At dinner that evening I asked some of the old fools what they thought about my sketch. “Oh,” one of them said, “that piece of paper on the notice board. Very nice, yes.” I explained again the theories behind my scheme for borders; I talked about Capability Brown and the Georgics, Hinduism versus Buddhism. Of course they did not fully comprehend what I said. Whenever I speak I know it is a case of pearls before swine. They smiled and glanced at one another surreptitiously in an attempt to hide their discomfort and embarrassment at not being able to understand what I was saying. Poor souls.
Whilst the overall inspiration of the garden is, as I must stress, Oriental, I confess that my borders are not entirely devoid of English undertones. Anyone can see that they are a subtle nod of acknowledgement to the humble cottage garden such as that at Hemscott, my childhood home in Gloucestershire, whose herbaceous borders were exemplary.
Hemscott’s influence on me has been stronger than I imagined. I have only realised this of late. All my life I wanted to escape it, but now I find it is still with me, the only thing I have left.
It was not a pretty place. The house itself appeared grey in colour, whatever the weather. Its walls of Cotswold stone — wrongly described by visitors as “golden”—always seemed cold to me, always silent. My father died when I was four and my mother took a younger man as a lover. They spent all day in her boudoir, festering in each other’s company. They surfaced occasionally for meals, and sometimes I was called down from my room to join them at dinner. Mother would look at me with vacant eyes. “What a funny little face you have,” she would say each time, with the mild surprise of someone discovering a titillating piece of trivia. With her left hand she stroked my hair; with her right she gorged herself (fork only: table manners did not apply to my mother) on scrambled eggs and boiled chicken. Across the table, her dark-eyed lover ate with sickening speed, never seeming to chew on his food. He seemed desperate to return to the languid, lotus-eating surroundings of his fetid chambre, to the arms of his intoxicated lover. Not once did he look at me; his lank chestnut hair hung thickly over his brow, hiding his lowered gaze.
Predictably, I spent much time on my own. Nanny was around, of course, but she had been my father’s nanny before, and was now too infirm to be of use. She sat in her armchair all day, with nothing to keep her company but a tin of shortbread biscuits and letters from a long-dead son, killed on the steep scrubby shores of Gallipoli in the summer of 1915, the year of my birth. When she leaned forward to receive her good-night kiss from me each evening I could see the sweat stains on the faded chintz behind her. She smelt of damp straw, a perfume I always found repellent.
The potting shed became my place of refuge. I was introduced to its silent, earth-scented charms by Robinson, our one-armed gardener (who was, despite his disability, wholly responsible for the exceptional vigour of the borders in our garden). He regarded my solitudinous boyhood with pity, I think, and one day invited me to share in his tasks. I stood beside him on a low wooden stool, learning to prick out seedlings and plant them in little pots, ready to be moved to the cold frames. Robinson took his glove off and held my fingers with his one hand, guiding them as he showed me how to squeeze the compost gently around the base of the trembling plant. I began to go to the shed when no one else was there. Light struggled to filter through the murky windows; its dimness comforted me, for in the shadows that Funny Little Face of mine became invisible. When I sat on the dusty, soil-scattered floor, my mean, bloodless lips and minklike snout seemed not to matter; no one could see me there. The tender plants, too, became mine. I didn’t know, nor care, what I was potting up: every time I saw a tray of seedlings I would seize upon them, desperate to move them on so that before long they could be planted in the ground.
