Losing the plot: a history of me and allotments

From the moment it was first mooted, I knew I wanted the London poet’s residency to take place on an allotment. I liked the idea of allotments, but their reality carried a certain amount of baggage for me. I wanted to reconcile the idea and the reality. This is the the story of what allotments, up until that point, had meant to me.

I spent the first seventeen years of my life in a house on the edge of town. Almost the edge, at least, for at some distance lay a 1930s bypass, separated from our back garden by a strip of allotments, substantial enough to mean that the traffic-noise was never more than a vague hum. There’d once been a chicken-wire fence, but the garden now ended in a low hump of earth, with the wilderness of sheds and bamboo canes beyond.

The allotments were roamed by frightening individuals like Mr Watling, our next-door neighbour. In his eyes, you were either an allotment-person, or you weren’t. My parents weren’t, and were treated accordingly. My bother and I he disliked simply for being children. He’d mutter when we passed him in the street, and sometimes just stood and scowled at us over the garden fence. There was a constant underlying suspicion that we trespassed on the allotments. We’d admittedly used them as a short cut on occasions, but we weren’t the kind of lads who abused other people’s property, and besides, Moulsham Drive allotments weren’t the sort of place where you’d want to hang about.

One day we were alerted by the sky darkening and the sound of hammering. Mr W – with the help of a man who looked as though he actually slept on the allotments – was barricading the end of our garden with a Berlin Wall-sized fence of their own design. By then, my family were by too bored by his antics to be offended. And in any case, we’d decided to move.

There was a postscript: a couple of years later, when I was away at college, pondering such philosophical chestnuts as If I drink until I am sick on my shoes, will it make girls like me more?, my mother wrote me a letter enclosing a newspaper cutting. The old allotments were being earmarked for development. And there, defiantly waving his garden fork for the photographer and looking like an escapee from the Battle of Sedgemoor, was Mr W.

My second experience of allotments came in the mid-’90s. My friend Patrick McManus, a Raynes Park philosopher-poet, was finding his allotment-plot too much for him. To Patrick, the perfect allotment-visit meant a couple of hours on a sun-lounger with a good book, and the gardening side of things was consequently starting to suffer. It was suggested that my girlfriend Jane and I take on half of the plot. As we were then aspiring to a sort of crusty-lite lifestyle, it seemed appropriate.

Weeding and watering at least once a day, however, seemed less appropriate. And so our parsnips grew into weird, mandrake-like shapes, the lettuces bolted, and most of the remainder didn’t grow at all. We saw where Patrick was coming from, and we began to regard the allotment as somewhere to sit with a flask, making friends with the cats that traipsed across from the nearby flats. A calming-down place after our increasingly frequent rows. One day, not as a result of any particular decision, we just stopped going (although I still have the key somewhere, Patrick).

The years passed. Seasons came and went. Mr Watling didn’t live to see the eventual desecration of his beloved allotment; Jane died under the wheels of a train in 2003. It was time to find me a new allotment.