Lynne Truss - With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

Phew, it’s hot work, gardening. I am not a celebrity like Melvyn Bragg and Anna Ford but I would let you rummage in my shed if you asked me!! I’ve got all sorts of odds and ends that nobody knows about tucked away behind the flower-pots. If you catch my drift.

Yours affectionately,

G. Clarke,

Honiton, Devon

Osborne was slightly embarrassed. But at least it made a change from the terracotta maniacs. He finished his coffee in a single swig, and shrugged at Makepeace.

‘Mad, I expect,’ he said.

‘There’s more,’ said Makepeace.

Osborne shuffled the papers and found the second letter, identically typed, and on the same-sized paper as the first. It seemed to be from the same person, but it had a distinctly different tone.

Dear Mr Lonsdale,

Having counted no less than 15 errors of fact (not to mention grammar) in your last ‘Me and My Shed’ column, isn’t it time you stopped pretending to be a journalist? Call yourself a writer well I don’t think. I could do better myself, and thats saying something. I haven’t even met Trent Carmichael. How much longer must we be subjected to this slapdash twaddle masquerading as journalism? I am surprised anyone agrees to be interviewed by you. Do you know you make all the sheds sound the same? Why does a magazine of such evident quality continue to employ you? Stay out of sheds and do us a favour.

G. Clarke,

Honiton, Devon

P.S. Someone ought to lock you in a shed and throw away the key.

‘What do you think?’ asked Makepeace.

‘Bugger,’ said Osborne.

Lillian lit a cigarette, narrowing her eyes against the smoke, and looked round to check that no one was watching. Coughing, she leaned back and continued to ignore the ringing of the phone. There is a cool, insolent way that blonde, permanent-waved secretaries inspect their fingernails in old film noir movies, and Lillian, a baby blonde herself in an electric-blue angora woolly, attempted it now, arching her eyebrows like Marlene Dietrich; but then suddenly broke the illusion by tearing off the broken top of her thumbnail with a savage rip from her teeth. She looked round again, smiling, spat the nail expertly into a waste-paper basket and tried momentarily to imagine what it would be like to be deaf.

Since the announcement of the takeover of Come Into the Garden, the phone had not stopped ringing. The newspapers were not very interested; but readers would phone in panic, selfishly demanding reassurance that the magazine would not cease publication just when the greenfly problem was at its height, or when the monthly ‘Build your own greenhouse’ series reached a crucial stage in the glazing. Lillian fielded these inquiries in a variety of ways. For example, sometimes she simply unplugged the phone. At other times she answered, but pretended to be speaking from the swimming baths. And sometimes, as now, she sat and suffered its ringing, perched on her typist’s chair with her legs crossed and with her eyes fixed steadily on the ceiling.

To add to the picture of martyrdom, a new sign hung above her desk, with the legend ‘Is Peace and Quiet So Much to Ask?’ But a keen-eyed observer might also notice that today Lillian was mixing her metaphors, for her corner of the office was adorned with items suggestive less of pietism than of couch potato. A fluffy rug had appeared; also a standard lamp, a magazine rack and a basket with knitting in it. Half a sitting-room, in fact, had blossomed overnight where previously had stood only furniture and fittings appropriate to the office of a small magazine. She was not using this stuff yet, but it was there, and it was obviously permanent. It was a statement of intent.

Apart from the phone ringing, the office was quiet again. Friday was the day when most of the editorial staff decamped to the typesetters, to sit on broken chairs in a makeshift work-room from six in the morning and wait miserably all day for proofs to correct. Lillian had never visited the typesetters, and imagined it, rather perversely, as some sort of holiday camp. The word ‘buns’ had once been mentioned in her hearing, and this had unaccountably conjured to her mind a scene of great frivolity, like something Christmassy in Dickens. Perhaps she thought the sub-editors tossed these buns across the room at each other, or had races to pick out the most currants or lemon peel. Who knows? Envy can play funny tricks on a person’s mind. Anyway, the fact that Tim and Michelle would return late on Friday afternoons actually stumbling with fatigue failed utterly to shake Lillian’s notion of Typesetter Heaven. ‘No, I’m afraid Michelle is not in the office today,’ she would report to the editor (who sometimes popped in on Fridays to check his post for job offers). ‘She has got the day off, at the typesetters. I expect she will be back at work next week.’

Suddenly, on a whim, Lillian answered the phone.

‘Come Into the Garden,’ she snapped, making sure it didn’t sound too much like an invitation.

‘For heaven’s sake, Lillian, where were you?’

It was Michelle. Lillian pursed her lips and made a series of smoke rings by jabbing her cigarette in the air.

‘Did you say where was I?’ she repeated carefully. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I was stuck in the bloody lift, that’s where I was.’

Michelle ignored this. Life was too short to argue about it.

‘Listen, could I be a desperate bore and ask you to do something for me? I brought my “Dear Donald” file with me, and a couple of letters are missing. Would you be unbelievably selfless and helpful, and look on my desk for them?’

Lillian prepared to stand up, but then thought better of it.

‘The letters to Osborne from Honiton?’

‘What?’ Michelle sounded rather indistinct, suddenly.

‘The letters to Osborne. From Honiton.’

‘No,’ she said, after a noticeable pause. ‘Ha ha, I don’t think I’ve seen any letters to Osborne. No. Not from Honiton, I don’t think. Hmm. I mean, surely they would be sent straight to him, wouldn’t they? Nothing to do with “Dear Donald”. Or to do with me, for that matter.’

‘I suppose not.’

Lillian waited. She had known Michelle for fifteen years. This pally ‘ha ha’ business told her something was up. The seconds ticked by. ‘So,’ said Michelle at last, ‘have you got the letters to Osborne? I wouldn’t mind a peek.’

‘No can do, I’m afraid. I sent them on yesterday.’

Michelle gasped.

‘To Osborne?’

‘That’s right.’ ‘Oh.’

‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

Lillian took a deep, satisfying drag on the cigarette. ‘By the way, you haven’t seen my big packet of cup-soups by any chance?’

Osborne turned the letters over in his hands, and felt peculiar. Peculiar was the only word for it. Makepeace meanwhile took a large bite out of a fried-egg sandwich and tried to imagine what it would be like to realize one morning that you had a fan in the West Country who entertained schizophrenic delusions about you while dressed in gold flip-flops and reinforced gloves. It was hard.

‘I don’t like this bit about slapdash twaddle,’ said Osborne at last.

‘Hmm,’ agreed Makepeace.

‘I mean, what does she take me for? You don’t expect Tolstoy in a piece about sheds, surely?’

Makepeace grunted, wiped some egg-yolk from his chin and prepared to contest the point. ‘Except that all happy sheds are happy in the same way, I suppose,’ he volunteered, reaching for a serviette. ‘While unhappy sheds …’ But he tailed off, sensing he had lost his audience. Osborne looked nonplussed.