I was down the allotment the other day helping to show groups
of young primary school children around the site. I wasn’t in the best
condition to do so, suffering as I was with a rare and raging hangover (rare,
because I rarely drink to excess these days, not because I’m some hard-nut immune
to the effects of alcohol). Lynda, the allotment manager had just chirpily
informed me that we’d be showing round no less than three large groups of kids,
with each tour lasting a good hour. I gazed longingly down the track that led to
the road that led to my empty and quiet house, where radio 4 and the kettle were waiting patiently
to soothe me. But they’d have to wait. For three, long, noisy, childreny hours.
I slunk off to a
nearby café to consume strong tea and plot escape strategies. But my guilty
conscious got the better of me- I couldn’t leave Lynda alone with endless gangs
of whippersnapper Penge tearaways, so I downed the brackish dregs of my tea, and
slunk back again to be greeted by a multitude
of grubby-faced urchins in even grubbier blue uniforms accompanied by their
care-worn teachers in fluorescent yellow tabards. The plan was to begin by taking them around
Lynda’s extensive plot, and I’d decided that I would just hover vaguely in the
background, perhaps concealing myself a bit amongst various clumps of towering
foliage in the hope I wouldn’t be bothered too much. But it wasn’t to be: Lynda
introduced me to everyone and told them that I was an allotment expert who
would be overjoyed to tell them all about the different things growing. All the urchins
stared up at me with such eager little expressions that I felt my second twang
of guilt of the day, mingled with a vague feeling of dread: how on earth was I
going to make rows of assorted vegetable plants exciting and inspirational to
the youth of today? With small nails pressing spitefully on the backs of my
eyes and my stomach churning gently like a pale of curdling milk?
I stared at some potato plants. The children gazed at me,
expectantly. I glared at some beetroots,
desperate for inspiration. Still the
children gazed at me, fidgeting a little. So I did the only sensible thing that you can
do when showing 15-odd 5-year-olds around a vegetable plot, and I started
tearing off smelly leaves and passing them round for them to sniff. Tomato
leaves, lavender, lemon balm: the kids loved them all. They loved the fact they
reminded them of familiar things: lemon sweets, ice cream, mum’s cooking. I
handed out poppy seed heads and demonstrated how, if burst open, a billion tiny
black seeds flew everywhere. They couldn’t get enough of exploding poppies, and
soon all of them had little black dots speckling their blue sweaters. I pulled
off the large, white bell-shaped flowers of bindweed and showed them how to
make them pop up in the air and drift to the ground like little elfish parachutes.
I lifted damp logs to reveal thriving communities of bugs. The kids especially
loved this- I think they could relate to the random, rapid movements of multitudinous
insects, like so many excitable children in a playground. I pointed out the
woodlice and solemnly informed them that they are officially known as ‘chiggy
pigs’, a term peculiar to my childhood home of North Devon, but now hopefully
part of the youth lexicon of south-east London. I created howls of delighted
disgust when they noticed an old bathtub full of foetid brown water and I
explained that I would be taking a bath in it myself later. And, all the while,
I experienced a strange sensation. I found myself, bizarrely, against all
expectations, actually enjoying
myself. The kids made me laugh. They were sweet. They asked peculiar, random, yet
often insightful questions. And the more I enjoyed it all, the more the fuggy
shroud of hangover lifted. I actually began looking forward to the next two groups.
But then something happened that brought me crashing down to
earth again. I had just escorted the group back to the gate, ready to bid them
farewell and welcome the next group. We were loitering there, half the kids and
a couple of the day-glo teachers, waiting for the rest to catch up.
One of the kids, a sweet, smiling little girl who had been one of the keenest
on the tour, pointed to some tomato plants and asked me, ‘If you pull them out
of the ground, will they die?”: a perfectly sensible, indeed intelligent
question for one of such a tender age. To which one of the teachers, replied,
slightly condescendingly, “Well, how can it die if it wasn’t even alive in the
first place?”, before addressing all the group with the question, “Are plants
alive?”, in a tone of voice designed to elicit only a negative response. “No”,
all the children responded dutifully. And the little girl stopped smiling, and
looked just a little bit crestfallen.
