Untimely Graves by Marjorie Eccles Read Free Book Online
Authors: Marjorie Eccles
of my own, but I’ve always said it and I’ll say it again. There’s nobody so daft as a man when he doesn’t want to see what’s right in front of his eyes!’
With this Delphic utterance, she raised her own eyes to heaven, leaving Sam, for the moment, at a loss, until she went on, ‘Break her heart? Lord love us, she hates this house, always has done, and it’s nothing but a burden to her now! The only thing it’d break her heart to leave is her garden, and I’d like to see the one who could make her do that!’
Sam blinked and turned a disbelieving regard on the jungle outside the window. At one time, Joe Totterbridge had kept it in reasonable order, until superannuation from his job as a storekeeper down at the glassworks had signalled his abdication from almost any form of physical activity except walking down to the pub. It came as a shock to see what even such a relatively short spell of neglect could do – if a prime example of exponential growth was needed, look no further. It hadn’t been tidied up before the winter and looked forlorn, pathetic and abandoned. Dead herbaceous stems stuck up like witches’ brooms and withered grasses waved in an unending prairie. A rotting pergola had collapsed under the weight of a great, unchecked rambler. Willow herb that was rosily beautiful in summer was ominous in its spread and the threat of its feathery seed heads. Brambles had taken over entirely in one corner. The paths were invisible.
But even as he surveyed this scene of desolation, determined to set about and tackle it the very next day, he realised Mrs Totty wasn’t speaking of Dorrie’s garden. She meant Dorrie’s garden, a
different proposition altogether: the other garden, where once a wide drive and a double coach house had existed, a sunken plot constructed on the site of a shallow bomb crater, the result of a bomb dropped on Lavenstock during the war. Jettisoned at random by a crippled, home-going German bomber after the raid on nearby Coventry, less than twenty miles away, on the infamous night when a beautiful, medieval city centre and its cathedral had been reduced to rubble, this particular bomb had landed, injuring no one, while Coventry already mourning its dead and injured, was in flames.
A few years later Dorrie, with who knew what compulsion, had set about making a wild garden of the ugly, empty space which had once been the Victorian coach house and stables. She’d employed workmen to cart the rubble away and to create a randomly shaped pond over the shallow crater, had tons of topsoil dumped around its edges, then dismissed everyone and set to work planting the wild plants she loved: now teasel, red clover, wild sorrel and yellow rattle grew among the pluming grasses. Self-woven into a wattle fence were dog roses, blackthorn and elder, within it in season there grew bluebells, wild scabious, white wood anemones and celandines. A substantial part of her days in the summer was spent on her knees, happily grubbing in the earth, talking to her plants and coaxing small seedlings to grow, aiding nature by art. Blackbirds, tits and pond life colonised what had become a small miracle. The side of the house had become a secluded, sheltered, scented haven, screened from both the road and the next house by sweet-smelling hedges, a living and beautiful thing risen from ashes and destruction.
No, Sam wouldn’t like to be the one who tried to prise her away from it. Once Dorrie set her mind on anything, she could be as stubborn as a mule, and this time Sam found himself in sympathy with her. More than that, he couldn’t help feeling that Dorrie without her garden was likely to lose even more hold on reality.
4
When Cleo announced, after having worked for her father for just two days, that she was going to work for Maid to Order, Daphne lifted her eyes to heaven. And well she might, she told herself. As a teenager, Cleo had occasionally been known to tidy her room, under duress, and now it had
With this Delphic utterance, she raised her own eyes to heaven, leaving Sam, for the moment, at a loss, until she went on, ‘Break her heart? Lord love us, she hates this house, always has done, and it’s nothing but a burden to her now! The only thing it’d break her heart to leave is her garden, and I’d like to see the one who could make her do that!’
Sam blinked and turned a disbelieving regard on the jungle outside the window. At one time, Joe Totterbridge had kept it in reasonable order, until superannuation from his job as a storekeeper down at the glassworks had signalled his abdication from almost any form of physical activity except walking down to the pub. It came as a shock to see what even such a relatively short spell of neglect could do – if a prime example of exponential growth was needed, look no further. It hadn’t been tidied up before the winter and looked forlorn, pathetic and abandoned. Dead herbaceous stems stuck up like witches’ brooms and withered grasses waved in an unending prairie. A rotting pergola had collapsed under the weight of a great, unchecked rambler. Willow herb that was rosily beautiful in summer was ominous in its spread and the threat of its feathery seed heads. Brambles had taken over entirely in one corner. The paths were invisible.
But even as he surveyed this scene of desolation, determined to set about and tackle it the very next day, he realised Mrs Totty wasn’t speaking of Dorrie’s garden. She meant Dorrie’s garden, a
different proposition altogether: the other garden, where once a wide drive and a double coach house had existed, a sunken plot constructed on the site of a shallow bomb crater, the result of a bomb dropped on Lavenstock during the war. Jettisoned at random by a crippled, home-going German bomber after the raid on nearby Coventry, less than twenty miles away, on the infamous night when a beautiful, medieval city centre and its cathedral had been reduced to rubble, this particular bomb had landed, injuring no one, while Coventry already mourning its dead and injured, was in flames.
A few years later Dorrie, with who knew what compulsion, had set about making a wild garden of the ugly, empty space which had once been the Victorian coach house and stables. She’d employed workmen to cart the rubble away and to create a randomly shaped pond over the shallow crater, had tons of topsoil dumped around its edges, then dismissed everyone and set to work planting the wild plants she loved: now teasel, red clover, wild sorrel and yellow rattle grew among the pluming grasses. Self-woven into a wattle fence were dog roses, blackthorn and elder, within it in season there grew bluebells, wild scabious, white wood anemones and celandines. A substantial part of her days in the summer was spent on her knees, happily grubbing in the earth, talking to her plants and coaxing small seedlings to grow, aiding nature by art. Blackbirds, tits and pond life colonised what had become a small miracle. The side of the house had become a secluded, sheltered, scented haven, screened from both the road and the next house by sweet-smelling hedges, a living and beautiful thing risen from ashes and destruction.
No, Sam wouldn’t like to be the one who tried to prise her away from it. Once Dorrie set her mind on anything, she could be as stubborn as a mule, and this time Sam found himself in sympathy with her. More than that, he couldn’t help feeling that Dorrie without her garden was likely to lose even more hold on reality.
4
When Cleo announced, after having worked for her father for just two days, that she was going to work for Maid to Order, Daphne lifted her eyes to heaven. And well she might, she told herself. As a teenager, Cleo had occasionally been known to tidy her room, under duress, and now it had