plastic garden furniture Mum had picked up in town for next to nothing. At the weekends we spent hours pottering about in the garden. We mowed the lawn – which was no small task since the gardens ran to nearly three acres and we’d allowed the grass to grow longer than it ever had under the iron reign of Mr Jenkins. I went back and forth dumping bins filled with cut grass onto the sweating compost heap at the back of the garden, remembering with a smirk how Mr Jenkins had presented the slimy pile to us with all the glowing pride of a proud parent.
Mum got very excited about the vegetable patch and the idea of cooking vegetables that she’d grown in her very own garden. She wanted to grow even more vegetables than Mr Jenkins had planted, and she also wanted to grow herbs like rosemary and thyme to flavour her cooking. Since there wasn’t enough room in the existing plot, she decided to extend the vegetable patch back towards the cypress trees. So one Saturday morning, after a trip into town to buy shovels and a pitchfork, we set to work, turning over an area the size of two double beds until it was a rich brown porridge. We threw ourselves into the work with a will, glad to be doing something physical for a change, but we had no idea how exhausting we’d find it. When we woke up the next morning we could hardly move – even picking up the kettle hurt, while walking up or down the stairs was agony.
In our silly moods, we played croquet on the front lawn or stretched a net between the fruit trees and played badminton. Mum, who was tall and rather gawky, was terrible at sports, and when she missed the hoop from just a few inches away, or swiped wildly at the spiralling shuttlecock and hit nothing but air, we would both collapse, helpless with laughter.
It was so good to live in the country, and not to have any neighbours for miles around. You could talk, laugh, shout – scream even – at the top of your voice, and no one could hear you. It was such a change from the matrimonial home , where you always felt self-conscious when you went into the garden because it was overlooked on all sides, and where you had to whisper so that the neighbours – whose shapes you could see moving behind the bushes – wouldn’t hear you.
In the evenings we played duets together in the lounge, something we seemed to have got out of the habit of doing since Dad had left. We had lots of music for flute and piano and one day, idly looking through them, I’d found one called Russian Folk Songs we’d never even opened. This became our absolute favourite and we worked our way through the entire book that March. The flute parts were catchy and quite easy to play, while the piano parts were tricky and tested even Mum occasionally. They were the sorts of tune that got stuck in your head and we’d both be whistling and humming them the next day. If I made a particularly horrendous mistake, we’d both get the giggles so badly it would take us half an hour just to work our way through a few bars. I really enjoyed these duets, and I was enjoying playing the flute – which I’d given up and started again countless times – more than I ever had.
I would look at Mum sometimes as she stood on tiptoe struggling to free the shuttlecock from the branches of a cherry tree, or pulled a comic face as I sent her croquet ball bouncing away down the garden, and feel overcome with love for her. With her tall, awkward body, her large hands that she never seemed to know what to do with, her dark, frizzy hair no amount of combing could tame, she looked so . . . so vulnerable that I’d just have to run over and throw my arms around her and hug her as hard as I could.
I knew money was tight, so when Mum started trying to find out what I wanted for my sixteenth birthday I just gave her a short list of books. When she asked incredulously if that was really all I wanted, I said, yes, that I had everything I could possibly want.
This wasn’t exactly true,
Mum got very excited about the vegetable patch and the idea of cooking vegetables that she’d grown in her very own garden. She wanted to grow even more vegetables than Mr Jenkins had planted, and she also wanted to grow herbs like rosemary and thyme to flavour her cooking. Since there wasn’t enough room in the existing plot, she decided to extend the vegetable patch back towards the cypress trees. So one Saturday morning, after a trip into town to buy shovels and a pitchfork, we set to work, turning over an area the size of two double beds until it was a rich brown porridge. We threw ourselves into the work with a will, glad to be doing something physical for a change, but we had no idea how exhausting we’d find it. When we woke up the next morning we could hardly move – even picking up the kettle hurt, while walking up or down the stairs was agony.
In our silly moods, we played croquet on the front lawn or stretched a net between the fruit trees and played badminton. Mum, who was tall and rather gawky, was terrible at sports, and when she missed the hoop from just a few inches away, or swiped wildly at the spiralling shuttlecock and hit nothing but air, we would both collapse, helpless with laughter.
It was so good to live in the country, and not to have any neighbours for miles around. You could talk, laugh, shout – scream even – at the top of your voice, and no one could hear you. It was such a change from the matrimonial home , where you always felt self-conscious when you went into the garden because it was overlooked on all sides, and where you had to whisper so that the neighbours – whose shapes you could see moving behind the bushes – wouldn’t hear you.
In the evenings we played duets together in the lounge, something we seemed to have got out of the habit of doing since Dad had left. We had lots of music for flute and piano and one day, idly looking through them, I’d found one called Russian Folk Songs we’d never even opened. This became our absolute favourite and we worked our way through the entire book that March. The flute parts were catchy and quite easy to play, while the piano parts were tricky and tested even Mum occasionally. They were the sorts of tune that got stuck in your head and we’d both be whistling and humming them the next day. If I made a particularly horrendous mistake, we’d both get the giggles so badly it would take us half an hour just to work our way through a few bars. I really enjoyed these duets, and I was enjoying playing the flute – which I’d given up and started again countless times – more than I ever had.
I would look at Mum sometimes as she stood on tiptoe struggling to free the shuttlecock from the branches of a cherry tree, or pulled a comic face as I sent her croquet ball bouncing away down the garden, and feel overcome with love for her. With her tall, awkward body, her large hands that she never seemed to know what to do with, her dark, frizzy hair no amount of combing could tame, she looked so . . . so vulnerable that I’d just have to run over and throw my arms around her and hug her as hard as I could.
I knew money was tight, so when Mum started trying to find out what I wanted for my sixteenth birthday I just gave her a short list of books. When she asked incredulously if that was really all I wanted, I said, yes, that I had everything I could possibly want.
This wasn’t exactly true,
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