On Tenantry Down
by Jackie Wills
It’s a warm afternoon; I’m dozing below the Reine Claude – I’ve been weeding since early morning. But my nap’s interrupted. Above me, a pair of wrens is encouraging four fledglings to fly, branch to branch, cheering them on like I cheered my kids at sports days. The tree arches above them; the young birds succeed. The wren is the keeper of the allotment – its warning call summons the others to track every visiting cat.
In her autobiography A House with Four Rooms, Rumer Godden writes: ‘everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.’
I read Godden’s novel, A Greengage Summer, when I was a teenager and it never left me. When I took on my allotment at Tenantry Down, in Brighton, there was a greengage tree. So it occurs to me that my house of four rooms is not just metaphorical; it is my allotment. For months there’s endless physical work but relief too – poems I’ve read, stories I remember while I’m picking or sowing. The mental work is to silence the noisy creator, read seed packets, follow instructions. No writing here, often no words at all. In my first collection Powder Tower there is an early poem about Mum unearthing arrowheads that foreshadows my own gardening. Jump forward to Commandments and ‘a year swollen with squash’, a body in the tunnels of childhood, which for me was woods and gardens. Even in collections almost totally urban or about elsewhere, the act of gardening appears. In Woman’s Head as Jug, the allotment is knitted into an image of pregnancy and a baby sleeps among pumpkins. Then the narcotic smell of elder blossom and scent of broad bean flowers in A Friable Earth, where the allotment truly finds its place. There’s even a poem called ‘Allotment’. One about the earth uses Sussex words for mud, others salute the badgers, potatoes, journeys of the European fire ant, Rob’s shed (read at his funeral), and perhaps the strangest, how a slow-worm reminds me of a schoolfriend’s mum selling girdles in 1960s Aldershot.
In Making the Wedding Dress, a poem for my old friend Annie uses vetch to transmit the message ‘here is childhood’ and I recognise the cliché of a writing life – the notion of an arc from childhood’s creative riches to the seventh decade, where I am shedding all but the essentials. I place myself at the perimeter with dead ends and allotments, all September’s spiders in my hair. The allotment is one of few places I see the doors of the spirit world when linden leaves shiver in the wind, a fox stops on the path and meets my eyes, blackbirds sing.
If I arrive angry or upset, the act of bending and planting unknots my shoulders. My plot stretches between a rat run and a cemetery, between brambles and ivy where magpies nest, and a line of trees towering above a broken fence to keep out the dead. The allotment year is marked by sowing times, transplanting, remembering what I’ve grown where – routine in a life of freelancing with its uncertainty. I’ve worked it as a mother of small children, a single parent, an empty nester, and a different kind of carer in my seventies. It hasn’t needed to be the place I write about; it has been the place that has enabled me to write.
I’ve sat in the shed in winter watching the rain because I don’t want to be at home. When times are hard I put my hands in the earth knowing ‘this will help’. I stand by elder when sun heats the blossom and I can taste the cordial before I’ve made it. I’ve had nights at the table with friends. My son has wheelbarrowed horse manure from the gate, cut hazel branches to make instruments. A jewelled beetle sends me to one of my other favourite writers, Jean-Henri Fabre; elder takes me to Margaret Atwood’s Pilar the beekeeper; the language of a garden to Jamaica Kincaid.
One spring I escaped to Utrecht after weeks of caring for my mother. I rushed to plant first early potatoes hours before I left on Eurostar. When my daughter and I were looking for things to do in her chosen city, one was an exhibition at the Centraal Museum, The Botanical Revolution: On the Necessity of Art and Gardening. And there was a tribute to Jamaica Kincaid. In my own way I’ve tried to express the deep links between writing and gardening. Kincaid says, ‘Gardening is like writing, I suppose; you don’t really know what you are doing, but you don’t really want to know.’
There’s a refrain in Paul Simon’s hit, ‘The Boy in the Bubble’, which goes, ‘These are the days of miracle and wonder . . .’ One May I played it again. The song’s opening lines, the sun on the soldiers, the bomb and surveillance, the urge not to cry, are chilling but it gave me hope art is cleverer than politicians and warmongers, making its point with a photo, a poem, a drawing, a soaring tune that won’t leave your head because it can describe the robin’s sequence of notes even when it doesn’t mean to, and on that day, it encompassed the allotment, too, all of us with our forks and gloves, the gorgeous clever foxes, badgers digging their latrines by the top gate, all the resident wrens.
The first of Jackie Wills’ six collections of poetry was shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot award. Former journalist and tutor, her recent publications are On Poetry: Reading, Writing and Working with Poems (Smith Doorstop, 2023) and A Friable Earth (Arc 2019). In 2023 she won a Cholmondely Award. Judge Moniza Alvi wrote: ‘Jackie Wills is a very natural, genuine poet of sensitivity, boldness and flair. She has been writing explorative, compassionate and often mesmerising poetry for many years.’
