Waking Up

At the end of a quiet street at the edge of a large town, between tidy houses and tidy gardens, was a wild place. Once it had been a garden like those on either side with a neat lawn and straight rows of flowers, but some years before, the old lady who had lived there had moved away and since then the garden had become a dark and mysterious jungle. In the middle of this wild place was an empty house, called fourteen, that was slowly disappearing behind crawling bushes and overgrown trees.

As time passed, the grass grew taller burying the path from the front gate, the ivy crawled up the walls and slipped in through the broken windows. The trees wove new branches together and the garden became a closed and secret place.

In the jungle the honeysuckle filled the air with heavy dreams, and animals that had nowhere else to go made their homes in its welcoming branches and secret places. Moles and rats that had been driven from the tidy gardens all around took refuge there. Beyond the edge of the abandoned lawn under a thick bramble bush a chicken lived in an orange box, and up on the roof of the house crows had filled the chimneys with years of nests. Rabbits that could never find enough to eat anywhere else lived in a wild warren at the bottom of the garden beneath a crowded hedge. Beyond the hedge through brambles and giant hogweed taller than men a dusty towpath ran beside an old canal and across the canal was a desperate place of crumbling factories and fractured concrete.

The years passed and then one day as spring began to push the winter aside the old lady’s nephew lifted away the broken gate and took his family to live in the neglected house.

Windows stiff with age were forced open and given new panes of glass and a coat of paint. The branches that had grown across them were chopped down and sunshine crept into the house for the first time in years. As the rooms grew warm again the dampness that had reached up to the highest ceilings was driven back into the earth.

In three quick weeks, the cobwebs were swept away, the holes that had let the rats in were filled up and the crows’ nests were pushed out of the chimneys with stiff brushes.

When the chimneys were clear they lit fires in every room. The chopped down branches cracked as the flames ate through them and filled the air with sweet smelling smoke. The thin shoots of plants that had crept into the house behind the plaster shrivelled away and in a few days it was as if they had never been there. Once again the house was back in human hands.

Out in the garden the air was filled with nervous talk as the animals sat and waited. The homeless crows huddled in the tall trees and made everyone else miserable. Eventually they made new nests in the high branches but for months afterwards they complained to anyone who would listen.

‘Just wait,’ they said. ‘When they’ve finished with the house, they’ll come out here and kill the garden.’

The other animals said nothing because they were all frightened that what the crows were saying might be true.

‘Of course, they’ll wait until we’ve built new nests,’ said the crows. ‘They’ll wait till we’re all nicely settled in with fresh eggs ready to hatch, then they’ll come out and chop everything down until it’s as flat and dead as all the other gardens.’

It looked as though the crows were right, for as

spring turned into early summer the man bought a bright red lawnmower and attacked the back garden. The machine flew over the grass like an eagle, tearing it to pieces as it passed. The green tunnels that the mice had made over the years vanished in a minute, leaving a wide open yellow space that was unsafe to cross. From her box under the bush Ethel the chicken sat very still and watched him go by. From the tops of the trees the crows looked down, too scared of the man to go and pick up the worms he had disturbed. All the terrible things they had predicted were coming true.

Every weekend the family pulled out the weeds that had grown around the house and swept up the dead leaves. They cut back the ivy until it was no taller than a dog and piled everything up into a huge bonfire in the old vegetable garden.

In the evenings as the days grew longer the man sat in an armchair by the French windows, gazed out across the tidy lawn at the dense undergrowth beyond and fell asleep. Sometimes he would wake up just as the light was fading away and see the rabbits and hedgehogs moving softly in the shadows. Sometimes he would see the blackbirds hopping across the grass and other birds flying in from all around to roost in the tall trees. Maybe something told him that if he cut everything down they would all go away, or maybe he was just lazy, but as the summer grew warmer his enthusiasm for gardening grew less and less.

The animals grew more and more restless. They knew the people would chop everything down. That’s what people did, they only had to look at every other garden to see that. But the family finished playing with their bonfire and then left everything alone. Some of the smaller more nervous animals like the voles and the shrews moved out into the narrow strip of wasteland by the canal, but for most of them there was nowhere else to go and they just had to watch and wait.

‘They’re just biding their time,’ said the crows.

‘What for?’ asked Ethel the chicken, but no one knew.

And then something happened that made the family make up its mind once and for all.

In the next house there were two miserable people who complained all day long. As she complained about the sunshine, he complained about the cold. When he complained about the noise, she said it was too quiet. They complained to each other about everything and when they could no longer stand to listen to their own voices, they wrote and complained to the newspapers. They hated everything and everyone but most of all they hated the overgrown garden next door that dropped leaves onto their tidy lawn and cut out the daylight and threatened them with its untamed life.

‘My wife wants you to cut down the trees by our fence,’ said the nervous man. He stood shuffling from foot to foot on the doorstep while his wife hid behind her plastic curtains.

‘Why?’ said the man.

‘She says they drop leaves on her flower beds,’ said the nervous man.

‘That’s all right,’ said the woman. ‘You can keep them, we’ve got loads more.’ In the next room their two children laughed and the miserable man went away. His miserable wife came to the door and she complained about the squirrels and the hedgehogs and the rabbits and the mice.

‘I didn’t even know we had squirrels,’ said the man. The miserable woman went away and wrote a letter to the town hall who lost it in a wastepaper basket with the eighty-six others she had sent them. Seven times they went back to fourteen to complain and the last time they said they’d get the police. The family laughed and thanked them for saving them so much work, because whatever they had been planning to do in the garden they certainly weren’t going to now.

‘Anyone can have a rotary clothes dryer in their garden,’ said the woman after the miserable couple had gone back to their net curtains and pampered cat, ‘but only special people get squirrels and hedgehogs.’

And they built a bird table and put out nesting boxes for the bluetits.

The family’s two children tunnelled down the garden, crawling like voles through the undergrowth and above a clearing of soft grass in the branches of a wide oak tree they built a tree house. They lay flat on their stomachs and looked down into the overgrown pond as the moorhens led their chicks away through the ferns to the canal.