Lynne Truss - With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

And not for the first time, Tim would wriggle miserably, like bait on a hook, and think how clever Ulysses had been, in the old story, to lash himself to a mast, with ear-plugs.

That Tim did not remember Mike McCarthy, Lillian knew full well. Tim had been deputy editor for only a year, and had taken the job straight from a postgraduate journalism course. In fact, at the time of Mike McCarthy’s ill-fated editorship, Tim had still been a quiet bespectacled schoolboy dreaming of a career modelled on Norman Mailer’s, and wondering how his myopia, general weediness and night-time emissions would affect his chance of success. But it was Tim’s newness, more than his youth, that put him at a disadvantage where Lillian was concerned, despite the fact he had done more for the magazine in a year than she had done since circa 1978. Michelle and Lillian had come into the garden long before everyone else, and the length of their stay was an accomplishment for which they both demanded a high level of respect. At the all-too-frequent leaving parties – for the transient editor (or whoever) whose nugatory role in the magazine’s forty-year history was ruthlessly scratched from the record the moment he hit the pavement outside (‘Mike who? I don’t recall’) – the heroic span of Lillian and Michelle was usually trotted out again, mainly because it was the one single topic either of them could be persuaded to talk about in company.

For people with so little in common, it was noticeable how much Michelle and Lillian made comparisons with one another. True, they were the same age, forty-two; they had both worked at Come Into the Garden for fifteen years; and neither could stick being in the same room with the other. But that was it; these were the only points at which their experience coincided. On this crucial length-of-service issue, in fact, Michelle could just remember life before Lillian, in that same wistful glimpse-of-yesterday’s-sunshine sort of way that some people can just remember being happy before the war, or sex before Aids, or global innocence before the Bomb. And when asked politely by craven sub-editors about the changes she had seen (at those godforsaken leaving parties amid the crisps and sausage rolls), Michelle was good at saying, with her eyes fixed musingly on the ceiling, ‘Well, funnily enough I can just remember life before Lillian,’ pronouncing the words with such perfectly judged emphasis that everyone latched on to the war-Aids-and-Bomb analogy without it ever being openly stated.

Come Into the Garden was a miserable, inert place to work, no doubt about it. Osborne’s joy in turning up once a week to soak up the atmosphere was a measure of his desperation, nothing more. This was the sort of office where the plants embraced easeful death like an old friend, the stationery cupboard gave a wild, disordered suggestion of marauders on horseback, and nobody washed the coffee cups until the bacterial cultures had grown so active they could be seen performing push-ups and forward-rolls. There is a theory that says if employees have few outside distractions (i.e. don’t have much of a home-life), they will make the most of work, but in the case of Come Into the Garden the opposite appeared to be true. Miserable at home meant dismal all round. The words ‘Get a life!’ were once hurled at an affronted Michelle by a fly-by-night sub as he stalked out one day at the typesetters, never to return. It was a brutal thing to say (the other subs exchanged significant glances before silently dividing the recreant’s bun), yet nobody could deny it was an accurate assessment of the problem.

For Michelle’s self-sacrifice was an appalling trap, with glaringly few personal compensations. And unfortunately it affected everyone, because she measured commitment by the yardstick of her own strict voluntary martyrdom. People resented this; it put them in a no-win situation. Besides the sub-editors under Michelle’s control whom we have heard about, there were four colleagues with status equal or superior to hers – art editor (Marian), features editor (Mark), advertising manager (Toby) and deputy editor (Tim) – all of whom periodically took grave offence at Michelle’s continual assertion that she cared a hundred times more about the magazine than they could possibly do. ‘No, no, you go home, Tim,’ she would say. ‘Why should you hang around? I know how you love Inspector Morse. Leave everything to me. I’m usually here until half-past nine anyway. I’ve been here for fifteen years, don’t forget; I ought to be used to it by now!’

Michelle’s big mistake was to suppose she had no illusions. Just because she had seen a few dozen colleagues come and go, loam-free, and had sub-edited several hundred celebrity interviews about sheds (in which Osborne did indeed make all the sheds sound the same), she thought she had seen it all. But alas, she was wrong. A lifetime of rewriting ‘Me and My Shed’ was not the worst hand fate could deal you, not by a long chalk. What she was yet to discover, as she sat on the kitchen floor on that Friday night with only the unknown whereabouts of Mother’s trick severed hand to disturb her mind, was that James Mainwaring (or was it John?) had already been declared the last editor of Come Into the Garden. The last ever, that is. If all went according to plan, those anxious readers who had phoned about ‘Build your own greenhouse’ had been absolutely right to worry: they would soon be left high and dry with a stack of panes and a lot of wet putty on their hands. And Come Into the Garden, for all the sacrifice it had wrung from Michelle, would return to the earth from which it came; ashes to ashes, compost to compost, dust to dust. No one at Come Into the Garden would survive to say ‘Michelle who?’ some day; nothing would remain.

For while she knew that the publishers, Wm Frobisher, had sold the title along with its lucrative seaside postcards business to an extremely youthful entrepreneur in the West Country, she did not yet know that the said young whippersnapper had decided immediately to close it down, merely retaining the Victoria premises of Come Into the Garden for his own personal headquarters. She did not know that the typesetters and printers had already been contacted by the whippersnapper’s solicitors; or that a personal letter to each of the staff was already sitting on the whippersnapper’s breakfast nook, awaiting signature. The little upstart had already inspected the building with his dad, in fact, and the spooky truth was that he had taken one look at Michelle’s little corner and earmarked it immediately as the proposed position for his own executive desk. He had even helped himself to one of her Extra Strong Mints and admired her range of nail varnish.

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