The Lost Garden (3 page)

The best gardens are a perfect balance of order and chaos. The tension created by this constantly threatened balance is the pulse of the garden itself.

I have not worked in many gardens since my time at the Royal Horticultural Society. And since my observation of vegetable canker began a year ago I have not even seen much besides my ward of terminally ill parsnips. But I only have to open the door of the walled kitchen garden to know that this is a garden in complete chaos.

There is a cross of weeds, once a path, dividing the large expanse of ground into four equal parts. At one time this vegetable garden must have been organized around a classic four-year crop rotation. It could be that, under the weeds and bits of debris, the soil is still healthy. I kneel down at the edge of a bed, push my hands beneath a tangle of dead tree branches into the cool, moist earth.

All of today has felt unreal to me. Leaving the boarding house—which I can’t quite bring myself to call my home, though it is where I have lived for the past two years. Leaving the city I adore. The train journey down to the West Country. The news about Mrs. Woolf. The oddness of this place, where there is evidence of other people, but only that one rude girl named Jane to be found. None of it has seemed to belong to my experience of life at all. And now, for the first time today, with my hands full of rich, clotted earth, I actually feel attached to my life again.

I rub the dirt between my fingers. The red earth of Devon is thick and full of texture. I put a little on the tip of my tongue and taste the wormy, metallic tang of soil choked with nutrients. It will be fine. All will be fine. I tilt my head back to the sun and close my eyes. I have missed this, forgotten how much I love to be down on the ground among the living things, my hands plunged up to the wrists in the sweet, sticky earth. I am a gardener who has essentially been indoors for the past ten years. Where’s the sense in that?

There’s the cheerful song of a bird in a tree by the garden wall. When was the last time I heard a bird in London? Here, the war seems not to exist at all. It is too far west for the drone of bombers on their way over the Channel. Was there a world like this before the war? A quiet world. A slow garden.

Suddenly I can remember birds in Green Park, before the war, when I had walked down from my lodgings in Bloomsbury, on my way to work in Vincent Square. Birds in Green Park. Birds in Russell Square. Trees pooled in daffodils. I could thread myself through London moving from leafy square to leafy square.

There’s an old chicken coop and run against one of the garden walls. A small brick shed against another of the walls. The door is secured with a rusted padlock and the window too sheeted with grime to see through. It bears further examination, this building. There might be tools in its dark confines. I’ll have to return later with something to pry the lock off.

As I’m leaving the garden I meet another girl, hurrying past the wall towards the entrance of the quadrangle. She’s as big as Jane was small, has a strong, lumbering gait, and masses of curly hair that bounce with each huge stride. She looks a bit like a giant child, has her head down, doesn’t see me at all. I stand in her path and she very nearly knocks me over.

“Stop.” I put my hand out.

“Sorry.” She seems utterly surprised to see me.

“What is going on here?” I say. I take my hand away from her shoulder and see the smudge of dirt I’ve left on her cardigan. “I have come down from London to take charge of a group of agricultural workers, none of whom are meant to be here yet, and when I arrive it appears that all the girls are already here. But I can’t find anyone. What is going on?”

The big girl seems genuinely frightened by my outburst. She steps backwards. I step forward. She steps backwards again, and we proceed in a strange, halting dance along the path towards the garden. Finally she backs into the wall. “They’re all up at the house, ma’am.”

“What house?”

“The house full of Canadian soldiers.”

“And what are the girls doing there?”

“Visiting.”

“Visiting?” I can’t believe the nerve. “This is a war, not a Sunday outing,” I say, although with the sunshine and the bucolic fug of nature, it really does more closely resemble a Sunday picnic.

The big girl looks down at her shoes. So do I. They are huge shoes, man-size. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem to be anyone in charge.”

“Well, I’m in charge. And I’m here now. I want you to go back up to the house and tell the others to get down here. No more visiting. There’s work to be started. I will speak to everyone at dinner tonight.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The big girl sidles along the brick wall towards the quadrangle. This is the opposite direction from where I believe the house is.

“Where are you going?” I can’t believe, after her submissive attitude, she would so soon disobey me.

“To the house.”

“Isn’t the house that way?” I point past the garden, up the hill.

“There’s a shortcut behind the west wing. A path through the woods.”

“How long have you been here?” What if the Land Girls have been at Mosel for weeks? What chance will I have to ever gain control over them?

“Four days.”

“And you already know a shortcut to the house?” This is all much worse than I had thought. The girls have probably moved in with the soldiers.

“I’m local.” The big girl looks at me with a small flash of confidence. “My father used to work here. In the gardens. I know this place.”

This is a stroke of good fortune. Deciphering the garden will be easier if there is someone who is familiar with it to help me.

“Is your father still alive?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And does he live nearby?”

“In the village.” The big girl thinks I’m on the track of something else. “I could stay there, ma’am, I know that, but I’ve never had a chance to be away from home before. And to stay at Mosel is so exciting.”

I could remind her that we’re staying in what were probably the servants’ quarters, and that staying on an estate such as this only truly counts if one is living in the main house, but there is no point being deliberately cruel. I need this girl. She will prove useful.

“Of course, you can continue to stay here,” I say. “Just go and fetch the others from the house. I’ll see you all at dinner.”

I have been touched three times in my life. Intentionally touched. Firstly by my mother, although I don’t remember much affection when I was small and certainly none after I was sent away to school. The second instance was at boarding school. It involved a fellow student. I was fourteen years old. The third time of purposeful physical contact was with Mr. Gregory, under the makeshift bomb shelter of the dining-room table at Mrs. Royce’s London boarding house.

One’s first experience of love is either love received or love denied, and against that experience all our future desires and expectations are measured.

My mother touched me on the head. She said, “At least you have beautiful hair.” She rubbed my chest with liniment. My mother held my hand one year when I was afraid of the bull in the back field, and wouldn’t hold it the following year, even though I was still afraid. She wiped the crumbs from my lips. “Learn to cover your mouth,” she said. Once she brushed the rain from my forehead. She spanked me. She pulled my arm too hard trying to make me keep up with her. She slapped my hand away from the cakes at tea. She dressed me. She undressed me. She soaped me in the bath, rubbed my scalp fiercely when washing it, clipped my toenails impatiently with rusty scissors. The last time I saw her, when she was small and sick and dying in the hospital, she held my head in her bony, shaky hands and said, “At least you are useful.”

My school friend was called Anna. Every night for one whole month when we were fourteen she slipped out of her bed after there was “lights out” in the dormitory, and slipped into mine. It was January. I never knew if our temporary intimacy was due to the fact that it was an unusually cold winter, or if it was motivated by some other desire that I was afraid to want, but wanted anyway. Every night Anna would lift the covers of my narrow bed and snuggle in behind me. She would nuzzle under my hair and kiss the back of my neck. Her nose was as cold as a dog’s. She would lie on her right arm and drape her left around my waist. Once I held her hand, held it tight against my stomach. Once she said my name out loud, like a promise. Then, just as I had become used to the nightly ritual, it ended. Anna stayed in her own bed and left me in mine. Perhaps she had been cautioned by a teacher, or perhaps she simply tired of me. I was never brave enough to ask.

Mr. Gregory always saved me a spot next to him on the hard wooden floor of the dining room. At night, with the blackout curtains drawn tight to the windows, the room was as dark as the inside of the earth. Mr. Gregory licked my ear, mistaking it, I think, for my mouth. He rubbed my knee with a sweaty hand. He cleared his throat, seemed just about to say something of significance, but never said it. Once he did say, “Sorry,” but this might have been because he rubbed Mrs. Royce’s knee instead of mine and realized, too late, that her lumpy cartilage didn’t feel familiar under his hand. Mr. Gregory burrowed up against me only in the dark, a sticky, sweaty nocturnal creature with nervous, moist, blind desires.

No one has ever said that they love me. Well, only my mother, but it was a defensive statement in response to my accusation that she didn’t. “Of course I love you,” she had said. “I look after you, don’t I?”

It is almost time for dinner and I am afraid to go. I have never been good at dealing with people. I much prefer to work alone. This position at Mosel had seemed possible because I was to have arrived well ahead of the Land Girls and I would be much older and more experienced than they were. The combination of these factors would ensure my authority without my having to prove or test it. But all has gone badly awry because the girls have arrived here well before me and so this place rightfully belongs to them. I am the intruder. For me to march into the dining room tonight and take charge will surely engender their immediate dislike of me, and perhaps even their unwillingness to follow any instruction at all. They have had a few days of complete freedom, have formed God-knows-what kinds of alliances with the soldiers. How can I possibly get them on my side now?

I liked my job at the Royal Horticultural Society because I had such autonomy. It was just me and the parsnips locked in deathly combat in my narrow little office on the ground floor at the back of the building near to where the dustbins were kept. On summer days, with my window open, I could smell the rubbish quite strongly, often mistaking it for the odours of my parsnip specimens. But I was left alone there. I did not have to fuss with people, only parsnips.

I almost didn’t apply for this position with the Women’s Land Army. A letter had circulated through the Royal Horticultural Society from the WLA head office and had, at some point, crossed my desk. The letter asked for volunteers who had knowledge of agricultural production and horticulture to supervise the growing of food for the war effort. Postings could be anywhere in arable Britain. The letter coincided with the “Dig for Victory” campaign, where citizens were requested to transform their flower gardens into plots for growing potatoes. There were posters all around London, and I found the slogan mildly annoying as it left out many steps of the process of growing and harvesting vegetables. I also didn’t approve of the illustration that accompanied the phrase “Dig for Victory.” A booted foot pushing a spade blade into the earth. The whole approach seemed much more to do with the war than gardening. But then everything connected with the war had become necessarily tainted by it. Everything connected with the war had become the war itself.

Every step I take across the quadrangle, every step that takes me closer to the dining hall, fills me with a heavy despair. I never wanted to be in charge of a group of girls. I am no good at this sort of thing. I just wanted to be out of London before it was bombed beyond recognition. I wanted to escape the inevitable decline of my parsnip specimens.

I can hear the girls giggling as I climb the wide stone steps up into the dining hall. There is nothing to be done but to face this. I take a deep breath and push open the studded oak door to the room.

Heavy blackout curtains are pulled across the windows where I had stood earlier, looking down into the gardens. The girls are sitting at one long table in front of the fireplace. They are completely silent as I enter the room, cross the floor towards them.

There are seven of them, including Jane. They all seem as young as the big girl I met outside the garden this afternoon. Jane is the only one of them who seems older than twenty, and she is certainly no more than twenty-five. There is an empty chair beside her at the head of the table and I slide into it. No one speaks. The heavy curtains at the windows muffle any sound from outdoors. There’s the small, shifting noise of something trickling down the chimney.

Jane looks at me with what might be sympathy or pity. “Girls,” she says. “Meet Gwen Davis. From the Horticultural Society.” She draws out the last two words for my benefit. Her mockery makes me flinch.

“Hello,” I say to the table of impassive faces. “It’s good to meet you.”

The girls regard me suspiciously.

“Don’t mind them,” says Jane. “They’ve taken a vow of hostility. It’s something to do in the evenings.”

This brings a smile to several of the faces. I realize, from Jane’s position at the head of the table and from her easy manner, that she has had unofficial charge of the girls. She is the natural leader of this little group.

I want to say something to her to indicate my acknowledgement of this observation, but I can’t find the right words. To the girls at the table I say, “There seems to have been a mix-up. You were meant to arrive after I got here.”

No response from the girls. There’s the noise of someone scuffing her shoes on the piece of floor under her chair.

The sooner I can get this over with the better. “Anyway, I’m here now,” I say needlessly, but I am so overcome with nerves that I feel completely muddled and don’t know where to start. I am not very good with groups. Something I should have thought about, really, before volunteering for this job.

“I’ll brief you, shall I?” says Jane. She touches my arm lightly, to stop me from saying anything further. “In your much regretted absence,” she says, “the county rep was by. Her name is Mrs. Billings. She dropped off our uniforms, which include, I must add, a very unfortunate sort of hat. I have your allotment of clothes. I’ll give them to you after supper.” As if on cue, the dining-hall doors open and two women enter carrying plates of food. The big girl giggles. Jane is unfazed. “Supper,” she says. “These lovely women have been hired from the village to cook our evening meal for us.” She waves a hand theatrically in their direction. “Mabel,” she says, as the elder of the women places a plate of what looks like animal swill before one of the girls. “Irene,” she says, as the other woman performs the same task. Both of the women look up and smile in a kind of alarmed embarrassment. “We’re on our own for breakfast and lunch,” Jane says to me.

“What about money?” I say.

“I’ll show you the coffers.” Jane grimaces as her plate of food is placed in front of her. “There’s money from the War Agricultural Committee.” She pokes at the lump of grey gristle floating in watery gravy on her plate. “There’s also money from the people who own this estate, to pay for the upkeep of the animals.”

“Animals? What animals?” There was no mention to me of there being any animals to look after at Mosel.

“Some cows. Two horses.” Jane puts her knife and fork down without eating any of her food. “That’s what I’ve decided to do here. Tend the animals.” There is no room in her voice for disagreement. Nor would I try. It is obvious that Jane is much more of a commanding presence than I am. She knows how to lead effortlessly. These girls are not going to be swayed by my horticultural knowledge alone. If I am to have any chance with them, if I am to gain their obedience and trust, I must lead with a light hand. Perhaps the best way to lead is to not appear to be leading at all.

I wait until all the girls have their plates of supper and Mabel and Irene have left the dining hall. “I only have a few words to add,” I say. “Please, go ahead and eat while I talk.” I am desperate now to cooperate with them in whatever way is possible to make this situation more bearable. “As you know, we are here to work the garden, and to use some of the surrounding land for potatoes. We’re all here to pitch in with the hoe.” I have forgotten the exact words but I am referring to the official Land Army song, which tries to make up for our lack of weaponry by glorifying the hoe.

No one responds to my attempt at humour. All the girls stare at me fixedly, their hands holding their cutlery raised above their food in suspended animation. I look at the big girl. “What’s your name?”

“Doris.”

“Is anyone besides Doris local?” I ask.

No one responds. Finally Jane says, “They’re mostly from London.”

“All right, then,” I say. “Tomorrow after breakfast we’ll meet in the walled kitchen garden. I will outline the work detail and Doris will be in charge of it.”

“I will?” Doris looks at me in horror.

“You will. That’s all until then. Obviously, you’ve managed well enough before I arrived. I’ll leave you to your own devices this evening. But please, no leaving the grounds. No visiting the soldiers who are billeted at the house.” I load some of what I’m guessing is mutton stew onto my fork, and the girls follow my example and start eating. Soon they are talking among themselves, ignoring me completely. Only Doris pays any attention to my presence, keeps shooting me little looks of panic.

Jane has pushed away her full plate of food. She watches me eat my supper. “Interesting tactic,” she says, in a voice meant only for me to hear. “Separating the potatoes from the potatoes.”