Wednesday, June 20th, 2012.
We’ve been in this house for almost a year now. Moved up from Blackburn last August. We love it here; it’s quiet and tranquil, and the neighbours are nice. Most of them are retired, right enough, so it’s Crumbly Hollow in one sense. But it’s all good. I have noted, though, how much retired folk – or, at least, these retired folk - love gardening. Any day when it isn’t actually pissing down, most of them are in the garden, pottering. More than two fair days in a row, and they’re out with the lawn-mowers. A fair week, and they’re mowing every second day. Forget putting-greens; you could play billiards on the lawns up here. It’s curious. You see, while I like looking at pretty flowers, that’s about the extent of my interest in gardening. I can’t imagine many occupations that would bore me more. Fortunately, for the appearance of Chez Nous, it is a pastime that Herself loves.
Interestingly enough though, it was my first job was in 1967. I was sixteen. I had a job in the Public Park as a gardener. My knowledge of Botany is on the sparse side. I can tell seaweed from a bag of sticks, but that’s about the extent of it. An honourable and venerable occupation, being a gardener – they say Adam was one – but when the rest of the world was turning on, tuning in and dropping out, I was prodding a hoe at flower-beds. Not to any great effect either, I have to say. I was all fingers and thumbs, and none of them green. My fellow gardeners, as I look back on that time from a distance of 45 years, line up in my memory like the cast of TV’s Dad’s Army, or maybe the Watchmen under Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado About Nothing – Hugh Oatcake, George Seacoal and that lot. Rakes, hoes and edging shears over their shoulders, they all seemed extremely ancient and doted, to the point of decrepitude, although some of them would be younger than I am now.
There was one gomerel called Bobby – or ‘Boa-beh’ – who was bald and had a nose like a tapir’s: long and wobbly. He spoke with a slow and gormless drawl, lengthening some vowels until you wanted to bang him on the sconce with a trowel and tell him to get on with it. He had a ‘thing’ about pictures of women in suspender belts and stockings and would, if at all encouraged, produce some from his pocket and wax lyrical about the delights of ‘that wee stretch a white thi-i-i-igh above the stockin’ taaaaap’ and decry as a blasphemy and a blight upon Western civilisation the advent of tights as the hosiery of choice for the young women of the day.
There was a weaselly looking man called Charlie Main, who smoked a pipe all day, no matter what task he was busy with and whom I never quite trusted. He never liked me from the first morning, when I asked him if he combined this job with being Holy Roman Emperor. He didn’t understand the joke, of course, but he knew I was taking the piss. He would not care for the proximity of the words ‘Holy’ and ‘Roman’ either, I suspect. He was a big-faced bastard, with a huge head that looked like it was made of papier-mâché for some carnival or other. In later years, he could have been a contestant on ‘It’s a Knockout’ without dressing up.
There was a man from Broxburn called Tam. I forget Tam’s second name, but he was one of the few I actually liked. He wore a waistcoat and corduroy trousers, a jacket and cloth cap, and great brown boots. He sported a little moustache and, below it, he was always smiling, usually at the stupidities of his fellow gardeners. Boa-beh brought in a photograph of himself as a young man one day – not in suspender belt and stockings, I am disappointed to relate, but in the finery of the Orange order.
“Aaaye,” he said deliberately, handing the snap to Tam, “that wis me when I was a young’er maaaaan. Yull see that I’m in the saaash an’ aw the regatta. Aaaaye, I wis big in the Ludge at waaaan time.”
“By the hang a yer balls,” considered Tam before handing it back, “I’d say ye were aboot twenty, there, Bobby.”
“Aye, weeeeell, ye’re no far wraaaang.”
It was like listening to a conversation in tree-time.
Then there was Sputnik. One of the many Poles who had come over here during the Second World War, he lived in Blackburn and had a name that consisted of all the letters of the alphabet twice, except the vowels. Nobody could even make a stab at pronouncing it, so they called him Sputnik. He was thin and wiry, with a gloomy Slavonic clock on him – he never smiled. And, when he spoke, it was in a gabbling, guttural voice, as if he was gargling with gravel. No-one knew if he was speaking Polish or speaking English with an accent so broad you could have parked a car on it. At piece-time, the men would read the papers and occasionally read out a choice featurette, commenting facetiously on it. Sometimes Sputnik would be moved to comment, too. We would all sit and listen respectfully, whilst he filled the air with lexical shrapnel. When we judged he’d stopped, Boa-beh would drawl “Aaaaye”, which fitted all occasions, and we went on with whatever we were doing.
The first time he actually addressed a comment directly to me, he was eating a beetroot sandwich and drinking scalding tea from a tin mug. I looked in his direction and became aware that he was making noises in his throat. At first, I thought he was choking on a chunk of beetroot, but when I realised that he wasn’t turning purple and was still breathing with ease, I guessed that he was saying something. Of course, I had no idea what it was. He might have been saying that Paderewski was a great politician as well as a great pianist. He might have been saying that he considered Conrad more of a Polish novelist than an English one. Or he might have been saying ‘You cannae beat a beetroot sandwich.’ When he stopped, I nodded slowly as if I were trying to think of a greater culinary treat than bread and beetroot and said, on a sigh, ‘Well …” as if that encapsulated it all. Whatever Sputnik had been saying, my reaction appeared to be the right one, because he nodded once, pointed at me and said – I think – ‘Bosta leeky danghy doo’. Then he tore into his piece again.
It was amongst this circus that I performed tasks of menial husbandry such as hoeing gravel paths, edging lawns and weeding flowerbeds. It was easy, light work, (I know now), in the open air and not in any way taxing. But it bored me rigid. I had no aptitude for it. I also know now that I have no aptitude for work of any kind. I like it not. I prefer to let the lave go by me, suck on the lotus, consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Work isn’t fun. That’s why they have two different words for them.
For many a long and sunny summer’s day that year, I found myself in various parts of the Public Park or, sometimes, on a squad cutting grass on municipal property in the town itself. I liked these days best, possibly because so much working time was lost travelling to and from the site by truck. Once there, we would lay out the equipment and light up a fag or two before we actually set about working. Then we would need a break. I would be sent to the nearest corner shop for cigarettes and snacks, Boa-beh always requiring ‘a boattle ae appull cruuuush’, his only tipple on such occasions. Off into the day I would wander, fetch the provisions and return to find Boa-beh had the sussies photos out again and was singing the praises of ten denier fishnets. “Yeh caaanae tell me thit tiiiights are as seeeexy as they, sir, noo, kin ye?’
That summer was also the only time I have ever been stung by a wasp. One day, Sputnik and I were in the thick clump of trees right at the top of the park, in the postage stamp corner, as it were, trying to thin out some of the undergrowth. It was a cushy number because the boss would have to be actually on the fringe of the trees before he could see in and catch us skiving, whereas we could see through the screen of foliage and keep a weather eye open for him. Sputnik and I were working together in companionable silence, occasionally stopping for a drag. Then, as I swung the sickle, I knew I’d caught something other than long grass. The air was instantly full of a humming cloud of seriously pissed-off wasps.
“Ozza dooby chugalug!” yelled Sputnik and dropped his rake.
“Eh?” I yelled back, not unreasonably.
“Neezy nazzy slobo zip!”
And he put his head down and charged out of the trees. Then I felt a sharp pain on my inner thigh. I yelped. I felt another insertion on my calf. I looked down. The buggers were crawling up my trouser leg. Terrified that I should end up with damaged goolies - one the size of a coconut and a great big one - I battered the locations where I was already bitten, to crush the stripey fuckers to death. Then, making an improvised garter of my two hands looped around my upper thigh to impede any further vespine progress towards my knackers, I staggered out of the thicket.
Sputnik was standing, flapping the air around his head with his bunnet. He looked at me as I emerged from the trees and said the single English word I ever understood him to say.
“Cunt, eh?”
You don’t get that kind of gardener up here.
Do spotykamy się ponownie.
