With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

Cover

Title Page

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About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Not having a hand free for a more dignified entrance, Osborne gave the swing door a mighty push with his foot, so that it boomed and echoed where it struck the wall beyond. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and shuffled awkwardly through the gap, sliding his back along the door to keep it open. He was distinctly overladen. From each wrist dangled various coloured string bags, bulging with parcels, fruit and scarves; and across his chest (as though to break an expected fall) he wore an old BOAC airline bag stuffed thick with dog-eared papers.

The subdued brown editorial offices of
Come Into the Garden,
though accustomed to having their peace-and-quiet vacuum broken by this weekly intrusion, gave a collective wince at Osborne’s rough approach. The sudden draught of air that sucked the venetian blinds away from the windows and plucked the last rusting leaves from the parched, spindly weeping figs was like a sharp exasperated huff of disapproval. Someone once said you should never trust a doctor whose office plants had died. For some reason this dictum came back to haunt Osborne each week when he made his entrance. By the same token, you see, perhaps you should not pay too much attention to a weekly gardening magazine which looks as though it has just received a visit from Agent Orange.

‘Ah,’ he said (by way of greeting) to Lillian, the editor’s secretary, but she made no reply. Her head thrown back at a tricky angle, Lillian was engrossed in savouring the last dregs of a cup-soup, tapping the vertical mug with a practised hand so that the last shards of soggy croûton came sliding and tumbling mouthwards, like rocks down a mountainside. Osborne knew from experience that there was no point expecting a response from Lillian while a single iota of monosodium glutamate remained at large. To judge from the distinctive aroma that hung like an iron curtain across the office, today’s flavour was celery.

‘Lillian?’ A phone was ringing, and Osborne wondered vaguely whether someone should answer it.

‘Lillian?’

‘Ngh,’ said Lillian, preoccupied with running her tongue around the inside of the mug.

‘Shall I answer this?’

‘Ngh, ngh,’ replied Lillian.

‘Right you are, then,’ said Osborne cheerfully, and left it to ring.

Heaping his string bags on a free desk, he felt strangely happy.
Come Into the Garden
had always felt a bit like home to Osborne, a shelter where he was welcome and beloved. As a regular contributor, blown in weekly from the cold, he felt tended, nurtured – like a special potted geranium brought indoors by a caring husbandman at the first sharp sting of autumn frost. What colour geranium? you might ask, if you were a gardening person. Well, Osborne was not dogmatic on the subject, but in his mind’s eye he leaned towards cerise. But the colour was largely immaterial. The point was that though he might be hibernating (professionally speaking) at
Come Into the Garden,
at least he was not in imminent danger of rusting, wilting, perishing, or being hoicked out and shredded for compost. And occasionally – to
push the geranium analogy to its furthest limit – a colleague with a kind heart and advanced ideas might even take the trouble to stop beside his desk and encourage him with a few kind words.

So every Wednesday Osborne came to the office to compose his time-honoured ‘Me and My Shed’ column and soak up the atmosphere. These pieces could equally well be written at home, really (in fact, the idea had been suggested to him more than once), but throughout his career he had always written in offices, from his early days as a staff reporter on a South Coast evening paper, and all through his time as a second-string drama critic in the sixties, so it was how he felt most comfortable. Physically, being a large, broad-shouldered person, he looked slightly out of place at an office desk, as if when he stood up he would tip it over. But Osborne merely felt cosy. He warmed to the very mottoes on the walls – ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’; ‘It is not spring until you can plant your foot upon twelve daisies’ – and thought of the parable of the seed on fertile ground. Also, not for the first time, he wondered whether anyone on the staff actually had a garden.

A man who has been buffeted by life needs a place where he can lay down his string bags. He needs a place where he can sit at an old Tipp-Ex-spattered Adler, treat himself to a free cup of tea, miss his deadline by hours, stand helpless at the photocopier until someone rescues him, fill his pockets at the stationery cupboard, and make hour-long surreptitious phone calls to old journo muckers in faraway foreign parts.
Come Into the Garden
was that place for Osborne.

Today, however, it seemed there was no one about. Osborne removed a few thick, dank layers of navy-blue outdoor garment (the month was November) and hung them on a coat stand, which promptly collapsed under the weight. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and ran his fingers through his short, grey hair. Where was everybody? He looked around for clues. A half-empty mail-sack
lay limp in the middle of Reception, but he was aware that little could be deduced from this. Lillian (who had now disappeared) famously claimed to have a medical problem with sorting the post, due to a rare neurotic-compulsive fear of envelopes. Such a condition was obviously unfortunate in a secretary (almost a disqualification, you might think), but there you were.

This unfortunate and improbable malady meant that post sorting was an all-day process, with a half-empty mail-sack permanently dumped on the floor as a kind of endless reproach, and most of the editorial staff sensibly steering well clear and simply learning never to depend too heavily on the prompt dispersal of correspondence. Lillian’s wont was to stoop and sigh over a heap of letters, laboriously examining each one with the aid of tongs, and stopping chance passers-by with
faux-naif
questions evidently calculated to drive them mad. ‘Look, this says “John Mainwaring, Editor”,’ she might say, waving the ironware in a wild, threatening manner, ‘but the editor’s name is
James
Mainwaring.’ Here she would pause to ascertain what reaction she was getting (usually uneasy silence). ‘What do you think? Shall I send it back, or pitch it in the bin?’ No one ever knew what to say to this sort of thing; after all, you don’t argue with mad people, especially when they are equipped to clock you with a pair of tongs. So Lillian got away with it, as she got away with everything else. And in between these bouts of petty tyranny, she would sit quietly at her desk, ignoring the phones, and give her full attention to the smoking of a cigarette – on the grounds, presumably, that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.

It seemed odd to be in the office on his own. Osborne was assailed by an understandable fear that he had forgotten an important appointment elsewhere – an appointment that his green-ink-fingered friends had evidently all remembered. Even the tireless sub-editors were missing from their work
stations, and Osborne marvelled when he peered into their little book-lined room and saw their four empty chairs – a sight, he realized, that few people other than night cleaners had ever previously witnessed. The fabric on one of the chairs turned out to be a jaunty rich tartan – but no wonder he had never suspected it, when a sub-editor’s drab, grey jumper and unkempt shirt (not to mention his drab, grey, unkempt body) had always blocked the view.

Like many writers, Osborne was afraid of sub-editors, the trouble being that they had a disarming habit of changing his prose automatically, without telling him. ‘Ah, the further musings of the giant intellect,’ the chief sub-editor might say, with gratuitous cruelty, as she took his copy each week; and then, the moment he had left the room, she fell on it savagely with a thick blue pen, taking out all the bits he was most proud of. In his more gloomy moments, he wondered why he bothered to write the piece in the first place, when the subsequent contribution of the sub-editor so often outweighed his own. He had been known to quote the lament of Macduff (‘What, all my little chicks?’) at the thought of his innocents, massacred. And you couldn’t blame him. ‘Not in my back yard’ he had once confidently typed in a piece about a politician, only to discover, a few days later, in the printed magazine, that it had been rewritten as ‘Not on my patio’, which was not quite the same.

In the stealthy, unnatural quiet of the sub-editors’ room, dictionaries and half-corrected proofs lay open on abandoned desks. Osborne tiptoed guiltily, like a schoolboy finding himself alone in an after-hours classroom when everyone has gone home. To stay his nerves, he helped himself to an Extra Strong Mint from a roll next to the chief sub-editor’s typewriter (careful not to disarrange her impressive selection of nail varnishes), and peered from an awkward position at the proof she had been correcting, which was covered in tiny blue
marks and explanatory notes circled with a feminine flourish. ‘
NOTE TO TYPESETTER
,’ he read, upside-down,

Osborne gulped in amazement at such erudition, which was an unfortunate thing to do. For the Extra Strong Mint promptly closed over his windpipe, like a manhole cover over an orifice in the road.

Thus it was that when the three subs re-entered the room in wordless single file a few moments later, they discovered their ‘Me and My Shed’ columnist bent double with a gun-metal litter-bin held to his face, making mysterious amplified strangling noises. Since nothing louder than the whisper of a nail file was usually to be heard in this room, they naturally flashed their specs in annoyance. However, having all received the statutory sub-editor’s training (involving, one suspects, the same kind of rigorous football-rattle personality testing undergone by the horses of riot police), they simply resumed their solemn work of skewering other people’s chicks with their thick blue pens.

‘Are you in difficulties,
mon cher?’
asked Michelle, the chief sub-editor, archly, adjusting an embroidered collar and seating herself carefully so as not to rumple her dirndl skirt. Osborne shook his head (and litter-bin) emphatically, to indicate that
any difficulties were of only passing significance. The sub-editors swapped glances (or did they signal Morse code with those specs?) and sighed. Osborne discharged the mint with a loud
ptang-yang
sound and fled red-faced from the room, and all was peace again.

It was quite some time before Osborne discovered the reason for the empty office; obviously, if he had asked a few questions, there and then, he might have been saved a lot of the palaver of the ensuing week. Unfortunately, however, he did not. The fact was, there had been a crisis meeting. The magazine had been sold to a new proprietor; a new editor had been mentioned, along with a rationalization of the staff. He did not yet know it, but a cold wind was blowing at
Come Into the Garden;
his shelter had been torn up and blown away, like so much matchwood.

However, since nobody had yet informed him of this, Osborne merely dragged his airline bag to his favourite corner, and from a safe distance waved hello again to Lillian. She was flicking through a mail order catalogue now, turning each page with a practised insouciant finger-technique not involving the thumb, while a motorbike messenger stood in front of her desk, waiting for her to look up. Above her head, Osborne noticed, there was a new sign. It said, ‘What did your last slave die of?’

He produced his notebook, flipped a few pages and attempted to compose his thoughts. Now, Osborne, old buddy, who have you got for us this week? He typed the words
ME AND MY SHED
at the top of a sheet of paper, and added a colon.

ME AND MY SHED:

A name ought to follow, but for some reason it failed to come. Osborne frowned. Every week he interviewed a famous person
about their shed –
Me and My Shed: Melvyn Bragg; Me and My Shed: Stirling Moss.
He had been doing it for years. In certain professional quarters people still raved about his
Me and My Shed: David Essex;
it was said that for anyone interested in the art of celebrity outhouse interviewing, it had represented the absolute ‘last word’. Osborne treasured this praise, while in general being modest about his job, deflecting the envy of non-journalists by saying merely that he had seen the insides of some classy sheds in his time. But today, despite remembering a bus journey to Highgate on Monday morning – despite, moreover, remembering the interior fittings of the shed in some considerable detail – it was only the classiness of the shed that stuck in his mind. He just could not put a classy face to it. The words

ME AND MY SHED:

looked up accusingly from the typewriter. Especially the colon on the end.

He flicked through his notes again, but they offered little help. After twelve years of writing ‘Me and My Shed’ he had come to the unsurprising conclusion that all sheds are alike in the dark. Even when the column’s remit had been extended, in the mid-1980s, to include greenhouses and any other temporary garden structures (such as the ivy-covered car-port), the interviews had always required a masterly touch to bring them alive. Here, for example, was a sample of this week’s notes:

Time was pressing, The official deadline was 2.30, and it was now a quarter past twelve. Osborne typed a few words, hoping
that the act of writing might jog his memory. He looked out of the window and tried to free-associate about Highgate, but curiously found himself thinking about Marmite sandwiches on a windswept beach, so gave it up. The experience of thirty years in journalism, a dozen of them in sheds, seemed to have deserted him.