Читать книгу The Way of a Gardener - Des Kennedy - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe country is holy: O bide in that country kind,
Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you
Lie in grace.
DYLANTHOMAS, “In Country Sleep”
DURING THE EUPHORIC AND TRAGIC days immediately following the Second World War, precisely one month after the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, I emerged into this world, specifically into the capable hands of a worthy English midwife. My birthplace was a century-old stone building located on a hill above Woolton Village in Merseyside, a suburb of Liverpool. The cobweb of crooked streets in which the village was enmeshed evoked a decidedly ecclesiastical tone: Saint Mary’s Crescent, Monk’s Way, Bishop’s Crescent, and Abbey Crescent. Church Road, where I was born, boasted two places of worship: a Methodist church in the village and, partway up a hill, Saint Peter’s Church of England. Our home was farther up still, at Knowle Park, a Roman Catholic convent and school for orphan girls where my father was farm bailiff. From the very beginning, everything was God. Merseyside, I later learned, was a Stone Age place, its countryside dotted with hill forts, barrows, stone circles, ancient crosses, and magical wells. Whether by accident or design, fate had dropped me into a spiritual hotbed.
Our living quarters were part of an old sandstone block building—I imagine it was the coach house of a former grand estate—that also housed the nunnery’s laundry, storage areas, and barns. One entered from the road through a Romanesque stone archway into a cobblestone courtyard. A faded photograph shows my father as a young man, my older brother, Ger, and myself at about age three standing in the courtyard posing solemnly for the camera. A flock of inquisitive ducklings is gathered at our feet. In the background a solitary turkey observes us like a suspicious old bachelor.
I retain only hazy memories of my first five years spent at Knowle Park, just a few dim glimpses, one of them around the excitement of seeing my father spearing rats with a pitchfork while a big collie barked and dashed after the scattering rodents. The chubby little fair-haired fellow in old photos doesn’t feel like me at all. I have almost no recollection of how it was to be that child— was I fretful, happy, difficult? How did I view my parents and brothers? Over half a century and many miles removed from the reality, it’s almost as though that little person was a chrysalid or larva that later metamorphosed into the being I think of as myself.
My older brother, named for Saint Gerard Majella, was nineteen months older than me, and my younger brother Brendan, named for the Irish monk and renowned navigator, was born fifteen months after me. I was never quite clear who Saint Desmond might have been and remember this causing me anxiety later on, as having a patron saint was a matter of some importance. It turns out that there seems not to have been a Saint Desmond at all, and despite a few early ventures toward sanctity, I was destined not to become the first. Besides the lack of sacred patronage, I suffered the anomaly of having vividly red hair, apparently triggered by a recessive gene that had popped up as a consequence of Danish raiders menacing the Irish coast in the dim mists of history. Our youngest brother, Vincent, was born after the family left Knowle Park.
My father was a robust little Irishman from County Down. His family had lived in Newry until his parents separated when he was fourteen, with his father going his own way and his mother taking her two daughters elsewhere. My dad was on his own, forced to make his way in life. He’d strapped a few garden tools to his bicycle and cycled off across the Irish countryside, picking up whatever small jobs he could. Eventually, like so many before him, he left Ireland for a better chance at work to be found in Liverpool.
My mother’s people were Irish too, with a splash of Spanish, although she was born and raised in Liverpool, which was where she and my father met. Her parents had not approved of my father’s courtship, apparently considering him an unreliable provider. Harsh words were exchanged, including on their wedding day, and the rift was never healed. I didn’t really know any of my grand-parents and we had only fleeting contact with various aunties, uncles, and cousins. I remember no large family gatherings convened to celebrate or to mourn. We were not a clan in any sense. The adults we saw most of were Sister Anthony, a nun from the convent who was quite devoted to us, and my mum’s friend Mrs. Richter, a portly little lady who lived down the hill from us, on the lip of Woolton quarry, from which had come the sandstone blocks that composed our house and much of the village.
One thing is certain amid the misty half-remembering of those first few years of life: that I began in a green and pleasant place of trees and fields, barnyard animals and ancient stone buildings, infused by the whispering piety of nuns. There I absorbed a sense of the sacred and of sanctuary, from the Latin sanctus, meaning sacred. In the Christian tradition a sanctuary was a holy place or piece of consecrated ground set aside for the worship of God or of one or more divinities. But it also became a place in which, by the law of the medieval church, a fugitive from justice or a debtor was immune from arrest. Thus it was a place of refuge also, a retreat both sacred and safe.
There was no question that danger lurked all about us. Hitler’s war had only just ended and Luftwaffe bombs had flattened whole sections of Liverpool. I remember the city pocked with heaps of rubble where buildings once had stood. Even with Hitler dead in his bunker, we were not safe. Across Church Road from our home the high stone walls of an abandoned estate were said to enclose neglected woodlands in whose depths tramps occasionally took shelter. Tramps were men of despicable habits and appetites, and God only knew what vile and filthy acts they’d perform on little boys who disobeyed their parents and ventured into those forbidden woods.
Gypsies sometimes lurked nearby as well, devious characters known for snatching unsuspecting children and carrying them off so they never saw their parents again. Whenever there was an encampment of Gypsies on nearby common land, I tingled with a fearful fascination over these exotic and dangerous people, their odd habits of dress, their strange horse-drawn wagons. They were everything that we were not: itinerant, disreputable, irreligious, tribal, mockingly defiant of society. The men worked as tinkers coming door to door to repair leaking pots and pans and, it was thought, to reconnoiter for what might be pilfered. When the Gypsies broke camp and left, I felt a surcease of danger and simultaneously a sadness I didn’t understand because they were gone away.
That the outer world was a breeding ground of evildoers was a conviction that I absorbed, like oxygen, from as long ago as I can remember. An instinctive distrust of strangers became second nature to me, a conviction that people at large were greedy and selfish, eager to take advantage of honest folk like ourselves. More than half a century later I’m still extricating tendrils of that foul inheritance from unexplored recesses of consciousness. I no longer blame my parents for it, for they in their turn had inherited it, the narrow, secretive, gossip-ridden character of Irish peasantry. Neither they nor I had any conception that the real foe, the saboteur of the soul, lies within each of us, and from that dark truth there is no sanctuary.
But everything has two sides, and while there might well lurk the likelihood of catastrophe beyond our little plot of holy ground, I must have intuited that there was safety and loveliness to be savored within it. The instinctive distrust of the unknown, the other, was balanced by a love of my parents and brothers and something else as well—I think an incipient love of solitude and seclusion, a delight in the natural world, in plants and creatures, extremes of weather, starry nights, and landscapes of surpassing beauty. I believe a sense of wonderment was also planted in my soul back then, an intuition of the power and beauty that trembled in everything.
BUT THIS LOVELY sense of being shielded by chant and flower was not to last, for our family was driven out of Knowle Park when I was about five years old. My father had quarreled with the mother superior of the convent. Affable and gregarious most of the time, particularly with people outside the family, my dad was not by nature a quarrelsome person. But when he thought himself ill-treated or misused in some way, he dug in and wouldn’t budge.
He lacked all skill at compromise or conciliation, and his stubborn sense of outrage at some perceived injustice—perhaps an Irishman’s legacy born of six centuries under John Bull’s boots—is one of my own more troublesome inheritances.
I don’t know what the quarrel concerned but it resulted in his losing his job and our losing our home. A disaster in the land of the landless. A horse-drawn cart pulled up in front of our dwelling one morning. My parents piled our few meager household goods onto the cart and my two brothers and I climbed on as well. Because we didn’t own a car and I’d never ridden in one, to do so would have seemed far more remarkable than was riding on a horse-drawn cart.
The horse trudged down Church Road pulling the cart. In my mind’s eye the scene is reminiscent of something out of Catherine Cookson: the honest and hard-working farm bailiff and his young family unfairly driven from their home to face a cruel world. We clopped past Saint Peter’s Church, in whose graveyard the bones of the as-yet-uncelebrated Eleanor Rigby lay, and down into the village of Woolton. The cart creaked to a halt in front of a two-story brick house, the last of a strip of dismal row houses on Allerton Road in the heart of the village. The house fronted onto the road, staring at a matching row of houses opposite. Next door to us sat the Woolton Public Baths, a squat brick building that held a little swimming pool and washing facilities for those who lacked full bathrooms at home. Across the street from the baths, on the corner of Quarry Road, the Grapes pub and hotel catered to sinners, drunks, and adulterers. A huge stone church up on High Street loomed directly behind our house. We’d moved from the shadow of a nunnery to the shadow of a Congregational church. On Sunday mornings the village resonated with the ringing of bells from its four churches.
But there was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere on our street, nor any flowers. Trees could be glimpsed only in the distance. Expelled from a green and pleasant place, we’d come to a crowded neighborhood of bricks and stone. Through our small domestic drama, my family was re-enacting the industrialization of Olde England, moving from pastoral to urban life, for Woolton had already by then been swallowed up as a part of greater Liverpool.
I think a sense of my father’s failure hung in the air after our move to the village. Surely it was his stubbornness and pride that had brought us down to this. I wonder now what he felt at the time, and what my mother felt. A more melancholy character, my mother endured life’s blows with a resignation that was equal parts stoic and ironic. “The exilic condition comes naturally to a certain kind of Irishman,” wrote Anthony Burgess in his preface to Modern Irish Short Stories, and I suspect that my father, having experienced exile at a young age, was less fazed by our changed circumstances. No doubt anxious to prove himself a more worthy provider than my mother’s family had judged him, he got a job working on the Liverpool buses, first as conductor and later as driver, and we settled into life as village folk. (Twenty years after our expulsion from Knowle Park I would suffer an uncannily similar experience when I was ejected from the monastic life I’d chosen. Like my father, I tangled with religious authority and paid a heavy price. I think of it now as a family specialty, getting up the snoot of religious tyrants and being pitched out onto the street for our efforts.)
But our familial piety wasn’t the least bit dampened in the process and, as I reached school-going age, I became a churchgoing marvel. I can still picture myself rising every morning in a little upstairs bedroom of that row house, dressing quickly and setting out on foot down Allerton Road with my brother Ger while the village still lay hushed in the secrets of morning. Reverently we’d enter Saint Anne’s Catholic Church with our little black missals in hand for attentively following the saying of Mass. The highlight was to rise together from the pew where we knelt and make our way up the aisle to kneel at the communion rail to await the approach of the priest murmuring in Latin as he lifted from a golden chalice and placed on each of our tongues the sacred wafer, the Body of Christ. As we had fasted all night and morning, this was our first nourishment of the day.
An old photo, taken on the afternoon of my First Holy Communion, shows me dressed in a white shirt and short pants, white shoes and socks, my hands joined as in prayer in front of my breast, smiling thinly like an earnest young angel. I’m still astonished by the innocence and purity of the image.
After Mass we’d walk back home for a bowl of hot porridge cooked by our mum, with creamy milk from the bottles delivered every morning by the milkman, and sugar sprinkled on top. Then Ger and I would catch the double-decker bus that would carry us down Menlove Avenue to Saint Anthony of Padua School in Mossley Hill. There we learned our catechism from the good nuns:
“Who made me?”
“God made me.”
“Why did God make me?”
“God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”
That was the lesson we learned first: Postponement is the prerequisite for Paradise. Knowing, loving, and serving God are the purposes of this life. Happiness will follow death. Meanwhile we are walking through a vale of tears. This belief system was drilled into us so relentlessly, both at home and in school, we accepted it without question. Just as we accepted that the Protestant kids we passed on the way to our school, and they on their way to theirs, would never be allowed to enter into Heaven. Which was how we could justify having snowball fights with them on the rare occasions upon which it snowed. We disliked and distrusted Protestants on principle—I remember once being taken to a Protestant Christmas party by a kindly lady, and being terrified throughout that the Protestants would surely do something vile and sinful before the party was over. Jews were thoroughly despised; one gentleman who operated a jewelry shop in Woolton Village was invariably referred to as “the old Jew boy.” No other ethnicities were ever seen in the village. In many ways we Catholics occupied a parallel universe to the one all around us. We had a sense of ourselves as the elect, bound together as God’s chosen people, indifferent to the cares of this tarnished world and yearning toward the glory of the hereafter.
On Sunday morning our family would go to Mass en masse, my parents and we boys kneeling chronologically side by side in a pew. The lavishly embroidered vestments of the priest, the exalted singing of the choir and rumble of the pipe organ, the heady scent of incense and guttering of multiple candles—High Mass was by far the closest thing we knew to spectacle.
Fear and guilt, those twin pillars of Irish Catholicism, underpinned our cosmology. Fear of the future, of falling from grace, was bred like superstition into our young bones. Expect the worst, always. I learned from my mother to fear the bailiffs, coldhearted men who’d put your possessions out on the street if you were evicted for failing to pay the rent. Or, even more fearfully, the Black Maria, the sinister prison van that would haul you away to jail for whatever transgressions you’d committed. More terrifying still, we learned that you could identify the Devil when disguised as a man by looking to see if he had cloven feet. At seven or eight years old I was glancing furtively at the feet of old men I passed on the street, convinced that one of them might well be the Devil in disguise. As well I learned to be alert for any sign of a great crucifix that would spread across the sky, tremendous and ominous, indicating that the end of the world was at hand.
Against these terrors we clung to our faith. We kids mastered the memorization of “Our Father who art in Heaven . . .” and “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .” and “Glory be to the Father . . . ,” each repeated mantralike in the saying of the Holy Rosary. And we learned that each of us had a guardian angel, a spiritual companion who hovered close by, ready to protect us from evil. I didn’t dare disbelieve this, but nor did I ever think of my guardian angel as actually there. I never spoke to it, called it by name, or thought of it as a companion.
ONE OF MY most vivid childhood memories is of the fear and anxiety that filled our house in Woolton Village while my mother was giving birth to her fourth and last child. She lay in labor in a bed specially installed in the front parlor. A midwife was in attendance, and eventually a doctor was called in. We kids were banned from the room, mystified by what was going on, but aware of our dad’s distress and an awful apprehension of disaster. The labor was long and difficult—a breech birth, I think—and the baby eventually was pulled into the world by forceps. For the following days Mother lay weak and exhausted, and it was uncertain whether she would recover from the ordeal. But she did, and we kids had a new little brother named Vincent. What nobody realized at the time was that he’d been born almost completely deaf.
Our mother suspected early on that his hearing was impaired, but she was told by the family doctor—a seedy-looking and incompetent old gent, in my memory—that his hearing was normal and that he was “acting out,” choosing for some peculiar reason of his own to ignore sounds. In working-class Britain the pronouncement of a doctor was almost as sacred as the word of a priest and not to be questioned. But for years thereafter there remained alive within our family a suspicion, deficient only in any shred of evidence, that the old quack’s incompetence with his forceps might have played a role in damaging the emerging baby’s ears.
My brothers and I were all impeccably obedient little kids. Disobeying, defying, or talking back to our parents wasn’t even considered. The prevailing ethos of the times—that children should be seen, not heard—was reinforced in our case with an absolute religious stricture that one’s parents must be obeyed unquestioningly. Our mother was largely responsible for maintaining discipline, and she managed to do so without raising her voice and only very rarely administering a frustrated slap on the bottom. She was, however, masterful in instilling fear of the dreadful things that would happen to disobedient children, not the least of them the ominous “You just wait ’til your father gets home!”
One time in a fit of childish rage I punched my fist through a pane of glass in the back door and spent the afternoon in terror awaiting the wrath of my dad upon his return from work. I remember him replacing and puttying the glass, but not that I suffered any punishment. Squabbling or bickering among us kids was not tolerated. In hindsight I find it remarkable how my mother succeeded in keeping four energetic boys under such firm control, employing instinctive skills that were at least as potent as the ministrations of any child psychologist or supernanny.
I don’t think that back in those days I was ever really conscious of being poor. The British class system, still clinging to its bigotries and privileges in the postwar years, remained reasonably efficient at isolating each stratum of society, so that comparisons were maintained within one’s class rather than with persons of superior or inferior social position. My mother prided herself on always having us kids look well dressed, clean, and tidy. “Oh, look at the tide mark on that neck!” she’d chide if a face wash had left a line between washed and unwashed skin. The other kids we knew in Woolton were more or less like us, although some were more obviously clothed in hand-me-downs, wiping dripping noses on their sleeves, sporting ridiculous haircuts done by their dads. One of our favorite games was playing “Wet Molly” in the brick-walled alleys behind our house. The Wet Molly was a water-soaked rag. Whoever was “it” had to take the Wet Molly and chase after the other kids until close enough to hit someone with the thrown rag. Whoever was hit would become “it” and take up the chase. Equipment costs for this game were extremely low.
Our house was heated, inadequately, only by a coal fire in a fireplace. In wintertime we huddled around the kitchen hearth and mostly lived within a few feet of its warmth. With neither radio nor television to entertain us, on winter nights we kids would be diverted by gazing at the blue, green, and orange genies dancing among glowing coals. On Christmas Day or the solemn occasion when the parish priest came for his annual visit, a fire would be lit in the front parlor too. For lighting we had gas lamps, and I think there were still gas lamps on the streets, lit each evening by the village lamplighter.
Finally the great day arrived when electricity came into the house, putting an end to the evening lighting of gas lamps and the lack of broadcast entertainment. Uncharacteristically, we were the first family on the block to get a television, conferring upon us an instant popularity among neighbors wanting to watch. Like the rest of the neighborhood, we had no indoor toilet in the house and no hot running water. I remember being terrified of having to go outside in the evening down a dark brick passageway to the ancient outdoor toilet behind the house. For our weekly bath on Saturday night, my parents would heat big kettles of water on the coal fire and pour hot water into a tub in which we’d bathe consecutively, starting with the youngest.
Frugality was bred into our bones. The bus ride to and from school cost a couple of pennies each day, so Ger and I would on occasion walk home in order to save the fare, not for ourselves but to give back to our mum. “Oh, aye,” she’d tease us, “but what about the cost of wearing out your good shoe leather with all that walking?”
“We walked on the grass wherever we could, to save leather,” Ger assured her, and I nodded. Never wasting money and contributing however we were able to the family coffers were unquestioned values to us. Largely because of my mother’s wit, these economies were considered not something shameful that poor people were compelled to do, but rather something terribly clever that smart people did. One time my dad brought home a large, flat wooden crate of glazed pears, a luxury item we’d normally never have in the house. He’d been given it because one corner of the crate had been gnawed by rats, but the remainder was perfectly fine. For the next little while we dined like princes on glazed pears.
My father kept a flock of chickens in a small barn in the backyard, and I was morbidly fascinated by how he could expertly kill a chicken with a quick snap of its neck. Every year he’d have a local farmer drop off several big sacks of parsnips from which he’d make his parsnip wine. We kids would help keep the wine cellar stocked too by harvesting clusters of blue elderberries from vacant land, hauling shopping bags full of them back to the house for our mum’s elderberry wine. We’d secure an enormous and rare treat by occasionally weaseling a couple of pennies from our mum so we could go to the little store around the corner and purchase a bottle of ginger beer.
There was no crushing sense of deprivation in any of this, and we were capable of what passed for extravagance, especially at Christmastime. We’d have the splendid treat of going into the city to see the captivating Christmas scenes on display in the department store windows, to meet Father Christmas and go to a theater to watch in wonderment a pantomime, none finer than Peter Pan with Tinker Bell and Peter flying miraculously above our heads. Somehow excellent presents and stuffed stockings always awaited us on Christmas morning, and Christmas dinner remains vivid with nostalgic affection. It seemed the grandest affair, carried on in the seldom-used front parlor at what was by our standards an elaborately laid table. We had roast turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy and brussels sprouts. Always a homemade Christmas cake with marzipan icing and Christmas pudding with brandy and soft sauce. We older boys were permitted a thimbleful of wine. All of this was better than Dickens ever dreamed of.
The inescapable school Christmas pageants were sometimes less successful, and I achieved a personal worst in my early thespian career when I was cast to play the feature role in a re-enactment of Good King Wenceslas. The rest of the class was to sing the carol while another kid, playing the page, and I as king would act out the requisite coming hither and going forth through the rude wind’s loud lament. Preparations were proceeding brilliantly until about a week before the night of the pageant when I developed an enormous boil on the back of my neck. Red and painful pus-filled lumps, boils were not uncommon afflictions, and I remember a number of times suffering from my father’s attempts to “bring the boil to a head” by applying a scorching hot mustard plaster. Unhappily for the pageant, my kingly costume included both a ruff and a crown. The ruff, rubbing against the agonizing boil, caused me to tilt my head forward, which in turn caused the crown to slip off my head. I think I acted out the whole scene with my head facing straight down and one hand clamping the crown to my head, leaving the other arm free to point toward yonder peasant, the miracle of preheated footsteps and all the rest.
Nobody we knew owned a car. A holiday would be a one-day outing by train to Blackpool or the Chester zoo or the seaside at Rhyl in Wales. But these were splendid expeditions, rife with adventure and excitement, like the time when Mrs. Richter came along with us only to have the sea wind lift her dainty little hat off her head and send it skittering along the beach with all of us boys in hot but futile pursuit. As with everywhere else, dangers lurked along the shore. There were deadly riptides and undertows ready to suck us out to sea. One time my father showed us an enormous jellyfish stranded above the tide line. He nudged it quickly with the point of his shoe and we all jumped back as the creature flicked out venomous tentacles. “One sting of those and you’d be paralyzed,” he warned us. The thick grasses growing in the sand dunes were capable of slashing bare legs like rapiers. We viewed with dread a notorious stretch of quicksand where it was said a horse and cart and its unwary driver had all been fatally swallowed up in a matter of minutes. In later years my mother would marvel, “I can’t believe you chose to live on an island that you have to take a ferry to get to,” because, she said, as a child I’d wept uncontrollably and fought against getting aboard the ferry to cross the Mersey River. Fear of water prevented my learning to swim, even with a swimming pool next door, just as fear of heights kept me firmly on the ground while Ger and his pals would clamber recklessly in treetops. One thing I could do in those days was run, run like the wind, run like the great Roger Bannister, whose “Miracle Mile” and subsequent victory over the Australian John Landy in the “Mile of the Century” in 1954, in the far-distant city of Vancouver, swelled our English schoolboy hearts with pride. An old photograph shows myself and Ger, along with ten other comical-looking lads in short pants and fallen socks, proudly posing as the Saint Anthony of Padua track team with our captain holding a large plaque signifying our triumph over the other parochial schools of the district.
What I loved best about outings away from town were the woodlands and patchwork fields and old castle ruins we’d pass on the train. I vividly remember a school outing we took to a medieval site, a sacred place whose ancient stone buildings held the relics of saints as well as marvelous swords encrusted with jewels. These spoke to me of another time and place, sacred and mysterious in a way that our own lives weren’t.
In Woolton Village I found grasses and trees again in Woolton Woods, a park just up the hill from our house. It had open fields we kids could run in and a woodland with wide pathways through it. In autumn my brothers and I would gather up huge piles of leaves and bury ourselves inside them, becoming leaf people. Tree children. Somewhere beyond the trees there was an area of gardens with a large floral clock as its centerpiece. Though first dazzled by it, I came to dislike the clock, its fussy Edwardian ingenuity. The woods and fields were what called to me. At eight years of age I was already confronted with primitive forms of the timeless questions of how nature, art, and gardening intersect. There was an artificial cuckoo sound that I associate with the clock. I remember hearing the cuckoo sound while walking with my parents through the woods to see the gardens. “Oh, listen! Do you hear the cuckoo?” said my parents, laughing. But I soon figured out it wasn’t a real cuckoo and I resented its fake intrusion into the woods. I wanted a living cuckoo to be singing from the trees. I wanted the mystery and wildness of a real wood with real creatures in it, not a park with high palings all around it and a foppish floral clock at its center. Why would you want a clock in a woodland anyway, a place that should be too primal to be measured or divided, a place, as John Fowles wrote in The Tree, “teeming, jewel-like, self-involved, rich in secrets just below the threshold of our adult human senses.” My child’s heart knew instinctively the secrets of trees, and already back then I may have set my sights upon living among them.
Then, suddenly, a seismic shift. Just as we’d left the fields and trees and animals of Knowle Park five years earlier, now a second great change was about to occur: a decision had been made that our family would leave England entirely, leave behind the crowded houses of Merseyside and everything we’d known there, to start a new life in Canada.
