JOHN CUNNINGHAM

Gardeners

The office where I used to work was stuffy, right up under the roof. My job was filing, and I listened to Ellen and Elma. They swung on their swivel chairs and ate cream cakes. A man couldn’t get a word in.

Across the road they were building a row of houses in a field. Beyond, forests and hills stretched away for ever.

Below, the workshop. The foreman shouted continually over the din and farmers, always in a hurry, brought in broken machines.

From time to time there’d be a heavy tread on the stairs and I would go to the counter to fill in the cheque for a man who’d mark his name slowly as if he was tracing.

I began to see that i t wouldn’t change. After the rattling hay and silage machines they were bringing in the combines. Then the tractors were hauling grain to the mill, and before you could turn round it was ploughs and dung- spreaders. The machinery was driving my life along.

I made up my mind - when they finish the first house. That was too long - when they get the roof on. I told my parents, who’d never left the town all their lives except for holidays,

not knowing if I’d miss them. The day of handing in my notice I told Elma: ’I’m off to Glasgow.’ I’d built

up an idea of her coming with me, but she didn’t exactly say she would. Once there it occurred to me that she needed time to think it over. I wrote

her about the job and the flat - a bit of luck, someone I knew moving out - and telling her she could come to stay any time; but not pushing her. A fine letter. I saw it being slipped through her letterbox by Jacky the postman; envelope, paper and writing all saying ’city’; I saw her reading it and putting it in her blue leather bag to read again. She didn’t answer

It was January and dark in my ground-floor rooms. Out at the bins round the back it was like a prison. The great dark walls of the tenement seemed to lean in. There were four floors and I didn‘t know any of the people above. They weren‘t like neighbours, up there instead of beside you. Anyway, you didn’t speak to people, we were all strangers.

Winter passed and a warm weekend came. I went out the back and there was a man at the bins. A. Irving. His name was on the door opposite mine. I kept on along the narrow path you had to go between the wall and the railings to get to the back green, with the feeling that he was waiting for me.

’Morning’, I said, as he began to speak too. We hesitated. I felt like a boy. The smell of the school labs and an experiment with iron filings and magnets

Gardeners 17

came back to my mind. So many magnets, one between two. They were kept in a wooden box in pairs. Lines of force ran between us.

’See you put some plants in’, he said. I saw he was looking at some things Mum had given me I’d shoved in to

get rid of them. ’I can move them’, I said. ’That’s all right.‘ He held up his hand like a policeman halting traffic, looking,

but holding my eyes only a moment. ‘That’s all right’, he said again, putting down his hand, and we stood a yard from each other, like dogs. I saw his face was lined and his hair was grey, but I think I saw something else, some kindness, or I wouldn’t have persisted afterwards. He went in after dumping his bag.

I used to go out, if I heard his door and could think of something to say. Sometimes just hullo, and I’d walk up to the shops and buy a carton of milk or a paper. Gradually I learnt that his name was Tony, that he’d lived alone since his wife died, that he’d been retired for a while, though I never discovered from what.

He seemed surprised that I had wanted to come from the country. And he assumed I must know all about gardening, hadn’t I brought plants?

One evening out at the back he showed me some things he’d planted. They didn’t look too good, I couldn’t think of much to say. He went to a bush hanging through the railings and lifted its withered branches. There were more of the things growing out of a crack in the concrete. He cupped his hand round his mouth and whispered, ’They may be seeded off this!’ He nodded towards next door. ’She’s a genius with plants.’

I was sure they were weeds. And what made me sure? I’d picked up a lot at home without knowing it . I even knew the bush hanging through the railings was a hydrangea.

At home I’d cut the grass, that was all, and I‘d taken for granted lawn, herbaceous, roses, vegetable plot and fruit trees. I was surprised how much I knew.

’Is it your garden?’ I asked. ’You could say that. Put it this way, I’ve done i t for years. None of them

’Would . . . could I help?’ ‘Sure’, he answered, but with a frown. ’I’ll buy some plants’, I said.

are bothered.’

I got a trowel first because I didn’t want to be asking for the tools that he kept in his flat. When he was unlocking the door it was like opening a safe. Inside was a dark hole. I didn‘t expect to be asked in - even if I’d invited him fkst and that was unlikely because I thought he wouldn‘t want to come. But in the garden we were friendly. The first flowers I bought were pansies. I didn’t like

18 Critical Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3

carrying them up the street but when they were planted in one of the beds in our sheltered garden I liked their wide turned-up faces. The sun was on them in the evening. I t was the good summer of ‘84. I watered the pansies and Tony cut the grass. The mower cable went through his kitchen window to a plug and I would hand it through to him. After use it went back into his flat. I bought more flowers; it didn’t take many to fill the beds round the pansies and his weeds, tall and flopped. The garden had never had such attention. He trimmed the grass edges, there was nothing else to do, and he brought out a chair and smoked. I sat on the grass while we talked. There were kids playing next door, midges hovering, Tony’s smoke rising.

’I’ll be going away soon’, he said, in July. ‘Holiday. Old friend.’ Did he want me to cut the grass7 ‘No, no!’ he said. I saw the difficulty. His nose seemed to have lengthened

and his eyes to have sunk further. They were already sunken. His lips pursed and stuck out. ’I’ll give her a trim before I go. Won‘t grow in this weather.’

’No.‘ ’Jack’s a gardener.’ He jerked his head, moving on to that. He lit up. ’You

should see his chrysants. Course down there they can grow things.‘ Smoke issued and he looked down, sideways at me. ’Jack and me was in the War together’

He was away a fortnight and the day before he came back I cut off the dead heads of the flowers and dug over the beds with the trowel. It looked good.

He was busy in his flat and going messages for a couple of days, then he came to the garden and nodded approval. It was to please me. Need to cut the grass sometime, was all he said.

He was there in his chair next day when I came home from work, reading the paper.

’How about this?’ he said holding it forward. ’Schoolkids three to a book!’ I leaned over his shodder and saw a photo of children. I read the smeared words quickly, hoping to keep his attention , turn our conversation to the garden maybe, anything but Jack’s garden. ’And they use all that money to make bombs‘, he said.

’To drop on other kids without books‘, I responded. ‘You’re right.’ Taking off his glasses he held the paper up and I saw a white

singlet through the armhole of his shirt. I shook my head, he let the paper drop and looked at the flowerbed. ’What do you call them?’

‘Petunias‘, I said promptly. ‘Sure it was them I saw in the War. France.’ He reached for a cigarette. ’In

the ruins, all round the houses.’ ’They grow anywhere,’ I said not liking it about the War. ‘We marched through those bloody ruins for days. There was a place we

Gardeners 19

stopped, piles of rubble just, wooden beams - that was it, the village!‘ He frowned till I acknowledged. ‘They were peeking out from under the stones there. Them.‘ He sighed towards the petunias. ‘And here this woman appeared with a big round loaf. Where she’d got it. . . . Big fat woman. She came from somewhere right beside me when we were having a smoke. Out the ruins.’ I saw him lean and tanned under his tin hat, a young man lying on his elbow with the others, coming back soon to his family in this house. ’Jack11 remember.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke.

I went to a rose that had fallen and held it against the railings to find a place to tie the jaggy branches that twisted in my hands and hooked a thorn into my wrist.

’He’s coming to stay, Jack. Mebbe he’ll move in with me.’ He had thrown away his butt and was guiding another cigarette to his mouth.

I looked up at a cloud sailing over the rooftops, it seemed it could fall out of the sky.