I was smiling peaceably, vacantly even, at the kitchen sink early this morning, when my blood started to boil. No, it wasn’t the onset of the dreaded hot flushes, but the sight that met my eyes out of the kitchen window.
I suppose we all strive to take life as it comes. However, most of us have our vulnerable patches. There are those whose emotions go all wobbly at the sight of a puppy – with others it may be pop stars, kittens, royalty, weddings or Steve McQueen. With me, it’s plants. So, having spent all day yesterday creating a new border, I was not overjoyed to see a little swarm of schoolboys short-cutting across the front garden and leaping about with glee among my newly-planted shrubs.
The trouble with ranch fencing is that it attracts small boys to use it as a ladder. At the most downtrodden far corner, we have recently planted a sweet briar whose thorns we had hoped would act as a deterrent. Not a bit of it. The doughty lads now cut across closer to the house. Sniff, thud, chortle, they were going this morning, right on to my still tiny Chamaecyparis ‘Green Hedger’. This particular conifer has an endearing habit of bending its topmost fronds over into graceful ballet poses. Ours now seems to be bending from the waist and ankles.
At least, nowadays, we have a fence to define the boundaries. The garden at our first home was open-plan and, in those days, my blood hardly ever stopped boiling. For reasons best known to the builder, our communal garden consisted of several triangular slices, tapering from the houses to a point in the middle distance. Fencing was not permitted, so, to improve our wedge, I dug a flower bed along the baseline and planted a birch tree at the distant apex. At this stage, the phrase ‘communal garden’ had quite a gracious sound to it. In the mind’s eye, one saw oneself having tea on cedar-dotted lawns, with other families, on little white chairs. The first time I carried tea outside I was immediately surrounded by about 20 assorted children who watched me suspiciously and in complete silence, until an older boy said menacingly, ‘Wotcher doing?’
Meanwhile, their various parents were busy defining their plots with nettles, trenches, burial mounds and trip-wires. ‘Why don’t we all hire a tractor, plant grass seed and arrange trees and borders on a communal basis?’ I cried rousingly to the family opposite. But they just went on building their burial mound and it was ages before we discovered that on their side it was studded with boulders – rather like a giant currant pudding. We felt a bit better when we knew it was meant to be a rockery, but we never did find out about the ‘Family at War’ two doors along, who just kept on rushing outside and digging trenches.
I think we gave up trying the day I looked out and saw the little lad next door bending back our young birch tree and using it as a catapult.
And now, here we are again, with trampled plants and boiling blood. I was just wondering how to let off steam, when another keen gardener dropped in for coffee. She listened to my tale of woe and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing. We sometimes get complete strangers picnicking on our lawn.’
She lives in the gatehouse at the home of a famous pop personality, and it seems that hardly a day goes by without assorted fans turning up. Sometimes they use amazingly clever ploys to gain access to the FPP. ‘Quick, can I use your loo?’ they gasp, wrapping one leg around the other and hopping up and down rather like knotted pogo sticks.
‘I really enjoy meeting all the different types’, said my visitor cheerfully. ‘Even the one who said he had arrived by transcendental meditation. He spoiled his astral image, though, by rubbing a bare foot and adding, ‘But all that walking don’t ’alf give yer blisters.’ However, the most difficult to cope with was the chap who turned up in a white blanket, wellies and a woven shoulder bag.
‘I told him there wasn’t anyone at home, but he said he’d wait. Whereupon, he sat right down in the middle of a flower bed I’d only just finished planting out and started to play his guitar. Oh, I was nonplussed. ‘I’ll set the dog on you!’ I cried, as a last resort. Well, our first guard dog, the soppy thing, took one look at the shoulder bag and thought it was full of sandwiches, because the workmen in the grounds carry their lunch in satchels.
‘So, there we all were – me shouting, this fellow strumming and the dog wagging his tail like mad and swinging on the handbag. In the end, we had to get help to prise him out from among my flowers. But he remained quite unperturbed. They led him away, still playing his guitar, and, as he reached the gates, he called back over his shoulder, ‘Hey – your guard dog’s real freaky, man!’’
And I think I’ve got problems!