DEAD WOOD AND JASMINE. THE GARDEN

A sepia, dog-eared photo: three children sitting with legs curled under them, toys spread all around, behind them a tall hedge. The boy’s body is turned towards a fair-haired girl with plaits, but his eyes are looking into the camera, head jerked round as his attention is caught. The girl is too absorbed by the toys to respond. A second little girl sits perfectly still, posed and demure, beaming straight into the lens. Patsy - Prim Patsy. Perfect Patsy. And Tony, dear Tony, now so far away.

Farmyard - it was a model farmyard. Tony's dad had made it for him, all the stables, sheds, the green baize fields, even the trees. The animals were plastic, though, and had been collected without attention to scale, so tiny horses stood among giant sheep. What was she holding? Edwina picked the photo up off the table and peered closely at the fair girl’s hand, clasping something - a pig or was it a mouse?

She put the photo down on the table and stood gazing out through the leaded window, but not seeing the neat courtyard beyond. Just out of the frame of the photo, on the concrete driveway, was where she had found that dead mouse. The grimace of all those years before again pulled back her lips in shock and distaste. A flat leathery thing with four tiny shapes attached to it on a strip, like those plastic model kits with strips you break off the parts from. But these were mice, or would have been. How did she know, at five or six, that the mouse was having its babies when the car wheel flattened it in the drive? Another image darted into her head: on the steps in the front porch, caught playing doctors and nurses with Tony, who was examining her bottom. Nana Shepherd, stretching out her arm towards the door, banishing them inside, her mouth a thin tight line, soundless.

Edwina smiled, thinking of her prudish grandmother and what a shock they must have given her. Grandad had always protested that she never kissed him, in spite of bearing him eight children. This claim had been ridiculed in the family but, reflecting now, Erica thought it was quite possibly true. Close your eyes and think of England. His children, the girls anyway, saw him as an old goat forcing himself on her, with no concern for her repeated pregnancies. Funny how one just accepted this family lore; the tales were told so often that to the child they were like fables with constant characters and she was astonished that she had never questioned further. It was after all perfectly possible to submit to sex without showing affection. In those days especially.

She'd actually been quite fond of her grandfather. She remembered him bouncing her on his knee and singing to her; his favourite was
When Father painted the parlour
You couldn’t see Pa for paint
Dabbing it here
Dabbing it there
Paste and paper everywhere

How did it go on? She could feel the bouncing rhythm and found herself humming the words:
Mother was stuck to the ceiling
The kids were stuck to the floor
You never saw a fam- i-lee
So stuck up before

Edwina’s smile lingered as she remembered another family tale, wherein Grandad came home late for lunch, having enjoyed his usual Sunday lunchtime spell in the Wagon and Horses. Infuriated by the tight-lipped silence that greeted him and the fact that his dinner was in the bin, he flew into a rage that sent the children scuttling for cover, and rammed his fist through the coloured glass of the front door. A couple of hours later he was patiently repairing it, singing cheerily to himself while he worked.

The Sundays of her childhood were regularly spent at No 65, as it was always known. Absence required a very good excuse: Grandmother expected the clan to gather around her. She held court in the wooden summerhouse Grandad had made for her under a pear tree, facing on to the back lawn. The children clambered about through the door and window frames, tumbling onto the floor round Nana's deckchair. And that scent: every time Edwina pictured the summer house she breathed in the wonderful scent of the creamy yellow tea roses so densely covering the trellis which separated the summer house from the path under the kitchen window.

It had never occurred to her before, but now the thought came to her that to plan and plant this wondrous place had been a huge undertaking. She had never heard a word about its development and certainly no word of praise, but then if it was her grandfather who created it, that was not surprising, He had never got much in the way of praise.

Her mother had talked about the house itself and what a step up it represented from the small terrace in Mill Street, where she had to share a bed with several siblings. Grandad had bought the land and had No 65 built on the profits from the little sweet shop left him by his father; it was on the London road and as horses gave way to cars and traffic increased, so the shop prospered, especially when a tearoom was added and the sons set up the small car repair place opposite, now one in a chain of garages. When his sons took over in their turn, with the exception of unambitious Walter of course, Grandad was free to direct all his energies to the garden.

Edwina glanced at her watch. Her mother should be home soon.

Lucky her mother had left the back door key under a tub, which had been quite heavy to lift. Surprising she’d said she would leave one at all, given her usual caution and mistrust.

She put the photo back in the album, and the album back on the shelf where she had spotted it standing incongruously among the cookery and gardening books, and glanced out of the window. The grey drizzle she had driven through was still falling, splashing into the puddles forming on the paved courtyard. Small enough for Betty to manage, she thought, and quite attractive with the tubs of foliage and trellises with evergreen climbers. Enclosed and private too.
Edwina stretched and walked into the front room. It felt odd being here and moving around the house while her mother was out. Still, she might as well sit somewhere more comfortable than that wooden kitchen chair. There were only two rooms downstairs, plus a small cloakroom under the stairs, which she’d used when she first arrived. All that tea Cissy had plied her with. She wouldn’t go upstairs till Betty got back. The sitting room was a decent size, with the two small rooms knocked into one, an arch put in where the wall had been. The front part had an alcove each side of a white mantelpiece with an electric fire built in.

She moved across to the bow window. The group of cottages had been quite tastefully modernized, she thought. On the other side of the street the houses were bigger and more modern but built in a similar brick. Almost directly opposite, between two pairs of semis, was a small green, with a few trees and a couple of benches. It was very quiet, nobody about except an elderly man walking his dog towards the green, bent forward into his umbrella.

There was a pale pink plush sofa in the bay and a wing-backed armchair each side of the fireplace. Edwina sat down in one of these and rested her arms listlessly on the embroidered protective sleeves. They looked new, probably her mother’s work, but she recognized most of the other furniture: pieces allocated to Betty in the share-out of her parents’ home. There was the Minty bookcase she remembered from Nana Shepherd’s’ front room, too large and the wood too dark for this room, she felt. And the squat china cabinet, crammed with figurines, plates on stands, odd pieces of tea sets. The walnut dining suite was from her own old home and practically filled the back section of the room beyond the arch. There was too much clutter for her taste; it spoiled the proportions of the room.

Her mind strayed back to the garden at 65 London Road

It was so much part of the landscape of her childhood that she could wander through any part of it in her imagination, even though it was mostly gone now, sold off in parcels for new houses.

The garden was long and gave the children endless opportunities to hide, make dens, watch people go up and down the two roads it bordered, run about being pirates or soldiers. The shady lawn in front overlooked the road, its steep bank rising directly from the path along London Road. There were two towering larches; you could make pipes from the cones that fell, still attached to their stems, and pretend to smoke like Grandad. On one side of the double-fronted house with its door set into a wide porch - where Nana had stood the day she and Tony were playing hospitals - was a path leading round the house to an untended area where the outside toilet and water butt were. On the other side, that looked over Mead Lane, was a rockery, separated from the back garden by the hedge they were sitting against in the photo. Here at the side of the house was the concrete yard where she had found the dead mouse. And the garage, full of mysterious objects: all kinds of tools, a gas mask, an old car not used since before the war. The cousins had climbed about in it, making imaginary journeys with the dolls and stuffed animals piled onto the back seat. Behind the garage was a row of sheds which backed onto Mead Lane. One had a mangle in it and in another she remembered seeing a couple of rabbits hanging up with no fur and bulging eyes. She’d stared at them in tears of disbelief and dismay, thinking of Little Grey Rabbit in her favourite stories.

Immediately behind the house was a lawn, crossed by a washing line. One day she had been caught wringing a kitten, dipped in the pond and ready to be pegged up. Nana’s summer house was in a corner of the lawn. Opposite it, enclosed by tall bamboos, was the pond, encircled by a narrow path. She used to ride her trike round it until the time it tipped into the pond and she was pulled out and sat in a hot tub in front of the living room fire, her legs scratched and bleeding.

Beyond the back lawn stretched a long orchard, with apple, pear, damson, greengage trees and fruit bushes of all kinds, culminating in a square patch, left wild and uncultivated. She had never wondered why, though now she wondered if Grandad had his sights set on selling it for building, which was what had happened in the end. At the edge of the orchard, next to a chicken run, was the dugout: a mound of grass-covered earth with a low door. This was forbidden territory for the children, but of course they sneaked in whenever they had goaded one another on to face the thrill of fear that came from going down the steps into the damp blackness, with that unmistakable strong musty smell. There was a tale of the family taking shelter there one night during an air raid and returning to the house when the all-clear went but leaving her behind in a linen basket. Preposterous when you thought about it; as if a mother wouldn’t realise her baby was missing! Still, it had instilled in Edwina a terror of isolation and abandonment. She thought she had a memory of being taken into the dugout, though she must have been very small. They were making their way down the garden and a saw a plane in the sky. A voice said: ’ It’s over the station’. Was it a memory or yet another piece of family lore?

How much longer would her mother be, she wondered.








,