allotments – derrickjknight

The Prize Pumpkin

Jackie drove me to and from New Milton for my trip for lunch with Norman.
The trains to Waterloo are very cramped. Space has been designed to accommodate people of, at best, average height and girth. Opposite me in a cluster of four seats without a dividing table, a young woman squeezed her legs around a huge piece of airline hold baggage which was wedged against the seat alongside mine, ensuring that no-one would be able to occupy it. There was room for her luggage neither in the overhead racks, nor in the corridors. When she invited me to use her hard-cased pink carrier as a perch for my coffee I remarked that it was impossible to imagine that this line served an airport. She replied that she was travelling all the way to London and was going to work. She said she had been informed at the ticket office that this was a commuter train, and people using the airport, with the consequent large baggage holders, should not be availing themselves of it. Our conversation took place while the stationary train was loading and unloading passengers at Southampton Airport (Parkway) station. I have, in the past, used these same trains on my journeys from London to the airport.
Taking my usual route from Waterloo, and passing Tenterton Gardens allotments on my way from Preston Road to Norman’s, I watched a gentleman tending a rather splendid array of pumpkins. This reminded me of the teenaged Matthew who lovingly nurtured an enormous example of these in his allotment at Cottenham Park in the early 1980s. One morning our son was devastated to find that his prize exhibit had been stolen by intruders overnight. These North London gardeners’ plots are enclosed within a vast and lofty strong metal cage, and can only be entered by use of a key. Would that Mat’s more established facility had been similarly protected.
I have mentioned allotments on several occasions now. Today, for the benefit of those not familiar with the term as used by gardeners, I reproduce the following explanation from Wikipedia:
‘An allotment garden (British English), often called simply an allotment, or a community garden (North America) is a plot of land made available for individual, non-commercial gardening or growing food plants. Such plots are formed by subdividing a piece of land into a few or up to several hundreds of land parcels that are assigned to individuals or families. Such parcels are cultivated individually, contrary to other community garden types where the entire area is tended collectively by a group of people. In countries that do not use the term allotment (garden), a community garden can refer to individual small garden plots as well as to a single, large piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people. The term victory garden is also still sometimes used, especially when a community garden dates back to World War II or I. [This comes from the slogan ‘Digging for Victory’ which encouraged people to grow their own food]
The individual size of a parcel generally ranges between 50 and 400 square metres, and often the plots include a shed for tools and shelter. The individual gardeners are usually organised in an allotment association, which leases or is granted the land from an owner who may be a public, private or ecclesiastical entity, and who usually stipulates that it be only used for gardening (i.e. growing vegetables, fruits and flowers), but not for residential purposes (this is usually also required by zoning laws). The gardeners have to pay a small membership fee to the association, and have to abide by the corresponding constitution and by-laws. However, the membership entitles them to certain democratic rights.’

Norman produced a roast chicken meal with crisp roast potatoes, tomatoes, and spinach in a cheese sauce, followed by blackberry and apple pie and custard. We shared a bottle of Reserve de Tugets 2010.

Jackie had not been idle in my absence. At the entrance to the back drive she had planted a row of flowers on the bank between the brushwood and the gate on one side, and carried out some heavy pruning on the other.

Yaw

Having just passed through London Minstead this morning on the way to Southampton for my usual journey to Waterloo, we learned the true meaning of New Forest animals having no road sense, and a contributory factor to so many fatalities.
Fortunately Jackie, as usual, was driving slowly down this winding lane. In a flash, almost alongside the car, two ponies burst through the wayside gorse, scrambled awkwardly up a ditch, and staggered forward. As my driver, crying the warning, ‘No, no’, made an emergency stop, one of these creatures swerved and continued along the side of the vehicle. The other, practically touching the bonnet, without a sideways glance, tottered across the road in front of us. Anyone travelling a bit faster and not anticipating the reckless progress of the animal would most certainly have hit it.
This incident put me in mind of Gerhard, known as Garry, a temporary colleague in Mobil Shipping Company where I worked in a building appropriately named The Pill Box from 1963 -1966. Linking the central island on which this stood with the rear entrance of Waterloo Station was a zebra crossing. From my office window I once watched this high flying international management trainee, without warning, march across this pedestrian access bringing an approaching vehicle to a skidding halt. When I suggested to him that this might not be the most sensible way to use the crossing and that he might end up in the nearby St Thomas’s hospital, he replied: ‘Well, it would be his fault’. There wasn’t really any answer to that.
From Waterloo I took the same tube journey as last time to Preston Road, where the underground trains get to come up for air. From there I walked to Norman’s new home. This took me through the John Billam Sports Ground, which could have graced many a London suburb of its period.
One corner contains well-tended allotments which bore evidence of recent rotavation. A solitary jogger ran several laps of the perimeter, and I had a pleasant conversation with a young man who was honing his football skills in what I took to be a five-a-side enclosure. This was Yaw. It was good to meet him and shake his hand. He seemed to have tireless energy, but perhaps he appreciated the brief interlude my interruption had afforded him.
Norman fed us on shoulder of pork with flavoursome savoury rice, kale, and green beans, followed by blackberry and apple latticed flan. We shared a bottle of 2010 Chianti riserva.
I then travelled by Metropolitan, Jubilee, and Victoria lines to Victoria for a visit to Carol.
As I slid my left palm along a metal handrail in Victoria station my fingers momentarily adhered to a glutinous gobbet of gum on its underside.
After my normal journey back to Southampton Jackie met me and drove me home.
In case anyone, having read my last two posts, is wondering, I am still waiting for Penyards’ manager to ‘get back to me’.

‘Bound For [Western] Australia’

8th October 2013

It was too late, and I was too tired, to post this entry on our return from Clutton yesterday, so I am doing it this morning.

Puddingstone Cottage in Clutton in Somerset is the home of our friends Ali and Steve. This is where Sam, Holly, Malachi, and Orlaith are spending a few days house and dog sitting before making their last farewells in England. Jackie and I arrived a couple of hours before Ali and Steve set off to visit their son James in Ukraine.

Next Tuesday my son and his family board a plane for Perth, where they will begin their life in Australia, starting at the home of Holly’s delightful parents.

Given that the children have spent their last six months living on a boat in the Mediterranean, I was not surprised that Orlaith wasn’t sure about me, but I was delighted at Malachi’s greeting. Stretched out on the sofa, he was so engrossed in the TV that he didn’t hear our arrival. I gently scratched the crown of his head; he gave an excited cry of ‘Grandpa’; leapt to his feet and wrapped all four of his tentacles around me; said ‘I’m just watching ‘The Rhymer’; and resumed his position. Fair enough, really. He soon climbed on to my lap to give me the pleasure of watching it with him, before giving Jackie a similar opportunity. He was, however, most displeased with her for not bringing her laptop on which he has enjoyed playing games.

Orlaith did us the honour of standing unaided for the first time in our presence. She scampers around everywhere, and demonstrated a skill in climbing that possibly will rival her brother’s, as she clambered up his armchair in an endeavour to steal his chocolate biscuit.

Malachi impressed me with his reading, then we did some jigsaw puzzles. Whilst Sam drove Ali and Steve to the railway station the plan was that Jackie and I should take Malachi to the children’s playground, down a footpath to the side of the house and past Clutton Primary School. Because of a certain confusion about left and right in Sam’s directions, it was a good thing that Malachi knew the way. We passed the school just at the time the children were all being released to their parents. A school crossing keeper held up the traffic for us and many other parental figures, some of whom pushed the next generation of pupils in buggies. Our next marker was what had been correctly described as a path that looked like someone’s drive, leading past well tended allotments with a country church in the distance. Then we were in business.

Rain drizzled down all the time, but we enjoyed ourselves anyway, and my grandson had a dry pair of trousers at home. It only took one trip on the slide to demonstrate that he would need them. Steve’s waterproof jacket was a bit tight for me, so I left off my own casual one.

There are several entertaining structures on which to climb. One takes the form of a boat. Malachi, of course, knows all about steering and turning the motor on and off. He recognised the galley stove on which he cooked some stones and bark chippings. Unfortunately, my pleas that I was too big to enter the craft cut no ice. I was forced to get up there. It was in fact more difficult to disembark because I had to turn around to apply my feet to the metallic steps.

Another climbing frame takes the form of a large wooden arachnid. It was this that was responsible for metamorphosing me into a monster, for it gave Malachi the bright idea that I should pretend to be one. So, all the way back to the house, as a cross between Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and Geoffrey Rush’s Davy Jones, I stumbled along, breathing like blasts from a pair of bellows, and waving my own tentacles about. Sometimes Mal would hide behind Jackie and I would have to pretend to look for him. At one point this charade took place alongside a garden in which an elderly woman was working. There was nothing for it but to ask her in monster speak if she had seen a little boy. Fortunately she had her back to me and appeared hard of hearing. I didn’t persist. A variation on the game gave me minimal respite. Malachi, by shooting me with his snorkel was able to transform me from monster to Grandpa and vice versa at the squeeze of a trigger. Back at the house, Holly informed me that Malachi’s maternal grandfather had always played the monster. Mick O’Neill, you have a lot to answer for.

Between them, Holly and Sam produced a flavoursome fish pie followed by cheese and biscuits and fruit cake. Before this, we had a game of cards, in which Orlaith insisted on joining.

There was an hiatus before cheese whilst bedtime duties were carried out. Sam ingratiatingly sidled out of the bedtime story by informing his son that I would be very good at it. Now, as a grandparent, you can never be exactly sure about parents’ discipline and routines. So, it wasn’t until my shoulders began to ache a little, that I came to the conclusion that it was less than reasonable to be expected to read a précis version of ‘The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe’ with a four-year-old perched upon them, his legs joined around your windpipe, and his feet pummelling your sternum. I had to get a bit stern. When I had finished it was Mal’s turn to read to me. He does this very well, but has a penchant for deliberately changing the order of the words. Have we, I wondered, a budding Mordred here?

The four adults had a relaxed couple of hours before Jackie drove me back to Minstead.

It was the 1961 Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem version of ‘Bound For South Australia’, that reverberated in my ears this morning. The Pogues have covered it more recently. Sam and Holly and their family are not going by boat, and Perth is not quite the destination of the shanty song, but perhaps the rousing refrain is pertinent.