Plot 29: A Memoir: LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD AND WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE. Allan Jenkins
of Chris’s hand. It doesn’t work, of course. Christopher is good at being hit.
1962. I like to scare myself as a child. There is a tree in the darkest part of the lane behind the house where I like to linger. It is tall, maybe malevolent, its branches and bark twisted like something from Tolkien. Christopher always hurries past (though he is braver than me with bullies). I stop and wait, savouring the moment of fear as scary branches wave in the wind. By about 10 or 11 years old, I have graduated to an abandoned badger sett I find on one of my long walks along the river. It is buried into the bank. I crawl deep inside, under the exposed roots, the heavy Devon clay. Burrow in as far as I can. I lie there daring the roof to fall, to bury me in red soil. The appeal is enhanced by the feeling I might never be found, the thought I can just disappear. After maybe half an hour of lying there I go home for lunch. By age 12, I get kicks from a piece of shaley cliff where the path had been eroded. I look down at the white water and rocks, and slide. You can’t walk it, do it carefully. The only route is surrender, to guide the drop to a piece of broken path with your feet. I love to let go, see if I can cross to the other side, stand where no one else would dare. I never do it with anyone else. Secrecy is the thing. I grow out of it when I become interested in girls.
1963. Lilian’s mother has come to live (or more accurately, die) with us. Christopher has to give up his bedroom and move back in with me. It’s not going well. He is not happy and when he is not happy we fight and I lose. At least he is outdoors all day, while I am obliged to stay in and read to her. She sends me to the village to buy her bottled stout. Mum and Dad are teetotal, the only booze the Christmas cherry liqueur and Harvey’s Bristol Cream on the sideboard for guests who never come.
Mum and Dad don’t read, except Dudley’s local Western Morning News. There is only a scant handful of ancient books in the house. The old grandma is a bit bad-tempered and I don’t like the smell of her or her beer, but I am fascinated by her age, her drab clothes, her thin, lined mouth and the thought that she is near to death. So we sit in the curtain-drawn gloom in the summer afternoon and I read her Heidi. She is 84, from deep in the nineteenth century, like my Victorian stamps and coins, too far away for a small boy to comprehend. She dies one night while we are asleep. We don’t get to see her or go to her funeral, though we are allowed to join the tea with Lilian’s good tableware. Christopher is soon moved back to his room.
1964. Mum cuts our hair with clippers: old school, hand action, blunt. She is always snagging our necks. She is worse at cutting a fringe. I think she is nervous. So are we. Christopher screams like he is being butchered. He checks for blood. He hates sitting still. I think we are all relieved when crew cuts come in and we can go to the barber in Kingsbridge. They let me take a sneak through Parade and pore over its pictures of topless girls. They also have Health and Efficiency – smaller, less sexy pages of naked ping pong in a naturist magazine. I leave feeling almost a teenager, splashed with spritz.
JULY 23. Of course I am now concerned about the baby squash and courgettes in the heatwave. The weather has been baking for days, so I am back on the first bus with today’s bleary-eyed postal workers. It’s bright, the start of a maybe 30-degree day, but there’s cool in the early-morning air, the first spectral tendril of autumn. The plot will need water and I can be back home before breakfast. Bill is there when I arrive, communing with his allotment, waiting for the day. We talk a little about the benefits of growing seed at home. It gives them a head start, he says. A heavy wave of sweet pea hits me as I pass the corner by the plot. A pigeon is feasting on the elder at the end of the plot, flapping its wings anxiously to maintain its greedy balance. The berries are turning now. Autumn won’t be long. Mary’s runner bean wigwam is flecked with flower and the bush beans are breaking through. I am more worried about the borders. Bindweed is creeping its way into the strawberry bed and the lovage is being tethered to the ground like Gulliver, sporting parasitic blooms. I grab a handful of beans. I have been bitten again and am starting to scratch. I soak the pumpkin bed, grinning at the new growth. Watering may be the best feeling in gardening. By 7am I am back on the bus, refreshed. I need breakfast and a bath.
SUMMER 1964. I have an appointment to be beaten. It is my choice. Dudley had been renting the field to the farmer for his cows to pasture but some escaped. It is our fault. Christopher and I have made a den in the hedge, a hideout for outlaw brothers after robbing a stagecoach or train. But the cows broke through and one became trapped in the river mud. I remember it lowing down the valley as the tractor tries to pull it out. It is freed eventually, it doesn’t drown, but the farmer’s nearly lost a beast and Dad is incandescent. He decides we can choose our punishment: to be caned or to miss TV for a week. No great loss, I think. We have BBC until 7pm, Dixon of Dock Green on Saturdays, maybe Doctor Who. The only person who can pick up ITV is the local coroner, who is given dispensation for a giant mast in the garden for his aerial, maybe because he spends his days with the dead.
Christopher goes for the TV option. I choose the beating. Just before bed I head downstairs in my dressing gown. I am scared but I want the anger over. Christopher waits, the thought of (another) beating unbearable. Mum and Dad are sitting in the living room by the anthracite fire. He has a garden cane beside him, a few cream crackers and cheese, a blue mug of Ovaltine. It is almost as though he is worried he will need a snack to replenish his strength. I am bent over his knee, my dressing gown has been removed. I think I am crying. I am hit once, maybe twice, but he doesn’t have the heart. After half an hour of Z-Cars, I return upstairs, triumphant but tear-stained. Christopher is angry I’ve almost escaped. I am furious the next day when his sentence is rescinded. There is no justice.
JULY 27. I had to leave the allotment yesterday; it was too hot to garden. I had contented myself with moving a few sunflowers and courgettes. I haven’t grown sunflowers for a while; the last were self-seeded. They grew like Jack and the Beanstalk, creating a shadowy canopy three metres tall. But I discovered seed in the bottom of my bag and I couldn’t control myself. I pick through radishes. They are big, round and red like kids’ lollipops but eat like crisp, mustardy apples. I cut lettuce for lunch and chard for weekday dinners, and gather a few multi-coloured handfuls of beans. It is too hot to work: days of mad dogs and Englishmen.
First thing Sunday morning, I am back. It’s cooler now so I lift the last of the calendula, tying a favoured yellow flower to the wigwam to save for seed. I weed through vegetable beds and train sweet peas. Mostly, though, this morning is about watering. I might not get back now for a couple of days so I soak everything in. The allotment site feels a bit abandoned. I miss seeing Mary.
1964. Being in the church choir is unavoidable for a village boy in Aveton Gifford. Only posh and ‘problem families’ are exempt. It is an infallible way to tell. Every week we pull cassock and surplice over our Sunday best and add our unbroken voices to the service. I faint once in the summer when the air is heavy, and come around to the sound of my feet drumming on the raised wooden floor. Wednesday evening is choir practice. There is sometimes a wedding on Saturday. Dudley never goes to church. Lilian goes twice a year: Easter and Mothering Sunday, when the church distributes the bunches of primroses we have gathered in the week. My favourite service is harvest festival. Hymns about ploughing fields, altar bread shaped like a sheath of corn, a table of fruit, vegetables, flowers and a few random tins of soup.
I don’t much like the vicar and he doesn’t like me. I don’t do sports, play cricket or football in the vicarage grounds like other boys, although Christopher excels at both. I prefer my own company, which the vicar doesn’t trust. One Wednesday evening, waiting for choir practice to start, I decide to stay outside in the sun. Christopher’s plan to blackmail me is undone a couple of days later by a knock on the door. The vicar and the village policeman (it seems bunking off village choir is close to a crime in the Sixties) stand there. Dad doesn’t invite them in. They think he should know, the vicar says. Perhaps bad blood will out. A priest and cop have come to our house. I have brought disgrace. I return to church and the choir, lesson learned. Back to singing solo, back to Advent weekend afternoons touring old people’s homes in brown-face and a beard and crown, a king in a Christmas carol. The vicar is probably right, I think. A rebellion has begun.
Muhammad Ali is our first hero, still called Cassius Clay when we listen to his fights on the radio (the wireless, as Dad always calls it). Christopher at first prefers Sonny Liston,