Spider Read Free

the cobblestones, and as it snorted great clouds of smoke issued from its blackened and distended nostrils. Sometimes my father would get off his bicycle and trowel the fresh dung into a paper bag, later to add it to his compost heap. Then on through the quiet narrow streets in a southwesterly direction toward the gasworks which, lightly cloaked in the early morning mist, achieved a sort of grandeur, and mystery, despite the smell. Across the canal, then up a long rise and down Omdurman Close to the railway embankment. Halfway across the railway bridge, when he was within sight of the allotments, he dismounted and took a moment or two to roll himself a cigarette. By means of this small ceremony he was able to savor for a few sweet seconds more the prospect of the day that lay before him.
    I haven’t yet been back to Kitchener Street; I feel apprehensive about crossing the canal and seeing again those blackened bricks, imbued as they are in my memory with the sounds and smells of the tragedy that occurred there. One day I must do it, I know, but not yet, not yet. I did, however, climb the hill to Omdurman Close last week, and even stepped out onto the bridge over the railway lines, clutching tight to the railing. From a point exactly halfway across the bridge—I dared not look down at the meshwork of tracklines far below—I saw that the allotments were still there, beyond the embankment on the far side, and still apparently in use, for the smoke of a gardener’s bonfire was sweeping into the turbulent air of that windy October afternoon. But barely had I decided to go further, and see what had become of my father’s garden, and of the shed he’d built at the bottom of it, than a goods train went wildly shrieking beneath me, and in a sort of shambling panic I scampered back the way I’d come and was a few moments later clinging limply to a lamppost with my heart leaping and racing in my chest and my ears ringing with the sound of the train, a terrible sound that for a few seconds turned into a howl of mockery from some tribe of invisible imps, so it seemed! How easily I am thrown into turmoil, these days.
    I’m something of a gardener myself, you see. In fact gardening is probably the only good thing that came of the years I spent abroad, learning how to grow vegetables, though I never took to it with the same passion as my father. For him that narrow strip of soil was not merely a source of fresh vegetables, it was, I believe, a sort of sanctuary, a sort of spiritual haven. Having crossed the bridge he would wobble down the narrow path beside the embankment, past the allotments of his fellow gardeners, working men like himself who would already be hoeing, perhaps, or digging, or perhaps simply pacing up and down between the rows with their hands clasped behind their backs and their brows knit as they contemplated their potatoes or their runner beans or their carrots or cabbages or peas. “Morning Horace,” they would murmur, as my father slowly steered his bicycle along the path. Silent and abstracted these men may have been, manifestly anxious about slow growth, or blight, or wilt, or a damp summer and marauding crows, but these men were at peace, as I have been at peace in a garden, they were happy.
    The first hour of the Sunday morning was when my father reflected on the state of things in the garden, and it was an hour from which he derived a measure of quiet joy incomprehensible to any but a fellow gardener. That hour, in the crisp, early air, with the dew still wet on the cabbage leaves, was in a way what he worked for, for he experienced then a sense of fulfilment that I don’t believe he found anywhere else in his narrow, constricted existence. He inspected, he pondered, he poked at the soil with the toe of a boot, he squatted on his hams to examine this plant or that, laid a veined and tender vegetable leaf upon the calloused skin of his palm, and peered at it through his spectacles. Then after a while he