FAIL, REPEAT,
BEGIN AGAIN
Kirsteen McNish
My first hazy memories of seeing produce grow are down to my maternal grandmother. She lived in a post-First World War house in Nottingham, a typical semi-detached on an estate cul-de-sac, with a front and back garden and an outside loo. My grandma was a petite, twinkly-eyed woman, who would laugh a lot; warm and quick-witted. I remember her almost always with her half-pinny on, cooking from scratch, retrieving things from a small larder. She was very house-proud, scrubbed her step and swept every day, but prouder still of her garden, graced with a greenhouse and a stubbly grey concrete path leading to a vegetable plot.
In the hazy recollections of childhood, my sister Rachael and I would create dance routines in that garden, pretending to be on Top of the Pops and bickering about who did the steps best. In the amber glow of the early eighties, we would stay there for a couple of weeks each summer with her and my two youngest aunts. My grandmother would do handstands against the stippled rendered wall with Rachael and me, and in the evenings we would watch Tales of the Unexpected. Lights off, she would dance in front of the fire, mimicking the silhouetted dancer of the show's opening credits, making us collapse in giggles until the programme got too frightening, and we were hurried off to bed with the hallway light on, whispering to each other in the dark.
In the daytime, however, it was this glass house of Grandma's that entranced me. Sneaking in, the sharp fresh smell of tomatoes turning from green to red and warming under glass, mingled with the almost sickly sweet smell of earth nestling cheek-by-jowl with crescent-moon, bumpyskinned, odd-shaped cucumbers. Here was twine to run between my fingers and make cat's cradles, mucky gloves to wear like Frankenstein's monster as I chased my sister, a leaky iron watering can with tape on the handle, tins with the labels taken off holding emerging seedlings. I would shower the watering can back and forth over the vines, making the smell headier - breathing it in deeply.
In the late afternoons, we would kneel on chairs in the kitchen shelling peas while Grandma sliced potatoes and runner beans that smelt as fresh as newly cut grass. This garden was also where my mum had played as a child, and looked after her younger siblings when she wasn't doing chores, and when we visited they would murmur the flowers' nicknames together as they walked around the garden before we set off for home in Corby - a place she never settled. Busy lizzie, forget-me-not, baby's breath, love-in-a-mist and bleeding hearts; the words comforted and soothed her. It was up behind the greenhouse, however, that felt like a Narnia of sorts to me. Obelisks of sticks with climbing runner beans with scarlet hermaphroditic flowers, sweet peas, garden peas, lettuce, cabbage, cucumbers and nasturtiums. The remaining details have evaporated into the vagaries of time, but I remember running to this patch in the rain once, so pleased to have been sent out for something for dinner and with the special responsibility. When I asked my father recently how big the garden was, he told me it was half the size it held in my imagination - such was its dearly held part of my youth.
My mother inherited a love of growing from seed from my grandmother. We would often see her, creative at her core, building cold frames and a makeshift greenhouse of sorts from offcuts of wood and cheap plastic sheets. Pinch pots were made from compressed newspaper (almost nothing was wasted). She was ultra-resourceful but in an age of the heady spread of supermarkets, she never branched out into vegetable or allotment patches. And with eight active children, footballs, bikes and second-hand tennis rackets, she perhaps thought better of growing things that could be so easily, if unintentionally, destroyed. Like my grandmother, as she worked she wore an apron, which once held a tiny, almost hairless abandoned kitten, nursing it back to health against the warmth of her chest. Planting out seeds, her tongue tip always curled up to her top lip in concentration. With a locked-away basket of tough memories and present-day worries, her garden was her respite and escape from pain and worry. We weren't encouraged to get involved. To grow and nurture quiet things was a place of survival in a life that hadn't always given her an easy ride.
Not long before she died, my mum had a nasty fall in the garden. My dad was impervious to her calls, listening to football on the radio as she lay for at least an hour in the dewy grass. I imagine that to feel so vulnerable in the place she loved best, and where so many of her strengths had played out, must have been a heavy blow. In the last weeks before she died, she asked every day to be taken to the window to see her rose bush - in the wheelchair she resented suddenly having to use. I have seen the garden she created only once since, but the neat, organised rows in her shed and the cold frames leaning against the back of the house remain still, legacy pieces of her toil.
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My first flirtation with growing and allotments comes in my early twenties, shortly after graduating. I'm living in Hull in a flat whose road is wide and regal - rows of trees set alongside beautiful, opulent-looking Victorian buildings - sectioned off in mini roundabouts by old fountains and tall statues. Many bohemian folk live here and I'm sharing a top-floor flat with my musician friend Jez while recovering from ME after glandular fever had swept through my body. My friend D visits to see how I am doing. She has a waspish energy, like an unattended hosepipe thrashing around, and unless she's stoned at the end of a night out rarely do I see her still. Restless as a storm, her body athletic and chiselled, she paces around my living room, then leans out of the window to have a cigarette. On the exhale, she tells me she now has an allotment, and I break into a smile. I cannot imagine this charismatic heart of the dance floor bent over with a spade tending veg. With a withering look, she stubs out the cigarette butt on the windowsill and tells me that she has made friends with her allotment neighbours (all retired). She loves sharing cups of tea and cake with them and learning about their lives: one allotmenteer had given her purple broccoli and peas for dinner that she said melted in her mouth. Admonishing my smile with a sideways look and a flick of her long dark fringe, she suggests that getting an allotment might be good for my recuperation. I should get in touch with the council for a plot. Not wanting to disagree with her formidable forthrightness, I do what she says.
For a few pounds a month, I am soon offered a plot on Chanterlands Avenue Allotments near the disused railway line. I arrive on my ancient sturdy Dutch bike, but I can't see D anywhere. An elderly man asks me my name and laughs, gesturing at the sunglasses perched on tip of my head. 'Ooh, come from the French Riviera, have you?' he smirks, but leads me to my patch. He tells me that I can ask the council to rotavate it, 'just the once for free, mind, and then it's just you and elbow grease'. He introduces me to a neighbour and he in turn offers me a bottle of dusky home-made wine as a welcome. Another shows me his abundant flower patch with hundreds of bobbing daffodils. I feel both welcomed and slightly intimidated. I have never really considered what I eat or the seasonal connection with any weight. In the whirlwind of socialising, working and going to gigs, then illness, everything I buy is from Jacksons Stores, quick to cook and abundant all year around. Through one shed's window, I spy a hand-drawn chart of what will come up when and times to sow; spidery drawings of flowers and veg done in fine black pen alongside motifs for the seasons, an artwork in itself.
I go up to the allotment each week as much as I can planting in higgledy-piggledy rows that resemble unravelled knitting. In time, the tops of carrots begin to poke through and the mangetout start to wrap their soft tendrils around rigid canes. I am comforted somehow by the fact that as I work I know that there are potatoes nestled warm under the earth. My input varies according to fatigue, and some days it's enough just to sit and watch the birds. I am intimidated by the abundance all around me: flowers, scarecrows lurching on poles like drunks at a bar, mosaics made from beach-found glass shimmering in the sun, driftwood mobiles and bottle tops clanking merrily in the breeze. This haphazard community - a contrast to the rows of neat houses just a skip away - seems to reuse and repurpose so much, and joyously so. I am happy here alone, fudging it all, with benevolent smiles and greetings from others, whole generations and lives lived distinctly apart - but communing here.
One day, not too many months after my allotment dabbling begins, my sister visits from Leeds and I have a bike accident after not the brightest move: a pizza box balanced precariously on my handlebars to take home for tea. A teenager darts across the road in front of me and I brake too hard and hit the deck with my legs still entangled between the crossbar and the wheels. A speedy hospital visit and then weeks of hobbling ensue. When I do get back to my patch, I find it in a state of undress. Everything has shrivelled through lack of water, been pecked at or is bolted and leggy. My potatoes are the only hardy, stoic survivors. It's an overcast day to match my mood and for once there are no other growers there to share my dismay. I decide to hand my patch back to the...
