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‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I thought it must be something like that.’

‘You mean you worked it out, and you’ve been torturing me all this time?’

‘Not exactly,’ I said, doing my most maddening impersonation of serenity. ‘I just thought it must be something like that.’

The answer to a riddle, like the last chapter of a detective story, is at best a crowning disappointment. The only consolation is to pass the riddle on, so as to relive your disappointment at one remove. Or to read another detective story. In practice everyone agreed with me (once they had heard those riddles’ solutions) that they enjoyed the questions more than the answers, but they seemed to think that sooner
or later another riddle would have a satisfying solution, as if there was no general rule involved. As far as I could see, though, questions and answers didn’t have much of an affinity. You could even say they were natural enemies.

Home wine-making was one thing I discovered at Barbara Broier’s house. Another was Victor Borge’s ‘phonetic punctuation’, which the two of us heard one Saturday on Radio 2, as the Light Programme was now called. This was a classic comic routine in which Mr Borge spoke the printer’s marks out loud. We loved it, and started to imitate him. We didn’t have the original to consult (or a recording), and I imagine there was a certain amount of drift between the acoustic representations we heard that one time on the radio, and our own repertoire of homage. Our full stop (I can’t vouch for his) was a popping noise made with the lips, our comma a click of the tongue, our exclamation mark a downward-whistle-and-pop.

This was a party trick well suited to my talents, the tongue being the only muscle in my body that was perfectly obedient. The underlying idea was also vastly appealing, this Peasants’ Revolt of underclass marks, the voiceless ones, socially invisible, storming the citadel of speech.

In time, though, it became a compulsion, and my party trick become more like a brush with mental illness. I found it a real effort to leave stops unvoiced, even when answering a teacher’s question during a lesson. The return of the repressed isn’t a process that is easy to put into reverse. It isn’t a straightforward job to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box of punctuation, and that little tic took a long time to die down. It helped if I asked Barbara to sit far away from me in class. Then the hysteria had a chance to die down, though our friendship stalled, rather, with what looked like rejection on my part. Sometimes I would get panicky when she spoke to me, for fear that I would erupt again, a displaced Pentecostalist bearing witness to his molten God not in tongues but spoken signs.

When autumn came the family’s wine-making activities tailed off, since fermentation became too slow for good results. I looked around
for a new project to maintain our momentum, and suggested that Dad occupy his time by growing mushrooms in the greenhouse. ‘It’ll give a bit of heat to the plants,’ I said, ‘And the insulating effect will lower our fuel bills.’

Dad might reasonably have answered, ‘When did you give a fig for our heating bills, John, with your taste for leaving doors open in all weathers?’ Instead he buckled down to become a mushroom farmer.

It was a funny old psychology that he had. He liked to know what he was supposed to do, which was easily managed when he was at work. Inside a proper cage of rules he could be very unyielding – so that my phoning him at work was a tremendous liberty that must be stamped on and prevented from recurring. But at home he had less sense of running on rails, and at the weekends he was almost grateful to have me organise his time. He tried to get me interested in what interested him, but at this stage I was fairly resistant and it’s fair to say that the flow of hobbies was more the other way.

Soon I was giving orders, watching him mixing horse dung, straw and organic composting powder, testing the temperature with a hotbed thermometer. We bought the spawn by mail order from a local farm which advertised in
Exchange & Mart
and even undertook to buy the crop back from us when it was ready. We couldn’t lose.

There was great excitement when we saw bits of the peat casing begin to heave with fungal nodes. Everyone went to look in admiration at the little pearls as they grew steadily bigger. We patted ourselves on the back. All that hard work was worth it.

Finally it was time to pick some of our crop and taste them. ‘Would you care for some mushrooms, m’dear?’ Dad asked, doing a jovial pastiche of what he imagined was Peter’s manner at work. ‘They’re from Chef’s own garden.’

‘Yes please, Dennis,’ said Mum, and then ‘I don’t think this is a good one, though, dear. Can I try again?’ They were none of them good. We couldn’t lose – yet somehow we managed it. Something rather ghastly was eating them before we had a chance. Our fungi had funguses of their own.

I scolded Dad for cutting corners with his fungiculture – he had turned the mass too little, he hadn’t been particular enough about the temperature of the hotbed, which was crucial. This can’t have been
much fun for him. Mum joined in with me in what must have been a horrendous alliance. To be hen-pecked and chick-pecked simultaneously, what a fate.

I was already firmly established as the family’s telephone wheedler, and I got on the phone to the farm. ‘I’m afraid there’s something gone wrong with our crop – do you want to come and inspect it?’ Suppressed panic leaked down the line. The response was very clear:
Don’t
for God’s sake bring them here!

Dad said he didn’t see the harm in us paying a visit. Privately I thought we would be as welcome as Blind Pew at the Admiral Benbow, primed to pass on the Black Spot to poor Billy Bones, but I also thought it might be fun to make them sit up and take notice. We took a few of our stricken mushrooms with us, though we left them politely in the car. We were relying quite a bit on the ‘knock’ effect of the wheelchair. The chair always knocked people back, and then they tended to lose track of their normal behaviour patterns.

Knock knock! Who’s there? Abel. Abel who? Able-bodied dismay. I asked the farmer if there was any medicine we could administer to our defective mushrooms.

‘Um … There’s powder I could give you.’

‘Will that work?’

‘No. I’m not hopeful. Best to dispose of them carefully and start again from scratch.’

All the same, they gave us a huge tray of mushrooms to compensate for the failure of our crop. This was a very welcome knock-on effect of our visit. We were many pounds of mushrooms to the good, though the truth was that we none of us cared all that much for mushrooms. It was the activity that was important, the uniting fever of a hobby, and the mushrooms, like the wine we made, were a sort of side-effect, almost a nuisance which we would have done without if we’d been able.

When both of us enjoyed the product as well as the process, though, we made quite a team. I privately claimed credit for having made the conservatory happen, but I have to give Dad his due in matters of siting and temperature control. He knew what he was doing. The dry, desert half of the conservatory was for Mum, of course, but also cacti (mainly grown from seed) and
Drosophyllum
s to boot, though the
first few batches didn’t seem too happy. It’s a temperamental plant, though, everyone knows that. The dry bit of the conservatory had a door into the garden for when it grew too hot, even for Mum.

The damp greenhousy part, which was kept shadier, had no external door. There was plenty of sun both morning and evening, with shade being provided by the trees, carefully pruned to allow a rich flow of air under their branches and over the greenhouse top. Just the sort of conditions your
Cymbidium
orchid is partial to. Moving patches of sunlight generated a really nice tropical fug, ideal for drosera, sarracenias and (even if it was just the once) an Australian
byblis
which Dad raised from seed.

It all worked beautifully, even if
Drosophyllum
wasn’t persuaded yet. I would have liked to convey my appreciation to Dad, but compliments were never really part of our currency, in either direction.

Even after the mushroom débâcle I hadn’t altogether lost my touch with Dad. It made sense to go on pressurising him for things, just to keep in practice for when it was really important. In one of his
Telegraph
s, probably a Sunday one, I saw an advertisement for an eiderdown called the Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud. There was a splendid picture illustrating the virtues of the product. It showed a girl ensconced under her eiderdown, warm as toast, radiantly smiling, despite the ice blocks surrounding her, which seemed to crimp the crust-edges of a strawberry-apple-girl pie.

I wanted a Dream-Cloud immediately. It was the perfect solution to my odd combination of needs, my love of fresh air in all seasons and weather coupled with this body’s intolerance of cold. There were various levels of insulating excellence, with goose down at the top. That’s what I wanted, goose down and nothing less, and I wore Dad down, though he did some bargaining of his own. It was finally agreed that the Dream-Cloud represented two birthdays and one Christmas. Dad said, ‘You’d just better promise that you’ll make it last.’ That was just like him, to save face by taking a hard line – even after he had caved in.

I read and re-read
Gardening for Adventure
, from its first page to the
last, and the ones after that. I’ve always had a particular fondness for indexes, bibliographies and postscripts – everything that publishers call ‘back matter’.
Gardening for Adventure
had something I myself had lacked for some years now, an Appendix, which listed suppliers of plants. Number 17 on the list of 35 was Major V. F. Howell, of Firethorn, Oxshot Way, Cobham, Surrey. There were other suppliers relatively near, but I have to admit I was attracted by the idea of ordering plants from a Major.

Majors have popped up at the edge of my life from time to time – starting with the Air Force colleague and friend of Dad’s, Kit Draper, who was officially known as the Mad Major. All of them have been somewhat eccentric, though I doubt if the rank of Major actively generates quirks. More likely it’s the highest military position compatible with independence of mind.

I wrote to Major Howell asking for his terms of business. When he wrote back I felt that my choice of him had immediately been vindicated. His ‘catalogue’ was made up of sheets of foolscap paper. There was an introductory paragraph, and then a bald list of the Latin names of plant seeds he had in stock, typed in capital letters. Major Howell’s seed exchange was totally egalitarian. Seeds were seeds were seeds were seeds. Common grass seed might sit next to the most exotic orchids, and the strychnine tree be cheek by jowl with meadowsweet – but only if their alphabetical position dictated that arrangement. In Major Howell’s pages, breeding meant nothing, family meant nothing, and size meant nothing.
CYMBIDIUM
and
COCOS NUCIFERA
were in hailing distance of one another on the page, although
Cymbid
ium
is an orchid plant with seed so fine it blows away at the slightest puff of wind, travelling almost infinitely far, and
Cocos nucifera
is a monster.

This was not a conventional business at all but something described as a ‘seed exchange’, a loving and utopian project. We were already living in the Age of Aquarius, though we didn’t yet know it. Rumours trickled across the Atlantic with the news that on the New York stage naked performers mixed with the audience at the end of a show called
Hair
, and in Surrey a military man was running a commercial enterprise as if it was some sort of anarchist commune for seeds.

I passed the list across to Dad, who read through it closely before
declaring, ‘The chap’s obviously potty. Take this item, for heaven’s sake …’ – he pointed out a name on the list – ‘it’s so darn common I only have to open the kitchen window and lean out and it’s almost in the palm of my hand. And
Cocos nucifera
… Have you any idea what that is?’

‘Is it a kind of palm?’

‘Not bad, not bad,’ Dad said. ‘
Cocos nucifera
is a coconut. Nothing more, nothing less. Why buy a coconut from this chappie? I can get a coconut in Maidenhead!’

‘I think …’ I said, instinctively defending the Major’s eccentricities, ‘the Major is referring to the fact that it may be a mere coconut, but that doesn’t stop it being a seed. Why should the poor coconut be banned from a seed-list? A seed is what it is. Aren’t you always telling me not to make the mistake of despising a plant because it’s common?’

Dad just grunted, but soon his eye fell on something more interesting. There were some fascinating items on the list, in among the common grasses and fairground prizes. There were plenty of
Drosera
species which we didn’t have, and soon we were making a shopping list of our own. Dad decided that we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of some interesting specimens just because the man was potty. Major Howell had converted me instantly, but it took Dad a little longer to come round. He came to mock and stayed to fill in an order form. Soon the Cromers, father and son, were regular customers.

The introductory paragraph of the list explained how the system operated. All seeds in the list were equal, and as far as Major Howell was concerned one item could never be more (or less) equal than any other item – even if one was the size of a cannonball and the other a sprinkling of dusty spores. So you could choose whichever seed you wanted. As far as I remember these were the rules:

Seeds shall be ordered in units. A UNIT shall be six packets of seed plus
a GRATIS specimen. A customer who orders two units shall be entitled to a
third GRATIS unit, as well as the GRATIS specimens included in the units
themselves.

If you have seed which is not in the list, you may exchange it for any item
in the list when ordering one or more units. Major Howell does not give cash
for seeds.

A packet of seeds (which might contain many seeds, or a few, or just one, depending on size and rarity) cost 5d, so that each unit cost 3/-. It was all splendidly idealistic but also terribly practical. Dad and I ordered two units from the list. I tried to scribble ‘
Cocos nucifera
’ on the form while he wasn’t looking, but furtiveness is not my forte and he found me out. He wouldn’t wear it. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I hope you realise that the old boy has to pay postage costs. In his eyes all seeds may be equal, but I doubt if the GPO will see it that way. Coconuts are heavy items. It will be expensive and inconvenient for him. And I know exactly why you’re trying this on. You enjoy creating maximum inconvenience with everything you do. That’s you all over, John! But not this time.’ I don’t think my psychology was really so complicated. I hadn’t wanted
Cocos nucifera
in the first place until I was told I couldn’t have it. Then it became a project and the thing I wanted above all others. It’s a mental mechanism which has served me well, all in all – it got me walking, didn’t it?