V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

But after some time, after many weeks, when he felt perhaps that the effort wouldn’t be wasted, he adopted me. And from a great distance, as soon as he saw me, he would boom out a greeting, which came over less as defined words than as a deliberate making of noise in the silence.

I saw him more clearly when he worked in the garden at the front (or back) of his cottage, and most clearly of all when he worked in his wire-fenced bedding-out plot, turning over the soft, dark, much-sifted earth below the old hawthorn tree. That brought back very old memories to me, of Trinidad, of a small house my father had once built on a hill and a garden he had tried to get started in a patch of cleared bush: old memories of dark, wet, warm earth and green things growing, old instincts, old delights. And I had an immense feeling for Jack, for the strength and curious delicacy of his forking-and-sifting gesture, the harmony of hand and foot. I saw too, as the months went by, his especial, exaggerated style with clothes: bare-backed in summer at the first hint of sun, muffled up as soon as the season turned. I grew to see his clothes as emblematic of the particular season: like something from a modern book of hours.

And then one day he, like the farm manager in his Land-Rover, stopped in his car on the steep hill from the farm buildings up beside the windbreak to the barn. Jack and the other cottagers had motorcars; without cars they would not have been able to live easily in those cottages; the cottages were too far from the public road and many miles from shops — I believe that the postman called only once a week.

I had heard the car and stood aside. It was what you had to do on this narrow farm road. (If you wished to hide, you could stand in the windbreak itself, among the beeches and pines, in the shaded litter of fallen branches.) It was from this stepping aside and watching them pass in their cars or tractors that I had got to know the farm workers. And they, after the solitude of their tractor cabs and the downs, were invariably ready for a wave and a smile. It was the limit of communication; there was really nothing to add to the wave, the smile, the human acknowledgment.

So it now turned out with Jack, though this stopping in his own car, in his free time, was special. We looked at each other, examined each other, made noises rather than talked.

I had always noticed his pointed beard. Seeing him from a distance, I had thought of this beard as part of a young man’s dash. Seeing him digging, considering his height, the depth of his chest, the sturdiness of his legs, his upright, easy walk, I had thought of him as a young man. But I saw now that his beard was almost gray; he was in his late forties, perhaps.

His eyes were far away. It was his eyes, oddly obstreperous, oddly jumpy, that gave him away, that said he was after all a farm worker, that in another setting, in a more crowded or competitive place, he might have sunk. And the discovery was a little disconcerting, because (after I had got rid of the idea that he was a remnant of an old peasantry) I had found in that beard of his, and in his bearing, his upright, easy, elegant walk, the attributes of a man with a high idea of himself, a man who had out of principle turned away from other styles of life.

We had had little to say, but a neighborliness had been established between us, and it continued to be expressed in his shout from afar.

His garden taught me about the seasons, and I got to know in a new way things I must have seen many times before. I saw the blossom come on his well-pruned apple trees, got to know the color of the blossom, carried it in my mind (and was able therefore always to recall it), attached it to a particular time of year; saw the small fruit form, hang green, grow with the rest of the garden, and then turn color.

I saw the fertility that at first did not seem possible in this chalky, flinty soil which in the summer could show white. In England I was not a gardener and had not taken much interest in the little front gardens I had seen (and saw even now, from the bus into Salisbury). Looking at those gardens, I saw only colors, and was barely able visually to disentangle one plant from another. But afternoon by afternoon I considered Jack’s garden, noticing his labor, and looking to see what his labor brought forth.

I saw with the eyes of pleasure. But knowledge came slowly to me. It was not like the almost instinctive knowledge that had come to me as a child of the plants and flowers of Trinidad; it was like learning a second language. If I knew then what I know now I would be able to reconstruct the seasons of Jack’s garden or gardens. But I can remember only simple things like the bulbs of spring; the planting out of annuals like marigolds and petunias; the delphiniums and lupines of high summer; and flowers like the gladiolus which, to my delight, flourished in both the climate of England and the tropical climate of Trinidad. There were also the roses trained about tall, stout poles, with hundreds of blooms; and then, on those small apple trees, always pruned down, the wonder of the fruit swelling in the autumn, touched in that cool season with the warmest tints, and looking like the apple trees in a children’s book or a schoolbook seen long ago.

At the back of his cottage — the back being where the true front now was, the true entrance from the droveway — there was a greenhouse. It looked like the greenhouses advertised in newspapers and magazines, and might have been bought by mail order. In this greenhouse, resting on a concrete base, oddly level and new and formal in the open littered ground between the old farmyard and the cottages, littered with cottagers’ stuff as well as with the farm debris of years, and not far from the ruined old pens where sick cattle and calves were sometimes kept, trampling their own dung into moss-covered black earth, in this greenhouse with its straight lines, new wood, and clear glass, Jack grew the overcultivated flowers and plants of the English greenhouse — the extraordinary fuchsias, for example, which were thought to be so pretty.

So many things to look after! So many different things to grow at different times! Jack, it seemed, was looking for labor, looking for tasks, seeking to keep himself busy. And then it came to me that more than busyness, the filling of the day, was involved, and more than money, the extra money Jack might have made from selling his plants and vegetables. It seemed that in that patch of ground, amid the derelict buildings of a superseded kind of farming (fewer and less efficient machines, many more human hands available in this county of Wiltshire, known in the last century for the poverty of its farm laborers), Jack had found fulfillment.

My wonder at the satisfactions of his life — a man in his own setting, as I thought (to me an especially happy condition), a man in tune with the seasons and his landscape — my wonder turned to envy one Sunday afternoon, when going out after lunch for my walk, I saw Jack’s little car bumping about towards his cottage along the wide, rutted droveway, and not doing the more usual thing of coming down the paved lane beside the windbreak. He had been to the pub. His face was inflamed. His shout when he saw me — and he seemed to lean out of the car window — was wonderfully hearty.

Sunday! But why had he chosen to turn off at the grassy droveway? Why hadn’t he driven the half a mile or so further up to the more usual way in, easier for his car, the paved (though broken) lane that led straight up the hill to the new barn and then directly down to the cottage? Was it drunkenness? Was it his wish to bang about the droveway? Or was it his fear of the narrow road winding on a ledge above the sharp drop down to the river, with two or three blind corners? It was probably in his own mind his Sunday drive, the climax of the extended pub hour. The pleasures of beer on a Sunday! They were like the pleasures of work in his garden as a free man.