The Lost Garden (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Jimmy could not find his digs. The address he had on a piece of paper from his father’s friend in Donegal had seemed straightforward enough: 5 Carroll Street, Camden Town, London. However, Camden Town, he discovered, was a very big place with a lot of streets in it. Many of them seemed to be the full length of the island he grew up on. He tried to stop one or two people, but they kept walking past him and he knew it was because they were afraid of his face, which put Jimmy’s nerves on edge. While the Underground had seemed to him a place where he could hide among people, up here on the residential streets he felt exposed. The one or two people he had managed to ask had no idea where he was talking about, and he had no map to help guide him. He had thought that if he walked around for a while, he was sure to just fall upon the right road, but after two hours, he was starting to despair. As he took yet another turn onto another seemingly endless street, he saw that he was right back where he had started, directly opposite Camden Town Tube Station. There were men outside on scaffolding. The building had been bombed – he remembered now hearing two veteran navvies on the boat talking about it.

‘Two years ago and they’re still clearing up the mess.’

‘Only four killed, but it took the side of the station clean
off. The Underground was fine, though, and the trains kept running.’

‘I don’t like those tunnels at all. I’ll take the bus anytime.’

‘Nasty business this aul’ war, but then, somebody has to put London back together for them lads – am I right?’

A group of navvies were now coming off the scaffolding and heading to a pub across the road, the Mother Redcap. Jimmy hesitated. He did not want to ask for their help. He had got as far as Camden Town by himself and he could make his own way. However, he knew that, in reality, he could not. There were six of them crowded round the bar. Jimmy took a deep breath and walked across to them. There were pint glasses filled with milk on the bar in front of them with the biggest pile of sandwiches Jimmy had ever seen. He suddenly felt starving and wondered how much it would cost to get his own pint of milk and a sandwich.

‘What happened to your face?’

‘Leave the lad alone – sure he’s only off the boat.’

The men were bawdy but friendly and helpful – in their own way. Two of them were from Donegal, and when he showed them his address, it turned out that they were staying in the same digs as him.

Celebrations all round.

‘Buy that man his inaugural London pint!’

‘There’s no drinking during the day once you’re a working man, Jim, so take the lunchtime pint while you can.’

‘Then you’ll have to be saving it up for the Friday skite like the rest of us.’

Jimmy had never drunk alcohol before. His father was a pioneer and he had taken the vow at his own confirmation and had never seen any reason to break it.

But he had already had to explain about his face and his fate, and he wanted to fit in, or rather, he needed to fit in.

The beer tasted vile, bitter, like the worst kind of medicine. However, after a few sips, he got used to it and before the men went back to work, they left three more up at the bar for him and said they would be back at four to take him to the digs.

All the sandwiches were gone.

Jimmy did not remember anything after that until he was woken up by a large foot pushing into his cheek. The stench and the strength of it were evidence that he was sharing a bed, head to toe, with another man. A narrow bed, because as he turned to escape further attack from the hairy toes, Jimmy fell face first onto a filthy brown carpet.

His head was pounding with more pressure than pain, as if there was a rodent in there banging to be let out.

He eased himself up onto his elbow, but found there was barely room to sit up as there was another bed directly next to the one he’d just fallen out of. He stood up and saw that the room he was in contained five single beds – four in a line and one across the width of the room, which was barely twelve foot square. In each bed were two men, sleeping head to toe. What followed was a miraculous choreography of twelve big, largely naked Irishmen dressing themselves in an extremely limited space: tucking elbows in a way to keep them safe from nearby chests, crossing their legs to avoid unnecessary precarious dangling, passing pants and socks and trousers to one another across an assault course of wobbling beds and other big Irishmen. They did this with extraordinary speed – as if they were in a tremendous hurry.

‘What time is it?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Five,’ one of the men said, and another added, ‘The site opens at six. The foreman says he’ll try you for the day.’

Jimmy, who was still dressed from the day before, grabbed his bag, which he had spotted under the bed, and followed them out of the room as the men pounded down the stairs of the small suburban house in the dark and into a small scullery kitchen, where they all squashed in and stood around in silence so as not to wake the family whose bedroom they were renting. After a few minutes, the landlady came in and passed each one a mug of sweet, milky tea, which they drank standing; a few minutes after that, she came back and handed them all a hunk of white bread with two sausages rolled into it. It was the first food Jimmy had eaten in two days and he devoured it in one go. He looked pitifully at the woman, but she glowered at him sharply to make it clear that was his lot.

‘You were in some state last night, lad – I’ll be expecting a deposit from you before I give you your tea tonight.’

‘I’m Sean Walsh’s son, from Aghabeg.’

‘I don’t give a damn that you are,’ she said.‘You’re all “Paddy” to me.’

‘Dolores is not as bad as she seems,’ one of the men, Brian, said to him as they left. ‘She’s a good Donegal woman.’

‘She’s a greedy bitch,’ said another. ‘You’re lucky we weren’t three to the bed last night – she’s tried that before.’

‘When there’s a big room next door to ours with only three small children in it?’

‘Don’t be looking in the other rooms, Aiden, or you’ll get us all thrown out.’

On the way up to the site, the lads explained that Dolores ran the cheapest house in London, which meant they could send money home every week, ‘and still have the few bob for a good skite of pints on Friday’.

As they talked, they walked through the dark streets of London towards Camden Town Station. Jimmy had no recollection of
making this walk the night before and vowed never to drink again. Despite his sore head, he thought that perhaps things were going to turn out all right. The digs were pretty grim, but the lads seemed nice, and if he saved all his money, instead of spending it on drink, he’d have a fortune saved in no time.

However, Jimmy’s career as a navvy was to be short-lived.

An hour after he was on site, Jimmy dropped a load of bricks from a hod he was carrying clean down onto the ground from the first floor of the scaffold. Jimmy had not realized how much his peripheral vision was impaired. With the hod up on his shoulder, one side was completely invisible to him and it affected his balance.

The English foreman was very nice about it, considering.

He could see that Jimmy needed the work, as did all the young Irishmen who came to him, and he had a particular compassion because he knew things would be hard for him given the state of his face. He kept him on for the rest of the day, sweeping the dust from one place to another on the ground floor. Jimmy knew it was over, but he stuck it out for the one-day wage of two pounds.

It was a Friday, but he left the other men to the Mother Redcap and headed for the Tube station.

Jimmy had one more card to play – an address that Anthony Irvine had pressed into his hand that day as he left the island. When he took out the crumpled sheet of paper, he saw it said, ‘Turn left out of Piccadilly Circus Station,’ after the address and instructions on how to get there.

This was a man who knew what he was doing.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Aileen looked around the old glasshouse. With the weeds all gone, she was amazed by this unusual, airy building. It seemed similar in size to her own house, except laid out as one long room. The floors were tiled, and the walls were red brick to waist height. The rest of the building comprised long glass windows – even the sloping roof. Glass was expensive and they only had three small windows in the whole of the cottage she grew up in; two of them were simply glazed gaps in the wall to allow some light in, and the third ‘proper’ window they were never allowed to open for fear of breaking the catch. Even on the brightest summer’s day, their house was dark, but this place of about the same length and breadth was so bright that Aileen’s eyes hurt. It was as if the Englishman had found a way of catching the sunlight on the island and had gathered it all into this one place for his own personal use. Aileen could almost hear her father’s voice saying, ‘That’s the bastard English for you – they take the best of everything.’

At one end of the room were tables whose tops were cluttered with pots and plates of various sizes. Running along the edge of the walls was a series of thick rusted pipes. On top of these were shallow trays, like semicircles of the pipes themselves built into the top of them – some mysterious piece of engineering
at work. As she cleared the bindweed, Aileen could see how the weed had been able to take over the space so thoroughly. Running at head height across the room was a series of horizontal metal bars, and along those bars were wound the fat trunks of fruit vines similar to the one she had cleared. There were eight of them in all – grey and dead, but still solidly clinging to their metal anchor. Aileen followed them down to their roots and saw that their trunks had been trained through cave-like holes cut into the bricks at the bottom edge of the outside wall. They were planted outside.

Clearly, the crazy bindweed had followed one of the vines through one of these holes, and despite the ferocity of its growth, Aileen discovered that the chaos was all coming from one plant. In the absence of anything to curtail it, the single bindweed had run riot and made itself look like far more than it was. Aileen wondered at the ability of one small thing to create so much chaos and shuddered for a moment as she thought that was what the Cleggan fire had been: one small oversight. She shivered, then shrugged the thought aside and went over to the trays and pots on the tables. Many of the larger pots still had earth in them, although it was as dry as gravel. As her fingers lifted the dead, dry soil, she remembered the barn after the fire and put her hands into the pocket of her coat to feel if the burned soil she had carried from Scotland was still there. She felt a slight lift in her stomach when her fingers touched the earthy ash, and for no reason she began to mix it with the soil in the pots.

‘Water,’ she said aloud.

There had to be a well or something in the vicinity – as she was walking out, she almost tripped over another of the pipes which was running along the centre of the room under the vines. The answer to their peculiar shape came to her in such a flash she could only imagine that she must have read about it
somewhere in a book: steam. The closed pipes heated the trays on top, which were filled with water and made steam. If they made steam, there must be water nearby. The thought had barely occurred to her before she was drawn to a thicket of nettles behind the back end of the building, and pushing them aside, there was a water pump. She found the handle of the pump and pulled it upwards. It was stiff and took some strength, but Aileen found she had it, and more besides! She pumped the stiff handle up and down until she thought it would yield nothing, but then, after a few minutes, a splatter of rusted liquid ran out of its tap. She speeded up her pumping and before she knew it there was clean water spraying down onto the ground in front of her. Aileen’s boots and skirt got soaked and she screamed, then, laughing out loud, ran back to the greenhouse to fetch the dusty pots with the Scottish soil.

She watered each of the pots and laid them down next to the pump. Aileen was astonished how the soil seemed to come back to life as she made a cup of her hand and spooned the water into each one. Seeing how springy and new the nettles were in that area, Aileen intuited that the ground underneath them must be especially fertile, so she clawed with her fingers around the pump and supplemented the pots with some of the rich black soil she found there.

As she picked up two of the bigger pots to carry back into the glasshouse, Aileen stood for a moment and got an overwhelming feeling of excitement in the pit of her stomach. Greater than when she had heard her father was bringing her to Scotland, greater than the anticipation of her travelling on a train or a boat. There was no reason for it that she could think of except for the notion that entered her head, which was, the greenhouse, the pump. If she cleared some of these weeds outside as well, goodness knows what treasures she might find.

Without caution for her nice clothes or her bare arms, Aileen tore around the garden. In the overgrowth round the back of the glasshouse and the pump Aileen quickly found a spade, a rake, an old wheelbarrow and a rusted long-handled scythe. Armed with these weapons, she began to battle the overgrowth and discover the garden underneath. Every swipe of the scythe seemed to reveal something new: a bunch of fledgling hollyhocks cowering behind a bank of swaying scutch grass; the stone wall of what was once a flower bed with giant sweet peas, their delicate purple and blue flowers clambering heroically among the weedy litter of spent dandelions and dead scrubs. One undulating stretch of ground had such regular little hillocks that Aileen knew it could only have been used for potato ridges, and next to it was another, raised bed, which she guessed would have been ideal for lettuces. Across from them was a huge lump of foliage almost as tall as a tree. After some investigation, Aileen discovered it was wrapped round a triangular metal structure that had probably been used for climbing peas.

At the very back of the field, there was a small stone cottage with a pretty scalloped door frame. Aileen stepped inside reluctantly. It had been empty for years and was eerie and damp. Aileen got a peculiar fright when she saw signs of human life – a few broken plates, a rotting chair – and having neither the desire nor the curiosity to explore the remnants of somebody else’s existence, she left immediately. There was so much more to be found: flowering apple trees; a bank of gooseberry bushes in fruit, their plump, sour balls already rotting underfoot; a sea of rhubarb as fat and red and juicy as she had ever seen. There were tall balls of purple flowers that smelt of onions, clambering roses that led her to another gate at the back wall, which, as far as she could tell, led out into the island itself. It seemed to Aileen that this garden was a kind of island in itself. At the
moment, Illaunmor was bleak and boggy with an emotional thunderous sky. In this garden, there were flowers and fruits and things to distract her.

Aileen was so busy adventuring through this magical place that when she remembered to look at John Joe’s watch to see if it was time to collect the children, she could barely read its face because it had grown so dark. It was 9 p.m. Could it be that late? Oh my goodness, the children! John Joe would be out of his mind with worry! Aileen ran through the door, past the ornamental garden and to the front of the house. The cart was there, but the horse was gone. Aileen thought she should have tied him up, but then she had become so absorbed in the garden she had forgotten about the poor animal – small wonder he had abandoned her. He was an old horse and knew his way around the island with little to no guidance from a driver, so she hoped that he had wandered home to John Joe and alerted him to collect the children, who were, in all likelihood, with the nice teacher, who would surely not have left them at the side of the road.

As she began to calm herself down, Aileen felt a strange ease come over her that she could not recall having felt for a long time. Certainly not since she was a small child, perhaps, snoozing in the arms of her father on a warm day on the beach to the whisper of the shore, although this felt like a different kind of peace. There was an indefinable quiet here in this garden; it was as if God was with her, even though it felt as if He had long since abandoned her. Even that thought could not deter the deep feeling of peace that had begun to take her over. Aileen climbed up into the back of the cart, and pulling the blanket over her, she lay down on the painted wooden slats and looked up at the night sky. The island was far west of mainland Ireland and at this time of year the sky itself held some light until almost
midnight. The clouds moved across her eyeline like kindly, fat ghosts, and before long she had fallen into a deep, empty, dreamless sleep.

‘Aileen. Aileen.’

John Joe was calling her. It was dawn and she drew back with a shiver in the damp air as her bones caught up with the idea that she was cold.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

He had the horse with him. The animal had led him here; the two of them must have walked across the island to get her. They might have been walking all night.

‘I’m sorry, John Joe,’ she said.

The older man surely had questions: how could she have forgotten to collect the children from school? What had she been doing here all night? However, he did not ask them and she offered nothing to him.

Instead, he tethered the tired old horse to the cart and the two of them travelled back across the island to the burgeoning of the day in comfortable silence.