So far there are no ill effects, chez moi, from the volcanic ash or sulphur - whch I believe I did smell in the wind last evening - unless it was the Devil passing by! An asthmatic friend says her asthma is worse but there are so many trees and shrubs flowering now that it’s most likely to be them. Someone else said she thought the dust on the cars was ash - don’t think so myself. It’s very dry everywhere and the farmers are fine ploughing so clouds of soil are blowing across the roads. The dust on the cars is more likely to be that and the pollen from the trees in my opinion. The comment reminded me of our postman when I was a child and atomic bombs were being tested around the world. He swore one morning he had seen ‘fall-out’ on the blackberry bushes.
So well was I feeling today that I surprised myself by doing a little tidying up in the garden The combination of bending and wet earth usually has me floored, wheezing and groaning, very quickly, but not today. The time my daughter put in working to ease the pain in my back was worthwhile, unfortunately I think I’ve just undone all the good she did and will need another going over.
Whilst I was dragging out new weeds, grass, and dead stuff from last summer, I thought about gardens I have known and neglected over the years. It was a shock to me when I discovered my husband knew nothing whatsoever about gardening having lived all his life in apartments in Athens and London. Once this was clear we avoided gardens or, if strictly necessary, had someone in to keep it tidy.
I grew up in the country eating the wonderful fresh produce that my father grew, or from neighbours growing different crops and at a push, as a last resort, the the local farmers. Field peas were consider very inferior to the home-grown ones picked daily, podded and cooked straight away. I suppose we ate our share of DDT, the crop-saver of choice then, though I don’t remember ever seeing fields being sprayed. My grandmother was in charge of the flowers and shrubs which she grew mainly from cuttings she took surreptitiously from the posh gardens in the area when they were opened to the public. The last little house we lived in had a large, long garden with a beautiful walnut tree. She created a fine rockery and a shrubbery with help from my dad who did the digging and patiently shoved the little mower up and down the lawn in the summer. They had no help from either my mother or myself. I was given a patch to grow things in and chose Canterbury bells, nasturtiums, antirrhinums, wallflowers and radishes. I think the Canterbury bells grew quite nicely and wallflowers will survive almost anything, but I didn’t weed them much or water them, and the soil was heavy London clay so in hot weather it baked hard. I have always hated radishes anyway.
We had garden plots at school too in which we planted much the same assortment, along with onions and carrots. I really can’t remember if anything grew in mine.
My mother liked flower arranging. She was so good at it she actually earned money at it eventually. I think it was symptomatic of her troubled, nervy, melancholic nature to enjoy making these arrangements. It was the one area of her life in which she could feel some control. Dried flowers were particularly gratifying because the arrangements lasted so long. Toward the end of her life when she was very ill she had a nightmare in which she was trying to arrange her clothes tidily in a cupboard but I kept pulling them all out and messing everything up. Sorry Mum!
I had my opportunity to marry a farmer. The Young Farmer’s dances were one of the few social events of the year, apart from the weekly dances in the Town Hall in Maldon. I found the YF’s a dull lot who could only talk about fast cars, and though they were keen to take us girls for rides in their father’s cars they didn’t seem especially fast themselves. As an ‘early adopter’ of all things sexual I was a bit surprised and disappointed. Later when on teaching practice from college we were given our evening meals in Writtle Agricultural College. Though it might have been a welcome thrill at the end of the day to see a few boys I think we generally agreed they weren’t worth making any effort to get to know. I for one had become spoiled by the proximity of Cambridge and found high IQ’s more sexy. Now that farming is so chemical, and so little is left to nature, perhaps things have changed and the students are all top scientists.
