat became like the steady drip-drip of water. He imagined each drip falling on his forehead like the Chinese water torture he had read about somewhere and the spot where it fell in his imagination felt nauseous, almost hurting him. It must have been late. Lily had turned in round about midnight, just before him. Ron swiped at his forehead, moving towards her. She was asleep. She often used to joke to Ron about her ability to sleep 'through fire, flood and tempest.' A ghetto blaster was along those lines.

Sorry I missed you

It was 1989. Central Station was choked with the glut of Christmas shoppers who elbowed their way up groaning escalators. Each shopper laboured under his sacrificial burden of shopping. In a city like Liverpool, there was always a feeling of nervous tension, but in late November the air itself seemed to discharge this tension.
This Christmas, the lights down Bold Street swayed triumphantly, thrilling the shoppers below with their intensity; bringing ( along with some nameless Christmas spirit) involuntary smiles to the lips of strangers and of desperate people. Most were already satiated with that sickly combination of excess and self-denial that takes hold at Christmas and loiters sourly until New Year.

Nicole bobbled along on the escalator of shoppers, content to let them edge her forward. The woman stumbling ahead of her with lacquer-brittle hair and pink and white tracksuit saw herself in quite a different way. For her the escalator was a kind of salmon ladder. Her aim was to outleap those other, slightly inferior salmon. Doing so was even more important than the final spawning destination, a sex-shop that had finally sounded the death-knell of Salesflo, an outfit in whose windows the same chaotic jumble of shop dummies had lain sprawled amidst dress rails and forbidding metal coat-hangers for over fifty years. Nothing had ever flowed from its premises- no dummies, no sales, yet it had held out in a perpetual shrug for decades.
'She looks like a marshmallow' Nicole mused, giving the pink and white tracksuit woman a wide berth. The thought was elbowed out by sudden discomfort as the person behind her thrust a bulky parcel into her back.
The streets were heaving with people, alive with high-pitched seasonal clamour. Children were tearing at their mother's arms.
A sudden gust of wind lifted the strings of fairy-lights. Nicole felt a shot of hope as she passed the great thirty foot Christmas tree. It had not yet been decorated and a faint sappy smell emanated from its branches. The dark tree was impassive, full of grace. It looked on with a sighing sagacity. Nicole thought of elephants. They had the same sort of grandiloquence.Why was it, she thought, that large mammals, those capable of most damage were often the easiest victims?
Her thoughts zigzagged as she gave in to the parcel-like bulk of shoppers, leaped with the marshmallow woman, and other salmon.

Work at the typesetting department at Fenton's had ceased as if forever. Nicole had waved off the last of her colleagues as she sped away from the building with its lights left blazing for Christmas.
This evening she wrapped her long, black coat around her, plunged her hands into its huge pockets. She'd been nursing a letter in the left-hand one all day. The pocket itself was charged somehow because of its contents. From time to time she fumbled with the letter. On the bus she brought it out of the pocket, examining it properly for the first time. The postmark intrigued her with its faint half-letters. So, too did the mystery of its whiteness but it gave no secrets away. She was nearly home, and the gentian blue sky etched the Mersey skyline.She passed all the usual landmarks on the way home, but now they looked different, cheering her on her way. The Post Office nodded. The tall spire of the Methodist Church seemed to soar, no longer earthed by its immensity the way she usually saw it but





magnificent, free. These landmarks had a certain definition now.She shrugged her shoulders at the quizzical feelings that wrapped themselves around her. She bought a newspaper at the
corner shop, smiling at Yusef as he gangled over the counter. She shoved it roughly into her free pocket. People were being more friendly than usual, she thought. It was because of this letter. Or was it just because of Christmas?
She turned into Shaw Close. Her light, quick steps echoed from cement walls as she passed the same, pale yellow round polystyrene pizza container, its lid flapping, dirt-ground now.Toilet seat, she thought (her elder sister called them that ). Litter was no joke but today it was mildly amusing. She ran up the steps in twos and threes.
Her neighbour on the opposite landing was a no-nonsense Irish widow, Bridie Conroy. Nicole sometimes wanted to knock on Bridie's door, to be invited in, to pass a whole evening talking to Bridie about nothing. She had rarely failed to make a friend out of a stranger. Her mother was often in the habit of telling her that 'a stranger is only a friend you haven't met' even though this clashed horribly with another of her mother's sayings- 'never trust a stranger.'
Nicole accepted her mother's quirks as they represented a 'whole-worldliness', as real as her long blue cardigan, pulled out of shape by her habit of reaching clenched fists down into the pockets to emphasise a point or to console herself when her ideas were rejected.
Tonight, Bridie's door opened a crack as Nicole passed on the landing.
"Here love" she half-whispered "d'you hev a minute-it's jus' that I was gorrn to ast yer, hev you seen anythin' o' downsteers?" She continued "I was a bit worried..."
"Oh they're on holiday" Nicole cut in.
"Only I was gonna take in their mail for them" Bridie continued, clutching the edge of the door the way old people do, shielding herself from something ."Then I thought that would be a bit interferin'" She pulled the door towards her and it was no longer shielding her but had become a leaning post.
"Nice of you to think of that" Nicole said
"By the way, I've to go over to Ireland to see my brother soon, I wonder would you collect MY mail for me...such as it is?" Neither of them ever had any mail worth talking about.
"You want me to keep all the JUNKMAIL of course?!"
"Ay, that's it-that's all WE'LL get." Bridie's eyes twinkled. She began to laugh in short, gutteral bursts which brought on a fit of chesty coughs. She patted her chest, finishing off dramatically with an "Oh dear."
"Speakin o' letters...you'd a nice one this mornin' that ended up in my hallway, so I put it through your door for you." Bridie paused, waiting for the confession...but none came.
Nicole tossed back imaginary hair.She regretted having lopped it so violently at the tail-end of summer. She patted the pocket containing the letter as if to make sure it was still there.
"Chance would be a fine thing" she told Bridie. For what was inscribed in her letter was a very fine thing, she was sure. It was tantamount to love.
Still, she had to be one step ahead of Bridie's assumptions.Otherwise Bridie would pre-empt her, disclosing the love the way a dentist discloses tooth decay.



It was late. She switched the radio on and began sorting a huge pile of papers
which had accumulated, become a high-tide mark on her kitchen table. But the letter in her pocket gnawed at her. She pulled it out roughly.' Deferred gratification' ran through her mind. She ripped at it with her thumb, sawing it open.

'Dear Nicola,' the letter began 'I wasn't sure whether to write you but here goes anyway.'



The script was large and well-rounded. It reminded Nicole of the wallpaper on a child's nursery wall that she had once seen, all bulbous teddy bears and lurid, pink-faced children with bubble cheeks.
She knew she loathed such writing, that she found it infuriating in fact, yet the earnestness
and simplicity of the letter eclipsed such doubts.
'I got your name in the catalog' it continued 'I'm 25, hope you don't mind and I've lived in Headley quit a while. I love writting letters' How about you? Your work as a tipsetter sounds intering? ( Nicole had renewed her subscription to the Exchange Dating Agency and had chosen Gold Standard out of sheer annoyance at having found no-one for a whole year of Silver Standard.) Irritated, fascinated, she read on.
'I love good music, dancing, DVD's, a log fire, curling up on a sofa and a bottle of wine and someone to cuddle up with on dark nights. At the moment I'm working as a home-help.
An un-named flicker of doubt passed through Nicole's mind. She read on.
'I hope you will writ back- Ide love to hear from you' Then, fading as quickly as it had begun, the letter ended in a childish scrawl with a signature that looked as if it had been practised too long.
'Love Diana.'

Nicole's reply to Diana was long, self-conscious, peppered with remarks. It wore it's heart not just on its sleeve but everywhere else too.

Diana's second letter came like lightning in another white envelope (identical to the first), got past Bridie's flawed radar. The stamp was first class, slightly skewed as if licked in haste and there was a small grease mark in the corner.
"Its Friday morning and I hav just got your letter' it began eagerly. Nicole was beginning to warm to the bad grammar. She stopped reading for a few seconds. She looked at the front of the envelope and sniffed it without knowing why. She read the faded postmark.
Broughton, 5.45 it said.
Nicole's correspondent had caught the last post. The letter had arrived the next morning 'hot off the press' as Nicole was fond of saying about anything done quickly. She examined the notepaper with its serrated edges, torn from a spiral-bound notebook. She felt flushed, looked at the way the paper had been folded hurriedly, secretively and was pleased that it was longer than the last one.
Further into the letter she read 'you say you lived alone for many years. Me too,in fact Im sick of it. You see I had a girlfriend for three year. She went off with somone else and left me brokenherted. Still thats life and my lifes been one long troble.You hav to move on they say.'
The childish script ran on. Nicole imagined Diana sitting, petulant but comfortably curled up
on a sofa with a bottle of wine and a DVD, moving on.
'You must be clever working in a job like that. I like my job but I enjoy walking myself in the countyside, the beach. What kinds of music do you like?'
Nicole was annoyed at the question. She had already described her musical tastes.
She began to write a reflex answer, the angry text looking like knitted eyebrows, then erased the outpourings. Instead she wrote a patient, fuller letter, carved from her rich memory, polished the words till they shone with their own beauty. She sent it post-haste, hot off the press. She was annoyed that she would have to wait more than a day for the answer.



She developed antennae waiting for a glimpse of the postman or his talismanic red and blue sack. In the dry passage of loveless life Nicole had become disenchanted with the mail that was addressed to her. But now the sound of mail spewing onto her doormat was electric.
Nicole had a theory that you could tell the kind of mail by the way it came through the letter-box ( she had many theories, such as the one that you could tell whether you had a welcome or unwelcome visitor by the way they rang your doorbell).
Junk mail fluttered through the letter-box, smattering on the carpet, penetrating the hallway and replicated itself under the umbrella stand. Bills, or brown mail as she called them slipped through the door discreetly, then lay in wait. Then there was white or personal mail, which sliced through a letter-box that opened like a cuckoo-clock, chiming the hour. It would tumble gleefully onto the mat. Personal mail sounded like a friendly footfall.
Diana's first letter was like this. It was the first snowflake in a winter of excitement.


Christmas loomed and the letters began to arrive more frequently. They had become bolder, longer. Diana sent Nicole a Christmas card for good measure.

On the 20th of December, Nicole stooped down to pick up the latest letter from Diana. She left it on the kitchen table, eyeing it from time to time. In the end. throwing on her black coat she stepped lightly towards the front door with the letter in her left pocket. Opening it on the bus, she was startled by what she read.
'Dear Nicola, I cant get you out of my mind. Everywere I go I think of you. I want to hold you, can I tell you what your doing to me? Well I could but I'm not sure if I shold.'
The next paragaph was matter-of-fact.
'I went to the estate agent today...they said they couldn't put my house on the market for more than £30,000 the cheeky bastards. How are you anyway...how's the work?
I went out on a shopping spree yesterday, got some clothes to cher myself up, three pairs of shoes.'
Nicole's eyes darted to the bottom of the page.
'Can I tell you somthin I relly want to meet you and when I get an idea in my head thers no stoppin me.'
Nicole was shocked. Another letter followed 'hot off the press.'
'You needn't be afraid of ringing me' it said 'I never give out my number but I can trust you so her goes.' Nicole kept this letter separate from the rest as a landmark of her bond with its writer. It felt like a high tide. Frozen for several days, afraid to ring Diana she wrote back, took a chance and gave the girl her own number.




The following morning, a small parcel arrived. Nicole was horrified but opened it with a quickening pulse. It was an unmarked tape. She slid the cassette into her Sony Walkman, pressed the play button. Her mouth was dry. There followed a series of rock tunes. Some were loud and hard-edged, others mawkish. She listened out for the catch, listened for some message laced between songs but none came.They were all songs she loathed, apart from one. She listened anyway. There was the Elkie Brooks song 'Lilac Wine', Meatloaf's 'Bat Out Of Hell,' Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse Of The Heart .The last tune 'Who's gonna drive you home' by The Cars infuriated her as it had once become a diminishing, portentous round, rattling round her brain for days.The song was succeeded by sneaky silence, then a chirpy voice with a faint Lancashire accent began.
" Hi ...is that you Nicola.It's me, Diana. I 'ad to send you this 'coz these are all me favourite tunes. I 'ope you like'em as much as I do. Hope to meet you soon. Anyway, stay 'appy. Byee.'
Nicole hardly knew the meaning of happiness. She was certainly not happy now.



Yet the taped message had a strangely compelling effect on her, produced a medley of emotions. She felt estranged by it but the woman's voice, her faint accent was beguiling. Yet it was disarming too, like a blurred photo suddenly coming into focus.
She wanted to tell Diana how infuriated she felt but instead quelled her anger, squirelling it away in some nameless place. She began to scribble jumpy notes on her A4 pad, things she should say to Diana but wouldn't.
Events, however overtook her.

Just over a week after the arrival of the tape, Nicole's telephone rang. The voice on the other end was nonchalant, unruffled.
"Hi, it's me, Diana."
It was the same voice she had heard on the cassette player only louder, as though its owner were in the next room.Then came a reckless peel of laughter.
"You'll never guess where I am." The voice paused for effect.
"Oh you mean you're here" Nicole could hardly speak. Her face blanched in fear.
"Got it in one."
She's only pretending to be cheeky, Nicole thought. Underneath she's a bag of nerves, same as I am.
"Guess where I'm ringing from?" Diana continued, breaking into the reckless laughter again. Nicole guessed she was ringing from a few feet away.
"Yep" Diana continued uninterrupted "that's right, the call-box by the Kwik Save on Peter Street. I 'ad to do some Christmas shopping anyway. I love town, me" Diana's voice was more settled now. "Sooooo- 'ow far are you from town luv?"
"Listen" Nicole interrupted "I'd better come and meet you. It'll take me half an hour, don't go away...I mean you could start walking up to Bold Street, it takes you straight to Shaw...I mean you know where I live, don't you?"
"Bloody well should do, eh? Tell you what, you start walking up towards Peter Street and we should meet halfway."
Nicole was uncertain how or whether to end the call. "How will I know you?" she proferred.
"Oh you'll know me alreet, ah've gorra cross round me neck and pointy red nails."
OK, Diana so...I'll see you soon." Nicole replaced the receiver. Minutes were fleeing, time was being swallowed whole.



She checked herself in the mirror, tossing the imaginary hair, mentally choosing the right clothes then deciding that they weren't the right clothes, that her first instinct was right all along. She checked the flat to make sure the place was above all clean, then that it was tidy.Thirdly she had to hide all her personal effects...the fat purse containing torn photos under its plastic window, her Sony Walkman with a telltale Beethoven's Fifth Symphony cassette lodged inside. This bit would take too long, so she removed only the most glaring aspects of her private self. A clockwork fear drove her down the cement stairwell onto Shaw Street. People passed her slowly, peacefully while she herself was being sucked into some godawful human whirlpool. A young woman on the opposite pavement was striding blithely towards her, glinting jewelry and showing red nails.They exchanged glances warily. Nicole tossed her head to elicit a response but there was no tremor of recognition.
This was not Diana.
She wanted to turn round, escape. She had a plan. Having clocked Diana from a Sherlock Holmes distance, she would tun off Shaw Street, or dive into a shop. Nicole, however was not very good at deception.
Her instincts forbade her this meeting, yet a strange and vivid curiosity drove her on.



If she were perfectly honest with Diana, she reasoned, no harm could come to either of them.Yet she felt as though she were teetering towards the edge of a chasm, sweeping her victim, Diana along with her.

Back in the phone booth, Diana fixed her hair with a small canister of hair-spray she carried in a tapestry Gladstone bag with an ornate brass clasp. She gazed around airily, keeping the rest of her body still. She lit a mentholated cigarette, (someone told her they were good for asthma) adjusted the belt she wore around her slim waist then stuffed the personal stereo she'd been listening to into the Gladstone bag. As she did so, she rehearsed her meeting with Nicole.'Hi, you're Nicola' she murmured to herself.

The older woman meanwhile was making her way towards Diana, throwing anxious glances down side streets. Swallowing hard, she turned quickly, looked behind her once. She felt hunted, trapped.
Diana must have given up, surely, thought Nicole. The threat was lifted and she had reached the free zone. Then, quite without warning, a figure bounded towards her with an arm outstretched. There, like an exotic safari animal stood Diana, looking down from her full, poised height.
"Hi, you're Nicola, right?!" she shouted.
"Pleased to meet you." Nicole extended her hand and blushed."It's Nicole, but never mind...so, how did you get here?"
"Drove to what's that place, er Allerton then parked up an. walked."
"Oh that's miles away, you shouldn't have"
"It's not that far, anyway I enjoyed it , especially knowing I was coming to see you"
Diana had strong blue eyes, like those of a doll , and a retrousse nose. Her brow was bold and clear as though she had never been troubled by much. Her full lips had been slightly glossed and her gently lacquered hair curled down to a white, open-necked blouse which revealed a mean crucifix. She wore a crisp, suedette ochre jacket.
She kept up an air-hostess smile most of the time. She was wearing it now as she fixed Nicole with a slow gaze that seemed at first to flicker over the girl's face then settled into a cool regard.
Nicole was hypnotised by this measured look. Diana walked alongside Nicole, easy in her manner now. She had worked hard on getting to meet Diana. She had made suggestions, written endearments, held expectations. She was holding them now. She was not going to be disappointed. She held her head aloft.

Their walk together was filled with awkward moments, ballooning silences yet something was entrenching itself in those gaps that Nicole liked. In their separate minds, each woman felt that a moment of recognition between the two was coming when feelings that had been shored up inside would slide down to meet. Talking seemed more natural now and sometimes as they talked the younger woman would flash the elder a glance and those crystalline pupils would dilate momentarily. Nicole could feel herself growing faint with an ancient longing.

Half an hour had passed (though for Nicole time had been newly abandoned) before the two women arrived at the small flat in Shaw Street. Nicole could hardly believe it. As Diana
chatted, she took off her ochre jacket. Nicole lingered on the curve of her neck, the turn of her wrist. She imagined taking that wrist firmly but gently, holding it for an instant. A violent longing turned inside her. She felt herself separated from the younger woman by details alone.
There was the fine cross which glinted with each tiny measured pulse at the girl's neck. (Nicole's meanwhile was thumping violently inside her head.) In addition, Diana wore an open gold and diamante brooch on her lapel. Nicole found herself staring at the brooch. It was of a leopard...or was it a hyena. She was unsure. Its tongue was painted red and its tail was curled over its head, scorpion-like.The brooch nauseated her, yet its futile innocence was fascinating.
Diana also wore two fine rings, one of which was worn on the ring finger. Her nails were painted and drawn into fine points (Nicole had never understood the point of nails..and pointed ones were even more pointless.They had no uses except to inflict pain, damage,scratch skin. The fingertips under them could never caress or feel anything.)
Diana almost read her thoughts.
"Got loads of jewelry, haven't I...they're all gold. I love jewelry me. It's daft in't it.I think it's just the glitziness of it. I see something I want an' I've got to 'av it" The phrase sounded loaded.
Nicole, displaced by the remark got up to make coffee, returning to find Diana flipping through her record collection, doubtless looking for clues, looking to find The Cars or Bonnie Tyler. They talked about a record they had both loathed when it first came out a year ago and Diana covered her face with her hands in mock horror. Then, as she lowered them, she turned towards Nicole, fixing her with the baby-blue eyes. The older woman could feel the warmth of the younger woman's body. For an instant she was suspended in Diana's silent appraisal. She felt tight, as though she were drunk. She was looking back at Diana with all the frankness and faintness of desire. Then Diana lowered her gaze until it burned over Nicole's breasts, churned her solar plexus. Nicole reached over her, hovered angelically, kissed the nape of her neck. She was reeling with pleasure.
The younger woman curled voluptuously round her. Her hands and feet were tingling. She was clinging to Nicole and felt only the sensation of the older woman's caresses which
flowed now with all the ingenuity of Nature. It seemed to Nicole that they now faced each other inside a glass water bowl, loosely conjoined.The ambiguity of distance had flown. Words and action had come sharply, violently into focus. Thus began for Nicole the oh-so-slow dance of a particular love and thus a certain river began to flow until its meanderings were to cut themselves off, ox-bow lake style.


Diana stayed with Nicole for five days. She had, with great foresight packed a number of belongings in the Gladstone bag, including hair-spray and personal stereo. She told the now-eager listener the story of the life that had been 'one long trouble', relating events from a long-distant past with a sense of relief, missing out more recent ones. Sometimes, recalling bad times she would stare blankly at the walls of the bedroom while Nicole listened, rapt. Or the two would sit drinking coffee in Nicole's kitchen while the pale January sun slid over the table, slinking diagonally down the wall. At others, she would light a mentholated cigarette, sucking in her cheeks with an asthmatic inhalation, pausing, then blowing the smoke slowly towards Nicole as if to make a point. She would wait for Nicole's kiss and each kiss would be woven with a new splendour.


The time came when Diana decided to go home to Headley. She packed her hairspray and the personal stereo.Phone calls flowed like electric impulses between them for the next few days.Then there were times when Nicole received no calls from Diana and other times when Diana was out. The gaps between calls widened, then yawned. Eventually they stopped altogether, unaccountably. Nicole couldn't even get through to Diana, who had taken the precaution of leaving a pre-recorded message on her answer-phone which began-
'Hi it's me, Diana. Sorry you missed me. If you want to, leave me a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Byee.'
To begin with, Nicole was affronted by the message. Her first deposition of an answer was clumsy, spare. It did not run smoothly. She re-recorded it, producing something that sounded insincere.There were moments of inspiration when laughter was in her voice, curling her lips up then dull remarks to glue the good bits together. She was indignant with the machine for waiting, all ears for her naked words.She wanted to circumvent it, break through its wiring and tapes to reach Diana. It was almost lying in wait for her. It was a repository, waiting to be opened like a trinket-box by its key-ridden owner. The owner, for reasons unknown to Nicole was not responding to her messages.


Time began to draw out, arrested by the futile calls Nicole was making. In the grip of love, she made many such calls. Diana changed her answer-phone messages from time to time.One of the messages started 'Sorry I missed you, I'm round at Dave's at the moment. If you want to leave a message for me here, this is the number...' Nicole did not want to leave a message there. She felt uneasy, bereft. Diana, it seemed was never at home. Nicole began to worry. Perhaps Diana was in some danger, had been whisked away to Dave's or some other place.
A more insidious doubt wormed its way into her fragile mind. Could it be that the girl was actually trying to avoid her? At last she spoke into the closeness of the phone mouthpiece. She tried 'I love you, are you OK?' Then 'I just want you to know that I love you Diana' .Then 'Diana, it's Nicole..I just want to know that you're OK...please get back to me.'
Her voice was becoming smaller. She felt like a comedian playing to an empty house.Gradually, her pain and love gave way to an indefinable jealousy which fell to earth, a cluster bomb exploding into a million deadly fragments that would harm anyone within their radius.



February gave way to Marc . Nicole had stopped ringing Diana. Occasionally, she would pick up the record that Diana had given her as a present. On the back, she would read the dedication-
'To Nicole, with all my love.'
The signature a little further down was bold and studied with a large D and a scrolled-back underlining, ending with a tiny cross. The signature looked like the name of a cattle brand she'd seen in a travel magazine about Texas. She remembered the 'x' burned into red cattle rumps. The brand said'I own you'.
Or she would go to the chest of drawers, pick up one of Diana's letters, re-decipher it.
One of them had the acronym S.W.A.L.K. on the back .It was another brand, claiming ownership.



On a wet afternoon in Headley, laughter could be heard through the opened window of an end-terraced house.The laughter was reckless, self-conscious. It belonged to a riot of teenaged boys and girls. Diana, who was one of them was playing a taped message to the others.
'D'you wanna hear it again?'she asked one of them. The reply, from a slightly built fifteen-year old girl was the rehearsed snap of bubble gum at close range followed by 'Goo on then.'
'S a laaff in't it?' cried one of the boys over her shoulder. The couple contorting themselves on the sofa were mouthing the words they had heard on the tape in sing-song fashion.
'I just want you to know that I love you Diana' and the others mimicked them, dragging out the joke. Diana threw her head back, convulsed with laughter.
'It's MY tape' she shouted at the couple and pointed the corner of the cassette at them.
'Are yer going to? one of the lads prompted her. The small, crackling silence gave way to 'Sell it a mean? Yer know, lezzy love -owt like that? Coz if you don't, I will.' He was slurring the words to taunt Diana, pinning her with round, grey-blue eyes. He gave a tiny snort.
She came right back at him with 'Eh you-this one's mine!'. She waved the tape at him then with the idea now visible added seductively 'Well alright then, wot'll yer giv me fer it- 'ighest bid an' Ah'll tek it an it's yours.'
The youth with the grey-blue eyes suddenly rose from a slouch, lurching violently towards her, bellowed at her 'Yer a slag you!' then muttered under his breath 'Giv yer a tenner fer it.'
'Alright then, go on' was her reply and she whisked the crumpled ten pound note off him, red pointed nails finding their use and with an exaggerated sway of the hips stuffed it in her jeans back pocket.

Bullies

At the height of summer in the Nineties, Otterspool Park was a cruising ground where cars passed each other languorously, endlessly along the promenade lanes, flanked by functional, waist-high shrubs.
That day was a warm, nothing kind of day. Family groups were dotted around the grass. The air was shiftless. Three lads, schoolboys, shambled across the freshly-mown swathes of grass and dog-dirt, Nike sweat-shirts wrapped around their waists. Conversations built, then broke up in the heat. Dog tongues lapped drily. The world, and its sounds were above me.They seemed abstract, miraculous as I lay on my back. Topsy-turvy figures passed by, deprived of right-way-up menace. Their forms were absurd.
Soon, however the sky with its silver floaters mired in azure began to be pervaded by a faint uneasiness. I left the book I was reading where it lay and began walking towards a shoreline hyphenated by broken-down concrete and brick shelters.Under one of them, three schoolboys were screaming at each other. Two of them, Al and Simmo were lithe, of average build.The third,Warren was short, thickset, with the vestiges and rosy bloom of childhood.

"Go'ed Al screamed "let's see yer climb tha'"
"S'easy" came Simmo's reflex."
"Yer jus'put yer'and on that brick."

"Go'ed then." Simmo pushed the other violently, sending him into the ground.There was a flurry of pushes and stumbles between the two lads before the two began scaling opposite ends of the shelter.
Warren lurched disconsolately from side to side, his embarrassment and frustration made more obvious by the posturing of the two boys. Al waved a red sweatshirt with grandiose, sweeping movements, as if at a bull.Warren felt, large, gelatinous. He did not feel like a bull. Something like fear was turning him inside out.

"Seen 'is arse" Simmo chanted in a nasal whining tone. Al joined in the goading exercise.
"Try it Warren baybee"
"'E can't Al, 'es too fat" taunted Simmo.
Warren's "fuch off" was too squashy, too camp.
The voices were rapid-firing at each other now, echoing from the walls of the shelter.
"Eh blob" Simmo continued, and he spat. The fleck of spittle had been forced, summoned up by hatred. It flew with spear-like accuracy but then fell to earth uselessly. Al added a demeaning dribble to the pursuit. The two boys erupted into cracked, adolescent laughter. Inwardly, Warren crumpled under their ruthless swagger, their double-act.
"Yer twats" he hissed. The phrase sounded odd, quizzical, like the sound of an Irish compere telling jokes about Paddy and Micky. Un-dented by Warren's tiny outburst, the lads turned up the volume, chanting in unison "I'm walkin' on the Chi-neseWa-all."
Suddenly, the elder of the two boys picked up a half-brick from somewhere inside the deep shadow of the shelter.
"Catch." The hurled half-brick struck Warren on the left shoulder.The pain should have been sharp but instead it was numbed by a greater pain inside.Warren searched for some consolation, blinded by an old, new anger but his frightened rabbit's eyes had never settled on anyone for too long.
He couldn't afford to look at the couples on the grass, whose intimacy seemed all the greater as his plight worsened. At this moment he was quite alone. He could neither protect



his soft underbelly nor his bruised mind. Fumbling for insults, he hit upon an outlandish one.Hoping to knife the heart of their prejudices, he brought out his trump card.
"Eh, Simmo-yer've gone all brown like a Paki."
The words dragged themselves thinly through the air. For an instant, the weight of prejudice had shifted to Simmo,but he shrugged it off like water off an oiled back.His brown shoulder-blades indeed seemed to mock Warren so that the insult slumped before him, corpse-like.
The lads began to circle him, their rogue-dog faces jutting out provocatively.
The desperate ploy had turned in upon itself.
Al's pugnacious features sharpened. His nut-brown, freckly face was too cheeky for words, leaving a permanent after-image across the screen of Warren's memory. It was a gargoyle, weathered by bad history. All the hidings he had ever had, all his campaigns of vengeance were etched in the curl of his lip, the rude set of his cheeks, most of all his muddied eyes.
Warren sometimes thought of his face as that of a bull-terrier, with blackcurrant eyes, whose whites showed as mean sickles.
I stood in the blotched-out sunlight. Thick hatred marred the view, marred everything.
Quite by chance, the trio lurched towards me. The elder boy had kicked Warren somewhere around waist-height, so he crumpled. The younger boy darted flick-knife glances between their victim and me. I felt suddenly stripped of all apparency and guise. Blood and anger rushed through my veins like sugar.The younger lad shot a rifle report at me, bellowed "Who-err-you lookin'at?-Eh?" His hand squirmed into a back pocket. His partner quickly caught up with him. Suddenly the two were standing before me, so close that I could feel their breath curdling on my face. They were thick as thieves.
"I'll smash yer fuckin' face in for yer" one shouted. Flecks of saliva hit me as he spoke.It felt like he already had. The indignity of just one tiny speck was too much, yet somehow I had been immobilised by it. Reeling with anger, yet paralysed by my own cowardice, I stood fixed like a bayonet. I had merely deflected interest from Warren.
"Ah sed who-er-you lookin at, -eh? EH?"
"Nobody" I replied like a dumb machine. The limping answer stoked up the fire and I was being transformed in nanoseconds into a doughy web of fear.

"Yer berrer not be." Simmo hissed between clenched teeth.
The threat further entrenched my humiliation and raised my blood to boiling point I felt sick with loathing, yet a strange force held my hands clamped uselessly by my sides.It was crushing my lungs and there was suddenly no space in which to breathe, to think.
It was as if I were being bounced between two narrow walls. "Just leave him alone, alright" I began , my voice trailing away to silence. My attempt to defend Warren sounded flat, one-dimensional..My voice was the voice of a ham-actor. "Yer wha'!?" barked the terrier Al.
"Gerrim Al " said Simmo in a lowered voice.
A strange, sickening pain shot up my spine, spreading across my shoulder-blades and filling my head with black-and-white nausea.
My nose felt wet and stung sharply. A lumpy blackness filled my chest and my ears were numbed, two cabbages on either side of my head. The twisted face of Simmo had come up to mine. My overriding urge was to push the face away. As I raised my fist, , I felt another spreading blow, this time in my belly. More than anything, I longed for the poisonous face to disappear, to evaporate.


Warren remained in my field of vision like a stigmata, a St.Sebastian, shot full of arrows, his eyes raised to the sky.His weakness clung to me. The world, in any case had turned upside-down, and I knew at that instant that I could never hunt with the hounds, no matter how many times my face had been blooded.
I was lying face down on the path. Pieces of gravel looked gigantic. Some had lodged themselves in my forehead and hands, pinpricking.The grass looked a nauseous shade, pinky-green .I heard the voices of children, distant yet with an unfamiliar harshness.They were the voices of children who had grown up too fast, neo-adults.
Over to my right, a teenaged mum yanked a clockwork toddler by the arm. The child began stumbling towards the path where I had managed a sitting position.
Her mother yelled after her "Ger'eere, Carla!"
The child's focal point was the broken torso of a doll lying near me.
The little girl shrieked, her hysterical cries succeeded by bursts of tears that died away like those of a crying doll whose intermittent jets of water stream from the eyes at the touch of a chubby finger.
The blowsI had taken had fled to the margins of my body. Mechanically, I walked, instinctively weighed up the figures who were drifting towards the edges of the park, returned to the place where I had been reading. The book was lying where I had left it, only its spine was broken and its leaves were splayed out like the wings of a crimpled, flightless bird.

The Book Club

Jan played with the phrase' keeping body and mind together', rolled it around in her mind. In her own case, she felt that keeping them apart would have been more appropriate. By way of a break from that insight (hatched at the interface of her laptop screen) she flashed up the local ad.noticeboard.

The Wotuwant inbox had filled up with the usual postings. The pickings would, as usual be thin and Jan would have to wade compulsively through the dross in order to find anything of interest, anything that waved at her.

Half-coincidentally though, the phrase 'book club' glinted at her from amongst the activities list just as she was contemplating the idea of posting up a notice herself for a film club.

The enforced celibacy, the loneliness of Twenty-first Century singledom had been eating her soul away (complete with body) and she had to find some form of social interaction that would result in actually meeting other people. However, she was of a mind that would not quite accept surfing the Net for relationships.

Her new job at a health consultancy would, she hoped provide the chance to socialise. There was bound to be someone of interest at Wellcare, someone she fancied. The first two weeks had been bewildering but after that the hierarchy of authority and personality had begun to emerge like the wreckage of a stricken tanker set in its sunken grave, looming through dark green waters.

Her superior, a twentysomething from Chiswick had landed her new job in Liverpool nine months ago and with the easiness that accompanies youth had settled into a flat, then a first mortgage on a house in Allerton. She was from a wealthy family and had not yet experienced any of the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. She had a habit of folding one arm across her lap while the other dangled loosely, rising occasionally to smooth an imaginary wisp of hair. She was, as yet unattached.

Occasionally, shards of envy would lodge themselves in an otherwise untroubled mind (not that anyone else would have noticed). She fended off any forays into her personal life, or lack of it by the phrase 'don't go there.'

Gemma Deveraux was, at twenty-five, starting to worry about when she would have a baby,and with whom to have it. Men were in short supply (eligible ones anyway) nowadays, or so it seemed.

Jan had started working at Wellcare shortly after Gemma. She sensed a froideur when, taking her place at her workstation one afternoon the liveliness of a conversation between Gemma and one of the juniors had ebbed, becoming tightly knotted. Gemma's confessional, from which Jan had pricked out the words 'issues' and 'cover' finally died back altogether.

She had felt unexpectedly vulnerable when Gemma had suddenly invited her to a 'staff leaving do' at the end of busy week.Jan had noticed an epidemic of 'staff leaving does' in the last two months. Gemma was always cool, terse with her. Several times she had turned away from Jan on slightly-heeled shoes when the danger of a conversation seemed imminent.



In the third week of her post (Deputy Assistant Manager) Gemma Deveraux had taken a week off without warning.

Jan found herself wedged between staff requests, spreadsheets, in-house e-mail traffic and the reality of being a newby in a sea of corporate faces.Suddenly, perversely her workload trebled.

It was at home during that particular week that Jan had found the book club notice. Clicking on it revealed that it had generated a fair amount of interest.So she e-mailed her enthusiasm with an offer to find a public meeting place.

The book club, she read, had been meeting in Esperanto's, the latest bar to have taken root in
cosmopolitan Aigburth. How on earth could they have discussed anything in there, she thought. How could the nuances of thought and observation be passed warmly, intimately against a cacaphonous noise-level? She discovered that there were fifteen members of the book club, that they were mainly professionals and that half of them worked in the medical and social care professions.

They had recently been formed and had so far discussed two novels,'High Fidelity' by Nick Hornby and 'Fingersmith' by Sarah Waters.They sounded interesting.They were currently reading a collection of short stories,'Bad Dirt' by Annie Proulx.That clinched it. Jan decided she would go along.

The first book club meeting was an exciting prospect even though it was three weeks away.
She found that month's read in Aigburth Library and was still mentally shrugging at the idea of a book club meeting in a busy, glass-and-chrome bar.

She left it to the last minute to read 'Bad Dirt.' (partly because it would be fresh in her mind and partly because Jan was a procrastinator). She ripped through the first half of the book,falling in love with the prose.The remaining stories she saved in her store-cupboard of desire.

It would be useful, she decided, to make critical notes. 'Annie Proulx', she wrote 'is an artist making beautiful sketches of character, place and time.She takes a long, hard, quizzical look then quickly and deftly sketches, setting in type what the artist does with a brush.'

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.