the all-day dawn chorus.
SUNDAY MORNING, LATE JUNE. I am on the first bus, my travelling companions the domestic workers heading to Hampstead, to the larger London homes they clean and care for. I haven’t been here for a fortnight and am keen to see the allotment and if the emergency bean sowing has worked. I have missed this place. My heart lifts when I arrive. Mary’s bean poles have eager vines on every stick. Her summer plot is saved. OK, tap-rooted thistles are thriving, there is an explosion of weed, many of the peas and broad beans are blown and fallen over, some seed has failed to germinate, but nothing that can’t be fixed by a day or two of hand-hoeing. Suddenly, a flash of rust, a glimpse of white on a scurrying tail as a fox darts across my path. My first sighting this summer. A good omen. Maybe omens are a country-kid thing but maybe also the plot will forgive me for my broken leg and absence. I sow saved red tagetes seed and get to work. A break for breakfast at home, a couple of hours for Sunday papers and back to tidy the potatoes. They are close to cropping now. The chard is heavy-leafed and luxuriant. I hoe every row and re-stake the peas in a downpour. I like giving in to gardening in rain. It closes off the outside, focuses your attention. Just you and the job: a meditation of hand and hoe. A moment of connection. I tie the peas and think of a friend who mails me seed. I send him an eclectic collection, saved and shared from around the world, he sends me Basque peas and intense, small tomatoes because they speak of him and his region. The peas are to be picked young, and sometimes when I eat them I remember Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, and I remember Lilian.
2011. It is one of the last nights before the closing of the best restaurant in the world. Dom Perignon has flown in 50 guests by private jet: serious wine investors, Silicon Valley billionaires, film stars, their boyfriends, another food writer and me. We are helicoptered into the beach like a scene from Apocalypse Now. We eat 50 small dishes – eggs fashioned from gorgonzola cheese, small, gamy squares of hare, sea cucumber filaments, rose petal wontons and peas. Excited conversation and Dom Perignon ’73 flow. I am sitting at a table of high-powered dignitaries when, deep into the meal, a wave hits me. The room and noise fade a little, a shard of emotion breaks free and I notice my face is wet. I am quietly crying. Ferran Adrià’s peas have burst in my mouth like memories. I’m no longer sitting opposite Roller Girl from Boogie Nights, I am aged maybe six, in shorts and stripy top, on the pink porch of our Devon house. Lilian is there with me, in her yellow patterned summer dress with blue butterfly-wing brooch, sitting, smiling, patiently podding peas into her dented aluminium colander. And as I pick up a pod and help her, I know this is what safety will forever taste like: garden peas freshly picked from the lap of your new mum.
The broad beans are almost gone now, just a half dozen or so spring-sown Crimson-Flowering from Mads McKeever at Brown Envelope Seed in Cork. I came across this old variety – and Brown Envelope – early in 2007 with the arrival of the Seed Ambassadors. Andrew Still and his wife Sarah are seed hunters from Oregon, where many obsessive plant breeders are based. Andrew’s passion is for kale, and the pair were on a European tour starting deep in Siberia and ending with Mads on the west coast of Ireland. With Andrew and Sarah came stories. They arrived at the plot on a cold winter morning with packages: from Tim Peters of Peace Seeds, breeder of Gulag Star, a winter salad cross between Russo-Siberian kales and mustards; our first Flashback Calendula. I learned that day of Trail of Tears beans, named from the winter of 1838 when Cherokee were forced from their farms in the Carolinas and marched to Oklahoma in the Indian Territory. First offered through the American Seed Savers Exchange in 1977 by a ‘Cherokee descendent, gardener, seed preservationist, circus owner, and dentist’, Dr John Wyche, the beans can now be shared and bought from heirloom growers. I save the seed and still grow the crops Andrew and Sarah gave us. This year, Trail of Tears have made their way on to a couple of Mary’s poles to supplement the beans that had been struggling to survive.
The pellets and sun have done their work, the wigwam will thrive this time. I weed around the base, careful not to disturb the geraniums Mary has planted there. Elsewhere, there are ominous signs of smothering bindweed breaking through, but Mary has been clearing another small winter bed. I thin out calendula now rampant on both parts of the plot, the flowers sitting brightly by this screen as I write in the early morning. It is glorious high summer, time to garden with a hat and with the sun on your back, time to harvest lettuces, peas and radishes for home, almost time to sow spinach. But the solstice passed a few weeks ago now, the days are warmer but the nights are a little longer. It’s time to begin to plan and plant for winter.
Summer for me is saturated in early memories of Herons Reach, the house on the riverbank that Lilian and Dudley bought to bring up the boys. When I talk of those days, my early life, it is often of ‘the boy’ (or boys) and what happened to him (or them). I rarely use me or we. It might be to do with confusion or creating a protective distance. I notice other people with a similar background do the same. It might be to do with shedding identity, like the ethereal adder skins I used to find in the Aveton Gifford churchyard. It might be about naming. Mum and Dad didn’t like the name Alan, so quickly chose to call me Peter, my middle name, instead. And after a probationary period – I must have passed a test – I was given Drabble (Christopher resisted and stubbornly stuck with Jenkins, a schism between us). Now that we were safe, they thought we could be safely separated.
Scared city child Alan Jenkins was fading, at least for now. Bright-eyed, blond-haired village boy Peter Drabble was cocooning, being born.
As we played, the house too was being expanded, refashioned and renamed. North Efford (north of the ford), a farm labourer’s cottage was metamorphosing into Herons Reach. An extension was added, light was let in, the exterior given a new coat of pink render; rust-red Virginia creeper was trained up its side. That long, happy summer, the first deeply etched into my memory, Dudley waved his phoenix wand, knocking through for French windows, buying the large field behind the house, laying in a drive, the foundations for a lawn, a croft. He planted more trees. Like me, the house was shrugging off its darker past. There was sweet strawberry jam being made in the kitchen, the sound of boys, a cricket bat on ball in the garden, plums and apples were coming in the orchard. Dudley was carving out a home fit for his new family.
While the work was done, we lived in a caravan. It was light, had a breakfast bar and drop-down beds, though we were never inside except to sleep. Christopher would play cricket or football, while I would climb trees and explore the river, catching eels and sticklebacks and putting them in jars until they died.
We had different hair, different eyes, a different smile. He had hazel eyes I almost envied, reddish hair I liked, freckles I wanted, though not the burning in the sun. He was slight while I was heavy, his grin was wider, though mine came more easily.
My favourite photo of Christopher is from that idyllic summer of ’59. He is sitting in the doorway of the caravan with a proud-looking Dudley holding him. Christopher is happy – his tic is slowly disappearing. He is being hugged. He is being loved.
The open smile would slowly disappear. His bright, tumbling chatter would go quiet. He would withdraw back into himself, if not quite yet.
JULY 4. We have fruit on all the tomato plants, about a dozen or so, growing in pots on the roof terrace. Ironic they are there, because it is through tomato seed I found Plot 29. It is July 2006, I am editor of a national newspaper Sunday magazine, juggling million-plus budgets, million-plus readership, 20-plus staff. My day is spent dealing with photographers, writers, agents, celebrities and fashion designers with delicate egos. But all I can think of is how my tomato seedlings are faring when the weather changes. How will they cope with the cold or heat? My next Observer Magazine cover can wait. I am haunted by helpless plants. For the first time in 20 years, my work has a rival. I feel as if I’m needed elsewhere.
I am not alone. There are a few of us on the magazine currently obsessed. We swap small plants
