Sarah May - The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

She put the letter in an inside pocket of her suitcase, then, still humming, went into the kitchen and made herself a sandwich out of WeightWatchers’ bread, cottage cheese and the tinned pineapple she’d opened that morning, and took this through to the lounge where she settled into the sofa in time for the Dynasty rerun she was following. Joan Collins thrilled her—had always thrilled her. If she was truthful, she’d put on her green and aubergine outfit, new blue shoes and make-up as much for Joan as she had for Robert.

Joan Collins and Margaret Thatcher made her proud to be a woman.

Parking beneath a bank of beech trees—the Hunters’ was the only car there—Kate got out and opened the boot, putting on one of Robert’s old jackets, the pockets weighed down with conkers he must have gathered months ago—back in the autumn before Flo was born.

Findlay, who was singing, ‘Happy birthday to me…happy birthday to me,’ refused to get out of the car, worried that the rain would shrink his foam musculature.

‘Okay, okay, but I want you to stay there in the back,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t want you going in the front or touching any of the controls. Findlay…are you listening to me? I said, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME…Findlay?’ she yelled.

Ignoring Findlay’s stunned face, she slammed the boot shut, picked up Flo—who was chewing on her fist, asleep—and stalked off across the allotments towards the one they’d had their name down on a two-year waiting list for.

Keeping the plot—once assigned to you—was almost as hard as acquiring it in the first place. Letitia Parry, chair of the Allotment Committee, made a formal inspection of all the plots the first Sunday of every month, and if it wasn’t up to scratch you were dispossessed of it. Not a monthly inspection went by without a dispossession getting chalked up on the board that Letitia kept hung outside the committee’s old Nissen hut—a board that Giles Parry had spent a fortnight making a waterproof hatch for so that not even rain could wash away the incriminating evidence. Letitia was so harsh that families and individuals—once dispossessed—preferred to forsake tools and anything else they’d bought for their plots rather than face Letitia and get formally drummed out into the wilderness of the rest of the world where there were no allotments.

A man named Gordon, who used to have one of the full plots two down but was unable to keep it up due to the onset of Parkinson’s, tried to come back for tools given him by his dead wife on their last wedding anniversary. He left his car down by the golf club at around midnight and crept, shaking, through the orange London dark, past the old scout hut to the top of the hill where the allotments were. He’d brought his torch, but he didn’t want to use it—just in case. So he skirted the fringes of the allotments, winding his way through the halo of beech trees—all that remained of the prehistoric Great North Woods—until he reached his plot.

He’d been worried—all day—that the padlock on his shed might have been changed, but it hadn’t, and he hissed with relief when the key fitted. So he opened the shed door with difficulty because the key was so small…and there was Letitia, sitting on one of his deckchairs, pointing a torch with its beam on full at him. Before he was allowed his tools back, he had to stand there, shaking—at 12.22 a.m.—and listen to the whole lecture on neglect as a form of vandalism, and the impact it had on the ongoing battle the committee was waging trying to keep the land out of the hands of the local council—and all the time he was standing there in the shed, his arm held shakily across his eyes to shield them from Letitia’s beam, which she kept on full throughout, he was thinking…how did she manage to lock the bloody padlock FROM THE INSIDE?

Months of mental torment passed before Gordon found out that Letitia had asked Giles to lock her in—and not just the night Gordon turned up at midnight either, but every night since the dispossession notice had been chalked up on the committee board.

The Grangers used to have a plot, but Ros fell out with Letitia over ideas she had about permaculture and was finally dispossessed when she covered the entire plot in old carpet they’d had ripped up from their study floor—with the idea of replenishing the soil’s nutrients by leaving the plot fallow for six months. The carpet had Letitia yelping at Ros from inside the huge body warmer she wore, summer and winter, which was covered in manure stains long since gone shiny—not only because it desecrated the plot, but because Letitia and Giles had just had exactly the same carpet put down in their sitting room.

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