I strimmed the back field today. I call it a field, because I can’t in all accuracy call it a lawn. I haven’t yet settled on a name for that part of the garden. Come to think of it, I haven’t really settled on names for any of the distinct parts of my outdoor space. I’ve been here a whole year and I still don’t know what to call the step / stoop or the zen / oriental garden, or the back patch / wild garden / back field – and then there’s the frontage…
It comes of living alone, working alone, and in lock-down and not having the kind of conversations that would need me to identify bits of my plot. Names attach themselves to things through usage.
Whenever I think about names, I remember Miff Morgan, a friend of my Dad’s from his cycling days. Everyone called him Miff. Not in the way of I’m Malcolm, but everyone calls me Dusty…, but in the way of I’m Miff. So far as Dad could tell, no-one knew how he’d come by the nickname nor what his given name was. It was a nickname solid enough for Mam to track him down and invite him, secretly, to their Silver Wedding party. People and places are given names, but they live by the names they acquire.
Think of how hard it is to change the name of pub. It will always be known by its former name, or the corruption of that that passes into local folk lore. There were few pubs in and around the new town that I grew up in, and most of them not very old, but the tradition for nick-naming took hold quickly enough. The Iron Horse (named for its proximity to the railway) naturally became The Tin Donkey. The Blacksmith’s Arms was referred to by the arms themselves The Hammer & Pincers, but by the time I was drinking there, playing darts in the back room and shaming my mother by going out on a Saturday night in jeans, it was simply called The Hammers. Somehow Mam minded more about the jeans and the cheesecloth and the scarf tied round my waist than she did about the fact that we were wandering down the unlit lane to drink underage.
We didn’t drink much. We probably put more money in the juke box. Working Class Hero is the song I equate with that pub at that time. I’m sure we’d have played others, but that’s the one that plays in my head. Just as I’m always dressed in the same outfit…which probably wasn’t the case. Perhaps one night comes to stand in for all of them. Is that how memory works?
Memory. Outdoor work is conducive to memories strolling in.
The strimmer broke just as I started work on the back. The guard came away. I couldn’t figure out how it had been fixed, couldn’t find a way to re-attach it. The thing is ancient. I found it in the workshop and kept it. Logically, I would have put the job to one side and concentrated on fixing the tools or ordering a replacement, but it is a warm September afternoon and I have been putting off this job for weeks, and in putting it off and knowing I needed to do it I have put off other things (like going to the beach) in the hope that I’d be spurred to get on with it, get it done, ease my conscience enough to sit on the damp sands of autumn. I wasn’t going to stop now that I’d (almost) got started.
The weather might continue unseasonably warm, but day-length is something we haven’t yet disrupted so there will be less and less time for the warmth to gather in the bowl of my garden. Already noticeable. I start to mow in the afternoon and the long grass is still holding night-dew.
Unguarded the strimmings fly against my legs, wet and cold. I slowly acquire a sheen of green, like an algae-harbouring sloth.
It’s an untidy mowing, but pristine isn’t really the aim. All I want to do back here is keep it under some kind of control.
When Mike asks how my garden is looking, I tell him scruffy. He reassures me that it is the time of year, assuming that ‘scruffy’ is a deprecation. Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe it is the wrong word. I make a note to make a list of words that might better describe what I have. Adolescent, perhaps. Reckless, maybe. Not ‘scruffy’ – too judgemental, too much an implication that I’d want it tidy and I wouldn’t, not this back patch, this unnamed plot. I wonder if finding its name and finding the right words to describe it are a single quest.
Words to describe the garden. I’ve spent a year responding to my garden in words and pictures and I now have 365 snippets and no idea what to do with them. They are resting, while I summon up the courage to revisit, rewrite, rework. Release.
I love Mike for always remembering to ask me how my garden is looking. Strangely, it is always this back plot that I think of when he asks. Not the deck, where I’m sitting writing this, catching late summer sun on my back. Not the zen space, which is only Zen in my head. Or the stoop where I love to eat and read and write, early in the morning, or by candlelight at night. Or the frontage where I feel so exposed to the neighbours who pass and stop and tell me what I’m doing wrong. I always think of this rag-taggle of greenery, left largely to its own devices, where the grass grows too quickly, and the path doesn’t quite meet the washing line, and the negotiation with the brambles always draws blood and the murdered Plane tree refuses to die. Where last year there were sunflowers and this year there were not. Where a thistle bloomed, and poppies, and sweet-scented white angels of the night, but now all is overgrowth and aggravation.
I strim the grass. And I remember.
I remember a summer long ago. The year I decided to cut the grass behind the flat. Clive was on detached duty Peterborough only coming home at weekends. I was in my final year, studying for exams. The flat was a quiet place to try to embed the basics of economic theory and try to remember my German idioms.
He’d bought the flat while I was abroad, with a notion that we would live there together. He didn’t tell me that part of it, until much later, when it was already evident we never would.
That summer though, was back when we were still so much in love. With each other. With music. With life. He was finally working in an office that did the job properly and understood his approach the way the Norwich office never did. They would have gladly had him stay. I wonder now whether that option was ever pursued, and if so, why it failed. Questions never asked. Paths never followed.
That summer though, we were happy. He’d bought the flat because it had a garden and he knew that I would want a garden. But I wasn’t living there yet and his idea of garden was just to let nature take its course. I never saw the worst that nature wrought on that plot (except briefly in a photograph decades later), but that summer I decided to intervene. I decided to cut the grass.
Grass. What do you think when I say grass? Don’t imagine green lawns. Think rather of a cornfield. Straw-coloured stalks, growing somewhere between waist- and chest-height. Think of a plot the width of a bedroom plus a bathroom-length plus a footpath wide, and square it. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but it’s the size I remember. The garden was too new to have anything else invading…it was only over-grown grass that you could hide out in. Summer brown.
I might remember it wrong, but that is what I remember.
I remember that I set about cutting it with a pair of garden shears. I suppose I had a rake. I suppose I gathered up the cuttings and binned them. I don’t remember that. I remember the heat. And crouching and cutting and cutting and cutting. I remember the sense of satisfaction of seeing each swathe cleared and a determination to finish it by the end of the week. I don’t think I did.
And in the end it didn’t matter. We never did make a garden there. Or here. Not together. We rarely got to sit outside in the evening. We never made a home together. Not there. Not here.
There are so many things we never did.
And now here I am making a home, and a garden. Without him. I haven’t done any of this in his memory – I freely confess I have laid it out and work in it, in my own conception of what I want to see, knowing full well how much he would have resisted most of it. But his memory infuses the place regardless.
I remember the last apple tree that survived the orchard. I know where the greenhouse was, a winter refuge for the foxes and the first step to indoors for Dodger. I remember gifts of runner beans and tomatoes and blackberries.
And now that all of this is gone, there are echoes.
Birds come to the table, the same table, relocated.
A new apple tree has been planted.
A cat collar still hangs in the wisteria.
~ / ~
