In the Garden

Once, long ago I had the privilege, pleasure and character building fortune, to spend a year of afternoons working in walled kitchen garden beside a country house in warwickshire. The house was first built in the 1600s and rebuilt in 1830 and set in a large estate with rolling parkland. In the Civil War, I am told, a force of five thousand Royalist troops paused there before being pushed away by a superior Parliamentarian force and eventually re-grouped to join the king at Coventry. The king was pushed toward Oxford and Coventry became the parliament headquarters in the Midlands. Royalist prisoners were ostracised by the the townsfolk, hence the saying " sent to Coventry."

I first came upon it early in the October of 61 when the espalier apples and pears which walled the inner beds were in full fruit. At that particular moment it was a place of peace and quiet to walk, think and apprehend the coming experience, no sign of Roundhead skirmishes then.

I arrived for duty on Monday afternoon and was allotted my task. I was to be a digger. I was given a spade with the shiny patina of many years of slice and scrunch and it was to be kept like that. It was to be washed and oiled after each use, then inspected once it had been hung in its place on the rack. The rack was in the shed in the the north east corner with a stand pipe tap outside ( for washing tools ?) and a fig tree around its door. Along the adjacent south facing wall were the fan trained peach trees. It was this area with its long two and half yard wide bed which had to be double dug, by me, before the winter frosts which would break it down into a manageable tilth.

Many hours later and with bowed back and blistered palms I had dug a ten yard stretch. Then came the inspection " Dig it again and get it level this time."
Nobody had mentioned the word "level" to me. After a second careful digging, my work was again judged " Not quite level"
"Try once more and we'll make a digger on you yet."
" It won't need frost to break it up. I have done it already!"
"No but the next stretch will."
And so with straightened back and shiny palms I continued to skim the surface and turn the sod. I turned many a sod in my time there but my final supreme skill was to dig a conical bed around a centre statue ready for the bedding plants in the front of the East elevation of this, once Jacobean, now Victorian, country house. The result was judged acceptable.

The inspector general was the head gardener, Syd Hyatt. Syd was a short and stocky Warwickshire man with broad hands and a flat cap, never to be removed except to accompany a thoughtful scratch. " My ol da oftentimes wore his to bed, no more reason than he was absent minded. Mind you it used to smell a bit if he ad been out muck spreadin." His cottage, shared with his wife was round by the fruit store with a rope of dead magpies and crows on a line strung between two trees. The fruit store was a long shed with openings at both ends to let a draught through and the apples and pears were gently laid on slats so that the air could circulate around them.

The kitchen garden itself had sections for different vegetables and fruits. I tended to stay in my own quarter although I did earth up some celery in one of the enclosed beds. Just close by was the asparagus in fern. "This asparagus bed is nearly a hundred years old." I also remember the espalier prunings used as support canes and markers in the spring . Along the wall of the bed I dug at first were the fan trained peaches, which I mentioned before, though I never saw one ripe as I was not there for the midsummer ripening. One feature I will always remember was the Mulberry tree. The grass below was left to grow long so that when the tree was shaken vigorously the fruit would fall gently into the long grass and would remain unbruised. It was a very large tree. The only one of such a size I have ever seen was in the courtyard of William Wilberforce's house in Hull.

In later years I visited the house to find the parkland under wheat, the house gone in a fire, when it was sold and used as a country club. Two walls of the kitchen garden remained. The garden itself was grassed over, the stores all gone, though the cottage still remained. It does probably remain in the memory of the many men who worked there over the years and so it should. If not the pleasure of a task well done, surely the agony of weeding gravel paths on frosty November afternoons with frozen fingers, then they must certainly be remembered. And finally there was the vision of the hunt galloping across the winter parkland in the pink and at full cry.

In my memory and in my mind’s eye I have it still.

JL May 5th 2011 10:59