“WHAT does corn look like?” Lovejoy asked Vincent. “It says it has blue flowers but—” “Fair waved the golden corn,” they sang in the hymn at school. “The princess had corn-coloured hair,” said the stories; Lovejoy had seen pictures of corn, of course, but they were not anything like the flowers on the packet.
“Corn hasn’t any flowers,” said Vincent.
“But—”
“It’s a grain,” said Vincent and he gave Lovejoy an explanation of how the seed grew and became wheat, “or rye, or barley or oats,” said Vincent, and was changed into bread. “Bread is the staff of life,” said Vincent, warming, “and it’s more than that. It can be spiritual as well as material. It’s a symbol.” Then he saw Lovejoy was not listening.
“There are blue flowers on the packet, printed,” she was saying to herself, and the obstinate, closed look came on her face. “I shall plant them and find out.”
But before even one seed can be planted there has to be earth.
“What is good garden—?” she began, but she had asked Vincent that before. Vincent was quick to many things but he had forgotten about earth. It was not surprising; in Catford Street there was not a sign of earth, except in the bombed places; everything was man-made, “But under everything,” Tip was to argue, “under everything’s dirt.” Tip called earth “dirt.” “Under the houses and pavements and the road, there’s dirt.” That was true, and dirt, earth, has power, an astonishing power of life, of creating and sweetening; it can take anything, a body, an old tin, decay, rust, corruption, filth, and turn it into itself, and slowly make it life, green blades of grass and weeds. “These bombed sites,” said Angela, “according to the Ministry of Works, grow one hundred and thirty-seven different kinds of weeds. It’s amazing.”
Olivia thought it was amazing too but not in Angela’s way; as when speaking of sparrows, they saw two different things; Angela thought of the weeds, Olivia of the power of life.
When Lovejoy thought about the cornflowers, the seeds, she seemed to forget a little, a very little, about her mother. “I need to plant them,” she might have said, but where? “Plant them in a box,” said Mrs. Combie absently when Lovejoy asked her.
“I want a garden,” said Lovejoy. If she had wanted the moon or a diamond tiara it would have been as easy to get in Catford Street.
There were, of course, back gardens to some of the Street houses; but they were dark, open cellars of gardens, spaces of dankness between sooty walls; coals were kept in them, handcarts and bicycles and mangles, washing was hung in them and they were full of bottles and tins. One or two had trees, but they were sooty, stunted trees that smelled of cat; Istanbul, for instance, thought every tree in the Street belonged to him. One back garden had a lilac bush, but it did not flower; even Lovejoy knew that nothing would be likely to flourish in those back yards, besides which each of them belonged to someone.
It was queer to think of people in Catford Street owning gardens. Lovejoy had lived there all these years but she had not seen what she saw now, the flowers—but they must always have been there, thought Lovejoy.
Now, in almost every window, she saw pots with plants growing in them; pots of red and pink flowers, of yellow ones, daffodils—she knew them—and hyacinths, as well as green things, ferns, palms, rubber plants; Sparkey’s mother grew fuchsias in her flat window. Mrs. Cleary and Miss Arnot were unpopular, their cats spoiled the window boxes; some houses had window boxes as high as the fourth floor; they had not the profuseness of the Square window boxes but they made patches of unexpected colour up the Street. In the area of one of the houses a whole vegetable garden grew in boxes. Well, you have to use something like boxes down there, thought Lovejoy, an area’s concrete all over. The plants, she had to admit, seemed to grow well in boxes. “What are those?” asked Lovejoy, peering down from the pavement and pointing to some small shiny-leaved plants.
“Broad beans,” said the man who looked after them. “Don’t you be throwing things down here.”
“I’m not,” said Lovejoy.
“Well, don’t you,” he said so belligerently that Lovejoy saw more clearly than ever that growing plants was difficult in Catford Street.
Another man, in another area, was setting little plants in half-barrels. It was a barrel garden; it even had barrels cut into seats. Lovejoy knew the man; he was Mr. Isbister, Rory Isbister’s grandfather, a wrinkled, brown old man, who lived in the basement of Number Twenty-three. “What are those?” asked Lovejoy.
“Sweet peas,” said Mr. Isbister.
He was not cross as the first man had been, and let Lovejoy talk to him. “I’ve got some seeds,” she said.
“You’d better get busy,” said Mr. Isbister. “’S nearly April.”
“Is April the time to sow?”
“March, April, for most things.”
“Why?” asked Lovejoy.
“Because,” said Mr. Isbister and grunted as he bent to tie a sweet pea to a little stick.
“Yes, but why?”
Mr. Isbister pushed his cap back on his head, leaving earth in his grizzled hair, and looked at her. Lovejoy was standing above him on the pavement. They were not at a good level for talking, but he answered her. When Mr. Isbister talked there were few words and long pauses. It was not at all like Vincent’s eloquence but each word sank in. “Christmastime,” said Mr. Isbister, “till round ’bout Febr’rary—” Pause.
“Yes,” said Lovejoy encouragingly.
“Th’earth’s like dead,” said Mr. Isbister; another pause. “Round ’bout March”—pause—“begins t’ work. April’s working.” Mr. Isbister looked up at the sky and frowned. “April’s short month,” he said, “must get after things”—pause. “Get busy,” and he went back to his sweet peas.
But Lovejoy had not finished. “If you wanted to make a garden here, where would you do it?” she asked.
There was a silence, then, “Nowhere,” said Mr. Isbister.
Lovejoy set her lips.
“When you do anything,” Vincent had told her often, “people will advise you not to, they’ll want to drag you down,” and his eyes grew dark, thinking of Cassie. “Don’t let them,” cried Vincent. “They—must—not. You must refuse to let them. I am going to have a restaurant that I call a restaurant,” said Vincent, “or I’ll have nothing at all”; and, “I’ll have a garden or nothing at all,” said Lovejoy.
•
Every now and then, in the streets between the Square and the river, there was a gap, the bombed sites of which Olivia and Angela had spoken, though the children called them the bomb-ruins. Where once houses had been, or warehouses or shops, was a pit below the level of the street, a space that was sometimes a hundred or two hundred yards across, an open gap between the houses. After the war the bomb-ruins had been tidied up, the debris of the ruins removed, only rubble left that would do for making new foundations when new buildings went up. The workmen had left each one tidy, but soon they were all untidy again; people tipped rubbish in them, threw tins and scrap iron down in them; the boys used them as lavatories; most of the children were forbidden to go near them, and they were seemingly empty, but only seemingly. Lovejoy knew, as every child in Catford Street knew, that the bomb-ruins were the headquarters of the gangs.
Every boy in Catford Street who was big enough belonged to a gang. “But you’re not six,” Sparkey’s mother told him. The gangs kept to themselves, though they fought one another at times, and they had partisan groups among the girls. By tacit consent, the girls kept out of the ruins; they were afraid of the eeriness of that waste ground. “Tramps go there,” said Sparkey, “and thieves. There was a burglar dumped a safe there, an’ one night a girl was killed, with a stocking!” said Sparkey, his eyes enormous. If a girl went in the ruins, she was not behaving like a girl; no book of etiquette had stricter rules of behaviour than the children of Catford Street, and a girl who did not behave like a girl could be fought. “It’s y’own fault, y’asked for it,” the boys used to say if they had to fight the girls. “Come in here and we’ll knock y’teeth out,” they said now to Lovejoy.
For Lovejoy was hovering. With the packet in her pocket, she had been walking round and round the bomb-ruins; some, bare and wide, she knew were no good; they were as public as the streets, everyone could look in them; but there were some where the rubble made hiding places, in which, picking a way in and out, she could get where no one could see her—places disused, derelict, given up, quite empty. “If it wasn’t for those blasted boys,” said Lovejoy.
It was not only that they would have fought her; she knew they could leave nothing alone. If they saw a tin, they must kick it; a poster, they drew on it and tore it; a fly, they must catch it. They took it out of one another too; if a boy were near another boy, perfectly friendly, after a moment he would kick or punch, and in a moment they would start scuffling, twisting, and wrestling; they could not sit next to one another in the bus without driving their elbows into or kicking one another. There was no ill will, no malice, as there would have been with girls. It was as if there were—a fizz in them, thought Lovejoy. She did not know how else to describe that bubbling, bottled-up energy. She had it herself, in spite of her quietness, her self-containedness; often she felt more like a boy than like a girl; sometimes she sat down on the boarding steps of the bus if the conductor were upstairs, and, holding on with one hand to the boarding rail, she would stick out her legs low over the road to feel the air as the bus swept round; all the old ladies screamed out that she would be killed. Lovejoy put her tongue out at them and, before the bus stopped, jumped off. Sometimes she walked on her hands down the length of a block. She sucked gob-stoppers, keeping the ball in her cheek, like any little hooligan; neither Vincent nor her own mother would have recognized her. Lovejoy knew what it was like to be a boy but, thinking of the fragile loops of Mr. Isbister’s sweet-pea seedlings, she drew her breath sharply. Isn’t there anywhere those boys don’t go? she thought. She seemed to have been carrying those seeds round for days.
“Have a box,” said Mrs. Combie and Mr. Isbister.
“I won’t have a box,” said Lovejoy.