I wonder what the word allotment conjures up for you. Gnarled old granddads digging for victory during the last war? A ragged patch of derelict Brussels sprouts and straggling beanstalks? A tiny uprising of sheds amid a flutter of faded bird-scarers? That was my impression until suddenly allotments became all the rage around our way.
‘Have you heard?’ asked my neighbour, Jillie, excitedly. ‘They’ve ploughed up that old allotment site across the road and individual plots are being re-allocated next Thursday evening.’
‘Don’t talk to me about allotments!’ said another friend, Mary. In the first flush of enthusiasm in her district it seems, her husband had rushed off and dug up somebody else’s plot by mistake.
‘Never mind dear, I’ll help you clear the weeds from the right patch,’ she cried keenly. And no sooner had she cut her first helpful swathe through the undergrowth than a great big piece of nettle shot straight up her nostril. ‘Did it hurt?’ I gasped. Which must easily be the silliest question I’ve ever asked anybody. ‘Well it certainly put me right off allotments,’ said Mary. ‘In fact I flung down my tool, plucked the nettle from my nose and stamped off home never to return.’ And who can blame her, poor soul?
For the rest of us however, that particular Thursday evening was like the Gold Rush as small excited family groups milled about the hedgerow waiting to catch the eye of the man with the notebook and marker pegs. Any idea that allotments these days are exclusively the territory of patient old chaps in cloth caps was very soon dispelled.
‘Hello Lucy darling!’ trilled the lady with the elegant hairdo to the one in the buttercup yellow wellingtons. ‘My dear, I simply can’t wait to harvest my own courgettes!’
Trendy, mauve-shirted chaps in advertising kicked thoughtfully at weedy clumps; serious men with beards scowled through seed catalogues; small syndicates of home-based mums turned up with collective infants slung over their shoulders in canvas hammocks; and large extrovert families strode about in Aran sweaters amid swirls of free-range children and Labrador dogs.
‘Here Dominic, here Julian,’ they boomed from time to time. But neither children nor dogs came to heel.
‘Well now,’ said the man in charge, reaching us at last and licking his stubby gardener’s pencil. ‘What did you say your name was? Ah yes, you wanted a ten pole plot, didn’t you? Well now, there’s that one over by the lilac bush or that next one with the old shed.’
‘Lilac bush,’ I murmured dreamily. ‘Shed,’ said my husband sensibly. So for ninety pence a year we staked our claim to a good sized piece of land with a white marker peg at each corner, plus a tiny lock-up tool shed, and all only a wheelbarrow ride from our own front door.
For the first few weeks however, the only noticeable crop was string. A giant blueprint of white twine defining boundaries; brown bass stretched taut along rows of seedlings; green raffia adding a colourful note, and in the case of one dashing family, masses of pink tape, zig-zagging off into the distance.
We soon discovered that the weeds, far from disappearing, had quite enjoyed being ploughed up. Dock and nettles swung into mammoth production, an ancient legacy of rhubarb came smiling through and raspberry canes shot up keenly everywhere. A large friendly frog joined us, hopping along the rows just ahead of us as we raked and hoed.
As the summer wore on, the hungry monster lurking in our garage began to purr contentedly as I fed great armfuls of bagged carrots, blanched swede and shredded beans into its vaporous depths. An allotment and a deep freeze form a natural partnership. Gradually too, it became clear which among us had green fingers and which were gradually falling by the wayside in a tangle of bindweed and good intentions.
The idea of allotments was originally thought up in the nineteenth century ‘to alleviate poverty among the labouring poor’. Nowadays as food prices rise and garden plots grow smaller, the labouring poor it seems, come from all sections of society. Some of the elegant ladies are still with us, calling across to each other with high clear voices: ‘My dear, the courgettes were such a success I’m wondering if I dare have a little go at artichokes!’
A chap at the top end filled his plot with conifers and the swirly Aran family have unearthed a gnarled old granddad to do the actual digging.
As for me, it is one of the pleasures of life to take my toiling husband a thermos of mid-morning coffee at weekends (he’s no gnarled granddad but he’s a better digger than I am) and to gather a basketful of our own golden sweet corn and ripe tomatoes. There is a general spirit of goodwill among the weekend diggers – broad beans are praised, carrots compared, advice given and accepted from the old timers to the raw recruits. Some are talking of forming an Allotment Association as they do in many districts to enable members to buy seeds etc in bulk and to lend weight to our desire for more long-term security of tenure.
On weekdays I sometimes take my own coffee and do a spot of solo weeding. The sun shines down on my back and I chat to Froggy as he leaps along, croaking companionably, Sometimes I look up and see a passer-by eyeing me strangely as I stoop there apparently deep in conversation with a runner bean. But I don’t mind.
I don’t even mind when more sophisticated friends double up with laughter at the sight of me in my muddy wellies and cry: ‘Been up the allottie, have you?’
As the season wears on and we come staggering home with ropes of gleaming onions and barrowloads of beet, ‘up the allottie’ is a good place to be. Even if one does risk the occasional nettle up one’s nostril!