A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own.Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged and demoralised and over-irritated garden.My father got at cross purposes with our two patches at an early stage.Everything grew wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse.The peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered.That lane with its occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one watched him.His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.
In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly appearance.He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time.He hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance.Never was a man less horticulturally-minded.The clamour of these vegetables he had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out his patience.He would walk into the garden the happiest of men after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or social organisation, or summarising some book he had read.He talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my limitations.Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.
"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.
More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.
His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind.The world would darken.He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.
"CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart.His discourse was at an end.
I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively enriched.He would come in like a whirlwind."This damned stuff all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah!
AAAAAAH!"
My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing on such occasions.She would remain standing a little stiffly in the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought.
"If you say such things--"
He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about."The towel!" he would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll give up everything, I tell you--everything!"...
At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point.Iwas in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened.I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe.We had tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths.He had the hoe in both hands and slogged.Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad.It was a fantastic massacre.It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats.After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame.Something of the awe of that moment returns to me as I write of it.
Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent happiness, "I've done with gardening.Let's go for a walk like reasonable beings.I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed for an instant with bitter resentment--" Pandering to cabbages."4
That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons.One is that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and the other is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he had done with it.He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weird world-forgetfulness.I listened puzzled, and at that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards became plain to me.It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.
