Trick or Treat by Lesley Glaister Read Free Book Online

perfectly positioned, but some of them are tatty now, neglected. It’s not like it was when it was a case of ‘grow or go without’. Oh, people are keen now, as ever, but there’s not the same pride, the same commitment. There’s not the love. There is rubbish tangled among the dying stalks at this dying time of the year, polythene rags tangled on thorns; there are weeds, nettles and the ballooning heads of onions gone to seed.
    Once Arthur had dreamt of a time when the land would be composed of industrial villages, where the workers would divide their labour between the factory and the land. He had sweated his own days away in the blasting heat of molten steel and laboured on the soil in the cool of the evenings – and it had meant something. Not just an old man’s pottering, a harmless hobby. But somehow, after the war, after the terrible grieving time, the core of his ambition had been lost, as if a bright glow in him had cooled to grey. He had continued just the same, his body performing the same actions, but the original motive, the dreams of change, had gone. Arthur remembers the youth that he was as if he were someone else, someone he had once known and admired and lost. And now he is an old man. Quite content. It hasn’t been a bad life, all in all. Just an ordinary one.
    Jim’s plot is going to waste now. It’s next to Arthur’s and the two men used to work side by side on the soil, and Arthur misses Jim now, simply misses him. He remembers the arguments they had. Politics. It was always politics. Arthur smiles wryly. He knows that he was right and Jim was wrong; but Jim is dead now and Arthur will be before long, and then it will be all the same, will all have been the same for the both of them. The politics got in the way – but there was a sort of friendship between them. There was the love of the soil that they shared, the love of the green growth that came from their own labour. There was something between Olive and Jim once, around the time of the war. Arthur knew it and he didn’t object. How could he? There were others for him, too. That had been their way, Arthur and Olive. They were free. They chose to live together and they were free. They were happy and no one was ever hurt, it had been the right way for them. It was Jim who felt the guilt about his episode with Olive; and Arthur, amusement at his guilt. For Arthur was secure. There was never any danger of Jim coming between himself and Olive. The thought of Olive and Jim, such opposites, was even faintly comic. And they had never spoken of it. Oh no. For Jim was the sort who rarely talked about women or feelings. He worried a bit about the state Nell got into over Rodney, but mostly it was politics they talked about, and club-root and aphids, and they shared a pipe of tobacco over the boundary. But they never mentioned Olive, not more than in passing. And they never spoke away from the allotments, never more than nodded in the street, for Nell had taken against Olive and forbidden Jim to have anything to do with the pair of them. And Jim was weak in that way, a slave to the woman.
    Now Jim’s plot is a sad tangle. A young couple did take it on and came every Saturday for a month or two while the weather was fine – and then gave it up. Results too slow. It was a sin. A good plot, the sort of earth that only comes from years of toil, of love, going to waste. He would take it on himself, but how can he now? He has neither the time nor the strength. His own allotment is as much as he can manage now with Olive as she is. He sighs. That is the way it is going now that they are so old. He looks up at the sky. The distant white cumulus clouds of the morning have darkened, clustered closer to the earth, and in the air is the smell of approaching rain, and the low stirring of a preliminary breeze. Arthur looks regretfully at the turnips and parsnips that he’s yet to lift, at the tidying that wants