I couldn’t remember how much almond oil I needed in the soap recipe.
I almost made it up, but soap can go excitingly, explosively wrong if you don’t pay attention to detail, so I trailed up the stairs to hunt for the recipe.
I knew where it was. It was folded up and left in John Seymour’s eternally brilliant Art Of Self Sufficiency, where I found it marking the page which explained, in gripping illustrated detail, how to kill and gut a pig.
The page also had a bloody thumbprint on it.
I dragged the book off the shelf, blowing off the embarrassing dust-drifts which always bear silent witness to my housewifely enthusiasm, and with it came an ancient and battered book that I had practically forgotten about.
It was my Gardening Diary.
I had practically forgotten its existence in the action-packed years since last I opened it, so with some half-hearted curiosity, I opened it again.
Ten minutes later I was still sitting on the corner of the desk, regarding the spidery, close handwriting, so unlike my wide, open hand now, with a mixture of fascination and horrified amusement.
Twenty years ago, when I escaped from the world into vegetable gardening, some gnarled old source of horticultural wisdom had recommended that one’s outdoor activities be recorded in a diary.
It will be of immeasurable benefit, he promised. You will have a handy record of seed varieties, of compost mixtures and weather patterns. Keep it regularly and enter details carefully.
So I did.
* * *
I leafed through the first pages until I reached February 2002, where I discovered that I had built a compost bin out of an old wardrobe. I have no recollection of this now, although the diarist carefully informs me that it was three and a half feet wide and two and a half feet across, and that I had layered the compost carefully with lime and twiggy bits to allow the air to circulate.
It appeared that up until this point I had a mere compost heap, obviously unacceptable for a truly methodical gardener.
On the next page comes the diarist’s seed order, carefully copied in that peculiar, tightly-pressed handwriting, in case at some future date she might need to know the exact variety and seed numbers of her purchases.
She follows this with a putative design for the back garden, which the diarist thoughtfully informs me is not to scale. Perhaps she was afraid I might decide to crawl around it with a slide rule.
Asparagus, the diarist explains pedantically, as she muses about her plans, can have the lettuce planted with it, because asparagus is permanent, whereas lettuce is over and done in a few weeks. Pumpkins can be planted to twine themselves around sweetcorn, because they are leafy and keep the roots cool. Peas are good to plant beside sweetcorn as well, because of the nitrogen they beneficently supply to the soil. Sweetcorn needs a lot of nitrogen, she informs me earnestly, and benefits from having chicken muck spread around it.
I thought that sweetcorn would probably collapse under the weight of a pumpkin, but read on anyway.
Some of the compost from the inadequate heap has already been distributed upon the intended sweetcorn-and-pumpkin-patch in readiness, although it is mere kitchen waste, she tells me, regretfully, not the magnificent nitrogenous by-product of poultry.
By February twenty second, the diarist is lamenting the ghastly weather. I can practically hear her wailing through the pages as she tells me of her desperate, muddy struggles through torrential rain, hail, high winds and frosts.
I had no idea why February’s weather seemed to astonish her so thoroughly, but marvelled at her determination, which did not survive into her old age.
More planning follows, carefully laid out diagrams (not to scale) of paths and raised beds, edged beds and water-butts, with the pros and cons of each new idea laid out beside it. She seems to have chosen a meritorious arrangement whereby the rising and falling of the sun has been carefully plotted, and each plant will have the sunshine it needs. A new plan is drawn out for each season of the year.
She could do all of this, I knew, because then as now, she worked at nights. Once the children had gone to school, the days were her own.
A little later in February she is mulching the strawberries and putting a layer of soot and salt on her onions. I flicked back to see if she had added an explanation about why on earth she might have been planting onions in February, but none was forthcoming, and a few pages later, after some distressed agonising about snow and floods, there comes a burst of almost delirious excitement, and I discover that she has acquired a frame for a greenhouse.
She does not go into detail about where she acquires it, although I knew. It was donated by the next-door neighbour who was expecting to go to prison at his next court date. He felt this would curtail his own gardening activities for the next couple of years, and kindly helped her lug it through the hole in the fence. She gave him some beer in grateful exchange.
It did not have much glass with it, having been thoughtlessly sited next to the public footpath.
The next pages are filled with a plethora of excited greenhouse-related warbling. There are detailed descriptions of laying the hardcore, made up largely of ash from the wood-burning Rayburn, which is the only heating her house has, and of her impassioned longing for a dry day upon which concrete might reasonably be laid. These are followed by another lengthy seed order and a rather surprising, although impecunious, longing for an olive tree, because the diarist is under the definite impression that Coniston might be an appropriate site for olive production.
I could have enlightened her about that one. There is a reason that even the eternally optimistic Cumbria Tourist Board has never come up with the slogan: Come To The Lake District. It’s Just Like The Mediterranean.
The middle of March finds the diarist hopelessly trying to install the greenhouse. It appeared that in those days she was not fully aware of her utter lack of talent for engineering projects, although I could have given her a helpful warning. She is not in the least deterred by the season’s inevitable high winds and hailstorms, although she remarks that they make the handling of panes of glass uncomfortably, and, as I recall, dangerously, difficult.
She also mentions for the first time that she has a baby. Obviously I knew this, and calculated that she must have been fourteen months old, although her name, in those days, appeared to be Tiddles. She changed this later, before she joined the police force.
Tiddles occupies her days splodging about in the mud in her tiny wellies or installed in her huge, old-fashioned pram to sleep beside the diarist, under a makeshift sheet of plastic to keep off the torrential rain and hailstones. The diarist evidently has no qualms of conscience about this, and fortunately, nobody ever called Social Services.
I turn the pages and the intensive activity carries on. The greenhouse is constructed, but at such a peculiar angle that none of the panes are square, and despairing, the diarist borrows the older children’s school mathematics kit, and painstakingly draws templates to take to the glazier.
She does not mention it, but I know that he laughed.
Soon she has her greenhouse, functional despite being painfully askew, and has even concreted a garden step. She complains woefully of the small welly-prints in the new concrete, but tells me happily that she has carefully utilised the largest pieces of broken glass to build a cold frame, and driven her taxi off to the riding stables for some fresh strawy manure with which to warm it. I seem to recall that she filled the boot with it. She does not mention cleaning it before going to work. I hope she did.
A few pages later there is an agonised howl. The diarist has been digging pea trenches and filling them with alternating layers of kitchen waste, sprinkled with lime, and soil mixed with compost, when suddenly she is compelled to decamp, with the children in tow, and head south to attend her sister’s wedding.
This seems to have taken her by surprise, but I am quite sure it can’t have done.
She says nothing about the event at all, but I remembered. I remembered her shocked discovery, the night before, that all the clothes she owned had somehow become too big, which was a problem that I rather envied. The photographs that I had showed her looking quite ridiculously young in a black jersey and tweed skirt, anxiously aware of her mother, who was trying very hard, and almost successfully, not to roll her eyes.
I couldn’t decide whether to be amused or appalled.
I remember her painfully scrubbing soil out of her cracked hands before she left, and recall that she curled, quietly, in the corner of the bar with her diary, meticulously recording the quantities of blood-and-bone fertiliser she had spread on the brassica bed, whilst everybody else danced and drank. I still remember the excruciating headache that ended the night early, and my sister’s bravely concealed disappointment at my ungracious ingratitude.
The diarist’s only comment is her joyous relief on waking up the next day and not having the dreadful spectre of a wedding hanging menacingly in her future.
The pages carry on.
The greenhouse becomes filled with shelves, which the diarist builds out of old pallets and a large steel Meccano set exchanged with somebody in return for climbing a wobbly ladder and installing their television aerial. The shelves fill with soil and compost, neatly layered with blood-and-bone fertiliser, and eventually with sprouting cucumber plants, tomato plants, and peppers.
The diary records that the diarist is checking the seedlings every two hours. I did not have the first idea what for, since presumably none of them intended to run away.
The nights are still cold, so a greenhouse heater is manufactured out of a biscuit tin and a light bulb, until a paraffin heater appears, probably from the diarist’s bedroom. The hot bed flourishes, and asparagus crowns sprout. The diarist drags home a massive old trunk and sets it on bricks by the front door. She fills it with one part soil to two parts sand, for the purpose of interplanting carrots and onions, so that their contrasting scents might disguise one another from pests. The diarist explains that these fly no higher than thirty inches above the soil, presumably she was expecting that they would clang into the side of the trunk instead of alighting to devour the quivering and vulnerable plants.
I could have told her that this was complete tripe.
On the taxi rank, Ray, whose great-grandfather was hanged at Whitehaven for piracy, and whose father won all of the Allotment Association prizes, teaches the diarist that second-early potatoes should be planted on Good Friday and harvested on Whit Monday. The diarist agonises that she didn’t get to the planting until Easter Sunday. Probably they all died.
The asparagus bed is mucked, the sunflowers pricked out into bigger pots, and the greenhouse is bursting with little seedlings. The diarist lists basil, melon, cucumber, lemongrass, tomatoes and peppers, and woefully remarks that one tray is utterly ruined when Tiddles sits on it.
By April the diarist’s little world is sprouting wonderfully, with frail asparagus shoots poking up, and sweet peas in the greenhouse almost a foot tall and ready to go outside as soon as the frosts are done. She is anxiously protecting the outdoor seedlings from the cold nights, and builds an arch for the sweet peas and several wigwams for broad beans. The chap across the road, who can’t have access to his children any more because of his drinking, donates a rusty swing for Tiddles. The diarist sands and paints it and replaces the hideous plastic seat with a slab of oak. Bluebells are almost flowering under the hedges, and the front garden is bursting into bloom. Lavender is on one side of the lawn, and lilac on the other. The hyacinths are swaying in the spring breezes, filling the air with their glorious perfume, and the roses under the window are showing their first buds. The diarist is watering her compost heap because it is too dry. Comfrey is in full leaf and she is cutting it back to dig into the potato patch where it will nourish perfect potatoes.
It is the twenty first of April when disaster strikes. The diarist tells us that she has fallen downstairs and broken her ankle, an event I remembered well. She was carrying a basket of washing down the stairs, and failed to see that Tiddles had left an empty bottle on a stair halfway down.
She is obliged to go to work shoeless that night, because none of her shoes will fit over the swelling, which she tells us looks like a nasty case of club-root, and on the taxi rank, Ray says that if she goes to hospital they will probably give her some good drugs.
She likes that idea, and goes to hospital after work, but slopes off unobserved in the middle of the night when the exhausted-looking doctor explains his intention to envelop the injury in a plaster cast. She steals the very useful crutches that they lend to her, because a plaster cast would be difficult to explain to the Taxi Inspector, and there isn’t any money for time off.
The crutches make it difficult to manage the wheelbarrow, and the diarist despairs, because she has bought an apricot tree which needs to be planted against a south facing wall, and she is finding it difficult to pull up the paving slabs. She manages it, although even from my hindsight-endowed vantage point I have no idea how she did, explaining that she has dug out two and a half feet of sub-soil and stone. She has planted the root ball and filled the hole with manured soil and blood-and-bone fertiliser. After that she builds a trellis on which the tree can stretch its branches in the afternoon sunshine.
She is tired, and tells us so, not just that day but on the many days to come, and complains that her foot hurts. I was not surprised about this, not least because I recalled that she was disappointed in her expectation of good painkilling drugs from the hospital, and was hopefully wrapping her foot in comfrey. Still she labours on, working every night, and at the beginning of May there is a long To Do list with ticks next to every item, and a photograph, taken by somebody else, of an impossibly young and slender person, in a garden with a determined-looking baby.
She does not tell us about what is going on in the rest of her life, but I knew what she was doing in between the lines. In the spaces she is hobbling to her taxi on crutches and hiding them in the boot every night, speaking to nobody and refusing to get out, paralysed by the fear that some competitor might report her to the council as being unfit to drive. This disaster would leave her with no income whatsoever, and three children unfed. She is not really unfit, she reasons, because it is her clutch foot, the incapacity of which is not dangerous. Not like a brake foot.
She sits alone behind the wheel, discouraging conversation by being immersed in Lawrence D Hills’ book of vegetable gardening, and glaring at everybody.
She does not mention this, because she does not care, but I knew that it was important. A new taxi driver starts on night shifts that week, and wants to know the story behind the cross girl who won’t speak to anybody.
You’re not brave enough, Ray tells him, and laughs.
The diarist makes dandelions and rhubarb into wine. She repairs the wobbly trellis and her fingernail goes black when Tiddles bashes it with the hammer. She creosotes the swing, and the older children say: What’s that awful smell, are you cooking something? She visits the graveyard every week, because the vicar has told her she can help herself to the mown-grass compost heap. She decides that she wants to keep bees, and telephones a beekeeper, and then her mother comes to stay.
Her mother tells her she thinks she must have Asperger’s Syndrome, and insists she eats meals every day. Frantically, secretly, she writes in her diary about sprinkling the compost heap with chicken muck and planting the carefully-reared sweetcorn seedlings in an often-dug, loose-soiled deep bed, which Tiddles has almost spoiled by jumping on it.
Her mother makes her sit still in the garden, which drives her frantic with boredom in less than a minute, so she reaches down and loosens the soil with her fingers, because loose soil will be good for planting. Whilst her mother is shopping she rushes to rake compost into the heavier clay of the side beds, and laments that Tiddles has been playing in the sandy carrot-soil and scattered it everywhere.
She buys Tiddles a sandpit, and her mother patiently sweeps the drifts of sand from the paths. She goes on a beekeeping course and buys a swarm that will be ready in twenty one days, much to her excitement. Her mother sighs, and goes home, and a few weeks later Tiddles becomes sick.
She is hospitalised, in a hospital an hour’s drive from home, and the diarist and the older children take it in turns to stay the night with her.
I reflected that nobody seemed to have reported this to Social Services either.
Tiddles recovers after a fortnight. The diarist does not give much credit to modern medicine for this, recording that she has spat it out three times daily. She adds that the paediatrician, observing the senior nurse departing to change her uniform again, wonders if the child might have Asperger’s Syndrome. This amuses the diarist, it is the second time she has heard the new term lately.
The bees arrive, and a few entries buzz with bee-related happiness as the diarist joyfully demonstrates all of her newly-acquired vocabulary of top supers and queen excluders and frames. The neighbour on the other side is stung whilst mowing his lawn, but does not complain because the diarist looked after his children when his wife was arrested a few weeks earlier, and helpfully gave the arresting officer some of her best council-house rhetoric into the bargain.
This injustice still rankles even now, years later, because the neighbour’s wife did not do it and carried the can for her fraudulent employer.
The diarist records a plague of snails, so many that she can hear them eating when she comes through the garden late at night. Soot and salt and slug pellets do not help, and she is late to bed, night after night, because she is picking them off by torchlight and dropping them in a bucket of water, and even then some turn out to be swimmers.
There is a howl of disappointment on the day when it becomes plain that the children will not eat vegetables at all, not courgettes nor cucumbers nor spinach, not even the broccoli. Of course she knew this, but somehow hoped it might be different, because they are fresh, still with caterpillars, out of the garden. Tomatoes are left in a dish in the middle of the table, so many that the diarist gives them to the neighbours and to her fellow beekeepers. Cucumbers flourish, and the diarist wonders what she might do with sixty of them. Parsley edges every bed, and every plate, and then there is a long silence.
* * *
I knew what happened in the silence, although in the next entry, several months later, the diarist pretends it was nothing.
I recalled the bleak morning when the diarist woke up and stared into the void.
She looked out of her window at the garden and knew that she did not care at all.
Exhaustion overwhelmed her, and she knew beyond doubt that life has no quest, just more living until it is over.
She thought about this hard, and the weeds, which had no qualms about having any purpose in life, and were just pleased to grab any chance they could, rushed in, crawling all over the beautifully soft, double-dug, bastard-trenched soil, and smothered everything they could.
For a while the diarist leaned over the edge of the abyss.
When she picks up her hoe again, the summer is almost over. There is still a harvest, of course, and she struggles to haul it in and bottle and pickle everything that the children will not eat, making chutney with honey and onions and the vinegar that the rhubarb wine became. She sits alone in the kitchen after work and stares into the darkness, and then one night she is at the back of the taxi queue when the new driver strolls along it.
I brought pizza, he says, because I thought you might be hungry.
She has not thought about it, but of course she is hungry.
Ray said you like gardening, he says. Tell me about your garden.
It is such a failure she can hardly bear to speak of it, but she tells him and he nods.
I wonder, he ventures, delicately, if perhaps you might like me to bring across a trailer load of muck. It’s well-rotted, and straw, not sawdust. There’s no nitrogen in sawdust. We farm, you see. I could bring a couple of tons.
She looks at him, disbelieving, but on Tuesday afternoon the Land Rover and trailer pull into the parking space. He has even brought a wheelbarrow.
She feeds him on bread and cheese, with fresh tomatoes and chutney. He wonders why she has never thought of chickens. Of course she has thought of chickens, but does not have room. He disagrees, he thinks there is space in the old potato bed. He could bring her a couple of point-of-lay pullets, which at least wouldn’t sting the neighbours.
He admires the chutney, so she tells him about the rhubarb wine disaster. He laughs and says she should distil it, and several days later they do, illegally, into jam jars from a kettle on the top of the old stove. The resulting liquid is quite startlingly alcoholic and surprisingly rhubarb-flavoured. It is the last page of the diary.
I flicked back through, but the story I had hoped to glimpse is simply not there.
The diarist simply ignores the police investigation and the inquest. It must have been going on in the background to every page, but she is resolutely, entirely silent.
She tells us nothing about her dead partner, or the trip to hospital to identify his crushed, partially-headless body, although I know this happened less than a fortnight before the diary’s first entries. Perhaps she thought I would not be interested.
There is no mention of the coroner’s eventual verdict of suicide, of the explanation that he had deliberately swerved in front of the truck instead of coming home, although he had phoned before he set off to see if he should stop for milk. She does not once mention the terrifying insurer-debate which pontificated in every morning’s post about whether this deliberate act might make her, the car owner, liable for the resulting costs to the road, to the truck, to the police and the poor devastated truck driver, and for her car, which could not be scrapped, but had to be burned before it was buried. It had threatened to bankrupt her for ever.
She does not mention anybody’s trauma at all, although I was quite sure that there had been plenty of it.
After that, she leaves us on a cliff-hanger, with twenty years of untold story echoing from the blank pages that follow.
Fortunately I knew all sorts of things that she didn’t.
I knew her gardening adventures had hardly begun, and would lead her to a smallholding jewel in the French mountains, with home-made sausages and ice cream and cheese, a brown-eyed Jersey cow to snuffle at the windows, a pig to eat any unwanted courgettes, and all the apricots and broccoli anybody might want.
I also knew that Asperger’s Syndrome is genetic, and it becomes especially pronounced at times of stress, leading to single-minded, obsessive behaviour, and an inability to relate to the world.
I closed its tightly-written, grubby pages, and put it back on the shelf, amused, wishing I could give the diarist the benefit of some of my own wisdom, and thinking how much she would have envied me if we had ever been able to meet.
I unfolded the soap recipe.
She would have longed for my life.