How peculiar. Before, David had turned off the main road, walked up the potholed lane, climbed over a rickety stile, and tramped across the stubbled field to a wispy hedge composed of elder, beech, holly, and leggy roses. It was high summer, and he was hot and sticky. The hips had been mean, orangey, and blemished. But he’d picked them because he hadn’t spotted any others in the vicinity. What little juice they contained yielded a grudging jam. Four pinkish jars and a mound of sludge waste. Now, beside the neat gravel path that led to the allotments, he saw with astonishment a long stretch of plump red hips clustered in the dense greenery that bordered the overgrown hollows of the ancient monastic ponds. They’d been there all along and he hadn’t noticed their presence. Sometimes what is before our noses is invisible. He stopped to admire them, wondered whether to start picking them, reached out his fingers to touch their beckoning smoothness, then withdrew from their polished wood surface. For he thought of the hours needed for cleaning, simmering, and hanging the irritant brownish pulp in a muslin bag to leach the reddish liquor slowly into a bowl. He was also conscious of a deeper feeling, of damaging something quite so beautiful. By contrast rhubarb jam was easy. Elephant leaves flung into the compost, the occasional slug dislodged with a quick tap of its muscly mud crazed body against the drystone wall, some quick rough chopping, an hour of cooking in the preserving pan, the satisfaction of watching a sample drop form a rippled skin on a cold plate. Perhaps next year, he thought. Already there were over forty jars of jam in the kitchen cupboard, enough apple, medlar, and blackberry to last until the following summer. Make too much and some would go mouldy, although strangely the quince jam from two years ago was still as fresh as if he’d just bottled it.
The scent of early autumn cut through the summer heat: overripe fruitiness, sour vinegary rotting, dry dustiness, and musky undertones from badgers or foxes. Wasps buzzed around shrivelled blackberries, brown tinted the outermost hazelnut leaves, nettles stalked the lower tree branches with stinging resolve. David put his arm over the wooden gate to release the catch. Ahead, colours danced in the haze: marigold orange, lavender blue, artichoke purple. He walked over to the section he had been weeding the day before, the earth dark from leaf shadow and kitchen waste compost. As he squatted on his haunches, he felt as if he was lowering himself to another world, from upper brightness to chthonic mystery. With his hand fork he loosened the roots of serrated thistles, the tiny white bell flowers on the enchanter’s nightshade, the musty pink of red robin. For five years he had tended the allotment, relieving through digging the upset of an abruptly truncated career, so that the softened soil gave up these wild intrusions without a struggle. What he particularly liked was the sensation of pulling at the bladed stalks of couch grass, drawing gently on their whitish roots until they slid neatly from the fine tilth, the longer their lengths, the greater the satisfaction.
“I’ve taken a few photos of your plot,” Andy said. He was sitting opposite David at the cracked wooden table by the tool shed. Their cups of milky coffee sitting at either edge balanced the thermos on the middle plank. “A damselfly on the mallow flowers.” He swivelled his phone for David to look.
The turquoise body shimmered like enamelled jewellery at the centre of the gold radials. The picture belonged to May. All that was left of the plants were wrinkled leaves and tall seed pod stalks. He needed to clip everything back to the roots.
“You should send this to the Somerset Levels magazine,” David said. “It would make for a beautiful cover. Too many beaver and stout snouts otherwise. But I guess they look cute.”
“The photo’s not that good,” Andy said in a quiet voice, perhaps a check on hubris. He sounded mournful. His finger scrolled more photos, of a rusty chaffinch against the yellow of the rainbow chard, the red, white, and black of a greenfinch head engaged with the glossy dull pink of a worm.
David noticed how the grey of Andy’s beard followed his facial contours like the scrub on the surrounding hillsides. He and Andy often sat together to chat. The meetings weren’t arranged. But David went up to the allotment every morning to dig, and Andy went out every morning for a walk, and so a shared drink just happened without the awkwardness of a formal invitation. Maybe the link was their former jobs. For Andy the engineering company had gone bankrupt after the managing director had paid himself one too many bonuses. For David the school where he had worked as a classics teacher had deemed him lazy, complacent, and ready to clock off at three. They were too old to start again, too young to sit around. The land gave them solace, each in a different way, reassured them through its beauty, reminded them that everything in the end decays. The managing director and the headteacher would not be around for ever. And from the humus of their former jobs something good would no doubt grow. They sometimes talked about their respective pasts, reflecting on the happy moments, the manufacturing orders fulfilled, the exam grades achieved for progression to leading universities. Half finished sentences veiled the other moments, the breaking off acknowledged by the other’s murmured sounds, no need to voice the embarrassment of commiseration.
“I’ll be off,” Andy said. “Nice to chat. I thought I’d try to get to Crowcombe Episcopi today. Five miles on the path according to Google maps.”
David watched Andy’s stooped figure recede, open the gate at the far end of the field, cross the main road, and disappear into the dark woods on the opposite hillside. Then he shook out the metal cups and placed them with the thermos in his canvas shoulder bag. From the butt by the corner of the shed he filled two watering cans for the late season potatoes, carrots, and rocket. The jet from the narrow tap shot out in a vivacious rush. Spring of Bandusia, clearer than glass, meritorious of neat wine and flowers. Often the years of teaching Horace’s poetry came back to David. The students preferred Catullus’s jilted love lyrics. Or so he guessed from their responses. As he got older, a sort of barrier grew between him and them, his persona he imagined becoming for them too fatherly, then too grandfatherly. His mind wandered to Greek myth, the strange spirits that roamed the countryside, the hospitality of the peasants, the dangers that lurked in the quiet of woodland glades. Randy satyrs pounced on boys, beautiful nymphs dragged them to the bottom of their pools, angry gods turned them into stags to be torn apart by their own hunting dogs. For lunch David picked lettuce leaves, pulled up radishes, plucked rhubarb stalks. He’d have salad, homemade bread, and crumble with cream from the local dairy.
The following morning, David stopped to admire the hips again. Each was a ruby, topaz, and carnelian. He couldn’t understand how he’d missed such preciousness before. Contrasting with their brilliance was the black of clustered elderberries. While the hedges bordering the cow field through which he walked from his house had passed their time for harvesting, this stretch of path was holding to summer. The retired vicar who lived the other end of the village passed by. David couldn’t remember his name, but he remembered the erstwhile dog collar at the post office counter in the corner shop.
“You look as if you’re about to be busy,” he said.
“I’m wondering whether to pick,” David said. “I made rosehip jam last month. With hot toast and butter, it’s delicious for breakfast.”
“Stop it,” the retired vicar said laughing. “You’re making me hungry.” And he turned to carry on along the path.
At the allotment, David put down his canvas bag and trug next to the pallets that made up the compost heap and began working around the courgettes. Tiny nettles were appearing under the crisp roughness of the courgette leaves, the roots creeping from the overgrown adjacent allotment. Unlike with the couch grass, the yellowy nettle roots were fragile and couldn’t withstand too much pulling before they snapped. Lose that thread, as thin as Theseus’s in the labyrinth, and what remained would send up fresh green shoots as soon as it rained again. At eleven he spotted Andy making his way towards him along the narrow grass strip between the runner bean frames and cabbage fly netting tents.
David took off his gloves and put down his hard fork. “Coffee?” he asked. “I’ve made some shortbread too.”
“You’re too generous,” Andy said. “Don’t mind if I do.”
They settled on the bench. The sky was a uniform grey. September rain was in the air, but it was still July warm. They chatted about the roadworks in the village by the water company over the summer, the diversion signs that led nowhere, the profits that were sent overseas by the privatised utilities, the problems tourists faced if relying on their Satnav to get around. Suddenly a wide brimmed hat, a flap of pigtail, a waft of sharp body odour, a violent shaking of the bench.
“Mind if I join you? I’ll steer clear of the coffee though. Too many additives in it.”
Pete was an infrequent visitor to the allotments. He led a life on the edge of the law, pushing against its strictures, sometimes spending time behind bars for annoying the authorities too much. Tax to be paid when he wanted, not when it was demanded. If he received a demand for immediate payment, he tried to pay it in cash, the more coins the better to confound the buggers. Legal tender, he said, coin of the realm. You’re under arrest, the police said. David wondered why he continued this peculiar struggle. Andy regarded it as madness, although he only voiced that when Pete wasn’t there. After the hassle he had faced in his final two years as a teacher, when his physical and mental health had been upended, David wanted to avoid any excessive stress and so only listened.
“You know what,” Pete said. “You should get some copper tubes filled with crystals to put in the corners of your allotment. I’ve heard they keep away chemtrails from your plants.”
Government experiments. Elemental sylphs. Conspiracy theories. Pete wove them with a rich yarn. His narrative was detailed and lengthy. The internet had a lot to answer for.
“How’s your fight against the most recent summons?” Andy asked at last, changing the subject.
“Fuck the taxman,” Pete said. “Excuse my language, but what was the point of Magna Charta other than to make everyone free.”
“Fine if you were a baron,” Andy said. “The ordinary bloke didn’t get much of a look in.”
“I’m not worried about prison,” Pete said. “Someone’s got to make a stand against corporate tyranny.” And Pete and Andy were off, Pete ramming home long monologues, Andy parrying with brief asides.
David listened to the two arguing. It was like in staff meetings at school when a newly appointed head of department proposed something that was to improve results or behaviour or wellbeing. An extra five minutes on tutor time, ten minutes taken off homework each week, staggering the end of the school day, introducing more sophisticated technology. In his thirty-eight years as a teacher, he’d observed the same ideas reappearing in different guises. They never made a blind bit of difference. Except that some heads of department used what they’d supposedly achieved to promote themselves and move on to deputy headships. Statistics could prove almost anything.
After Andy and Pete had left, the allotments were deserted and quiet. David wondered why so few people came to dig. Their beds might be weedy, their courgettes swollen into marrows, but they didn’t show up. Perhaps life for them was too busy. Or they didn’t need to soothe their minds with trowels and hand forks and gardening gloves. His last headteacher. You need to grow a pair, she used to say. Won’t have wimps in the school who can’t face criticism. Well, he was growing things, but not in the way she meant. He thought how Pan was referred to as goat horned. Countryside and fertility and renewal. With sylphs and chemtrails, Pete was using modern mythology. However effectively empirical science explained the world, there was a human need for mystery and the occult. David stood up to stretch his back. He admired the soil he’d just weeded. One day he’d add his own molecules to such a patch. His grandfather had died at sixty-eight, his father at eighty-eight. He was sixty-four. The zone of probability was shrinking. It made what had gone on at school seem small and ridiculous.
David did not go up to the allotment for a couple of days. He was singing in the village choir and rehearsals for the annual concert had reached their finale. Fauré’s Requiem swirled and rippled and surged. It was simultaneously heavy and light, momentous and delicate. Apart from a few shaky moments, the result was almost professional. The accompanying musicians meshed seamlessly.
“Amazing,” Andy said by the vestry to David after the concert had ended. “For a small village we don’t do too badly. I hadn’t realised so many people were involved.”
Pete wasn’t there.
When David next walked up the gravel path, the hips were still there, even redder than he remembered. It was as if an artist’s brush kept working at them, adding oiled layers with each stroke, creating richer tones of shiny paint. They seemed out of place, too colourful for a misted morning, the hint of a parallel world. Miro, Picasso, Hockney. Not an Old Master. In ancient writers the human and the divine coexisted like two glass plates that did not quite coincide. Rough bark concealed smooth flesh, dark depths held spirit life, rocks were once human. Always in the corner of your eye there was the what if, the flit of horn, hoof, eye, and tail. Today the drizzle ruled out the bench. Instead, Andy stood for a while, his holed cardigan pricked with moisture, two drips collecting at the bottom of his beard.
“It’s the anniversary of my wife’s death today,” he said. “I moved here from Kent fourteen years ago to get away from my memories. But they follow you. Not as bad now as they once were.”
David listened to Andy talking about two family holidays far back. They were important to Andy, made meaning of his life, but they didn’t matter to anyone else. Maybe he was one of the few who still knew about what had happened to Andy on these occasions, the driving to Dover, the ferries to France, the camp sites around Normandy. When he’d been in the classroom, everything had been on him to direct the pace of the lessons, to manage the questions, to hold the attention of the students. On the allotment, by contrast, he stepped back. He might keep the ground clear of weeds, but he couldn’t hasten the germination of the seeds, make the potatoes swell faster, stop the snails from nibbling chunks from the Pak Choi leaves. He was no more in control of the growing than he was of Andy’s reminiscences. It happened because he was there to prepare the ground, but not because he instigated it.
“Have you spotted the rosehips by the path?” David asked.
“Can’t say I have,” Andy said. “When I was young my mother used to give me rosehip syrup. Something about getting enough vitamins. From all the sugar I got a hole in my tooth instead.”
“I don’t know why,” David said, “but they’re particularly beautiful. You could take a photo of them.”
For David the gravel path had become almost like a secret grove. It was paradoxically both public and private. Two glass plates, equally transparent, yet each very different. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there were numerous such places. There is in Haemonia, there is not far from Henna’s walls, there is in the land of the Cimmerians. Whenever David had been preparing the texts for the Latin exams, he had tingled at these place references, his expectation of impending denouement and transformation heightened. He doubted whether he had ever conveyed this thrill to the students. Maybe it wasn’t there, but merely his personal reaction.
“Thanks,” Andy said, “but all the same I’ll stick to insects. They give focus. The plants provide the backdrop.”
David didn’t say anything about his efforts at a photo earlier that morning. He’d tried from different angles with his phone, but on the screen the rosehips appeared dull, red dots randomly scattered with no framing or point of interest. To comprehend the other was impossible by ordinary means. In ancient mythology humans were punished for trying to do so. He watched Andy trudge up the hill. How carefully they each kept to their routine. At school the bell had rung their awful regularity, for lessons, breaks, lunches, end of the day. For months after he’d left, he’d mourned it, and so had constructed something similar out of silence, with the shift between allotment, cooking, reading, cycling, and singing in the choir demarcating the days in a similar way. How ever the engineering firm once functioned, Andy had also made a framework for time to creep around like curling ivy.
“That Pete, he’s an odd one,” Andy said. “I like his company. But he doesn’t half go on about weird things. I got caught by him yesterday outside the corner shop. Something about the dangers of the flu vaccine.”
As soon as he was on his own again, David cut around the allotment with his shears. To have sharp borders was aesthetically pleasing. When he’d finished, he admired the trim lines, grass, ditch, earth running as straight as the ramparts of a Roman fort. Like the imperial frontier, however, there was a blurred zone, the grass path that ran between each bed, a sort of client kingdom that acted as a buffer, especially against the twists of brambled nettles that covered the abandoned allotment next door. The choice was his whether to devote resources to these strips of land, to clip and clear, or leave until the occasional visit by the petrol mower.
“That Andy,” Pete said. He and David were standing by the compost heap. “I don’t think he understands the evil at the heart of government. When I tell him things, I can see from his face that he doesn’t believe me. We’re all fucking guinea pigs.”
David maintained the passive face he’d once reserved for interviewing students, open for disclosure, but closed to reaction. If he gave away too much of what he was thinking, the conversation would stall, and he would never discover what the problem was.
“This climate crisis. Nothing to do with bloody carbon fuels. It’s all the water extraction for drinking and irrigation. So much has been pumped out of the ground that the earth’s balance has shifted. Did you know that magnetic north moves each year? Keep tilting the globe and it stands to reason that the seasons are going to be changed.”
Behind Pete the hill sloped down to the village and the red tiles and grey stonework clustered around the pinnacle tower of the round arched church. David thought how the view would not have been much different in mediaeval times, except for the electricity pylons and the solar panels on an occasional roof. Clouds sagged like grey dishcloths on the dirty horizon. The air was tinted with orangey red. A weather warning had been posted for later that day.
“You probably think I’m off my head,” Pete said. “But we’ll know in a few years who’s right. You and I have had our lives. It’s the young I’m sorry for.”
David felt like a rustic in Ovid. Philemon and Baucis. The elderly couple who unwittingly entertained Jupiter and Mercury in disguise. Pete and Andy probably approached lots of people, although few would be prepared to listen to them and their stories of family woes and global catastrophe. When the weather was good enough to sit on the bench, he received them with coffee and shortbread. In the ancient tale, the gods had a smoked ham brought down from the rafters and fresh greens pulled from the garden. The story had been one his favourites. During his career it had appeared three times on the exam syllabus. Or was it four? Hospitality, kindness, an ear to listen, whatever the sobriety or craziness of the narrative. He glimpsed Pete briefly at the stile up the hill, his pale leather hat silhouetted against the dark yew, before he vanished into the field beyond. An hour, perhaps two, before the rain came. Time enough for some tidying up. The growing season was slowing. Tomatoes that would stay green however many shoots and leaves he stripped from the stems, rocket that was unlikely to fill many plates with peppery salad, coriander that was thinning in sympathy with the sun.
He rinsed the hand fork and trowel under the water butt tap until the stainless steel gleamed and the wooden handles shone. Andy was Silvanus. The bearded tutelary god of the countryside. Not wild like the Greek Pan, chasing after sex of any sort and causing rout, but respectably Roman, concerned with safety and boundaries, written law trouncing base instinct. But Pete, what was he? A wandering seer, perhaps, rather than a god, arriving in a town square to forecast doom and destruction. He’d be reviled and ridiculed, a prophesying Tiresias to a stubborn Pentheus, no king in their irrational anger wanting to listen. David recalled his production of Sophocles in the school hall – God, was it thirty years ago already? – and the increasing physicality in the scene between king Oedipus and the blind prophet. The boys who had played the parts would be in their forties now. He couldn’t remember their names. The stage, however, was still bright in his mind.
Through the gate, along the path, and into the grove. The leaves were turning, the hips were mottled, the light was glooming. The former magic had waned. David took hold of a hip, passed his fingertips over the knobbed surface, noted the pale centres of the brown indentations. No jam now from this crop. Soon they would all pass over the threshold of the year. Persephone was about to return to the underworld. Six eaten pomegranate seeds, six flowerless months, the darkness of Hades. A raindrop glistened on a leaf, translucent and cold, the hard paleness of diamond rather than the soft red of ruby. David realised he had tears in his eyes. The awkwardness of the final meeting with the head, the faint thanks for past exam results and willingness to engage in extracurricular activities, the hackneyed words about early retirement allowing for longer life. He missed the banter of the classroom, the collegiate veneer of the staffroom, the ephemerality of teenage argot. One moment he was legend, the next he was sick. He sniffed, ran the back of his hand over his face, told himself to pull himself together. Stupid really. To go on for ever was impossible. When once you’ve died, and Minos has pronounced his distinguished sentence on you, neither family background nor rhetorical skills nor good deeds can bring you back. He didn’t need Horace to tell him that, but the Latin was far more moving than his own mundane thoughts, and it reminded him that the years in the classroom had left him with a legacy of some sort. Birth, maturity, decay. It was the cycle of nature.
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Mark’s latest book, Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes for Modern Kitchens, is published by Serif and available here.
(Photo: Simon Flint/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Persephone’s Lesson by Mark Grant - November 16, 2023