Chapter Seven - Digging For Dystopia.

 As an adult I have done far more unpaid work as a volunteer in different organisations than ever I have worked for a pay packet. The work was there to do, I had the inclination and the time, so I did it; the work was mine to choose or refuse at least until automation made human labour seem irrelevant. Had Mother applied for paid work as a married woman she would have been rejected from any job she applied for simply for being married, if she got as far as an interview she would have been told by the male interviewer to 'Go home and be a better mother/wife' if he was even that civil. I was part of the reason she would have been rejected from paid jobs. The labour of parenting and housekeeping were very important, but openly not worth remuneration. 

I know what the importance of a lack of remuneration is like, I have been pushed to apply for more jobs that I was never going to get than I could count, record or remember. The reasons for rejection by employers has changed from generation to generation, but the depth of insincerity on the part of the employers remains the same. Always 'the market' is what matters, where ' the market' is the sum of popular opinion projected on the many as held by the few. False reasoning still makes a good disguise for self interest for those with something to protect.

The unpaid job that Mother gave herself for the longest period in her life was that of 'allotment holder'. She rented her first allotment when she was thirty. She is over eighty now and for all I know may well still rent an allotment and slowly keep active and grow just enough veg for herself. The price of being self employed, and being paying yourself-in-kind this way, started with rent paid to the council who owned the land, and the dues paid to the Allotments Association.

When Mother moved plots from the first isolated allotment she got to her first plot on a large popular allotments site she was the only female gardener among many male gardeners. She was respected for the knowledge that she gained from her father but held apart from the other gardeners. It was as if she were the allotment holders token suffragist. Her presence was a quiet protest against what was assumed to be a male club, though for many years she was treated kindly by quite a few of the men there. But to win their respect she had to be better than the male gardeners to be treated as equal to them. Good for her then that she was that good, if somewhat eccentric with it. The male gardeners only let their wives on to their allotments in high summer, and never let their children near because children required amusements and the men did not want to have to be amusing. For the men the point of the garden was to get away from family. My sister and I going up the allotment with her became one of several outward signs of Mother awkwardly trying to be twice as good as the male gardeners. I too had to be twice as good as I could be, to maintain the appearance Mother had to project. I let her down quite a few times, and to me my mistakes made me feel ashamed but I don't know what else I was meant to do; if I'd been told 'You are out of your depth here' I would have wanted to be in depths that were safe for me, but that would have taken Mother away from her allotment, so I was never told how out my depths I was. The shame that came with the mistakes and misunderstandings I made practically poisoned me, but I stayed to be poisoned enough for my misunderstanding to seem normal.

The walk up to the allotments was the best part of going there because when we arrived Mother would cut me off from her and go into 'work mode', lay out the tools and materials she was going to use that afternoon. My sister and I were expected to constructively amuse ourselves. Every gardener lived in their own space, though neighbours were there to ask for gardening advice if you could see that they had stopped work. It was non-competitive, up to a point. Gardeners often had surpluses when a crop cropped all at once and he would seek to share it with those who grew something else, knowing that the favour would be returned later. Part of Mother trying to be twice as good was her being keener than other gardeners at finding uses for their surpluses. One year she was offered vast amounts of quite ordinary apples which ended up being bottled and stored underneath my bed for feeding the family with as if they were cooking apples during winter.

When Mother got a second allotment next to the first, then her next door neighbour Stan, decided to get an allotment as well and became her allotment neighbour too. This was not in her plans, and not what she wanted. She already did Stan's laundry, ironing, and shopping for him. Stan getting the allotment next door to Mother looked like clinginess on his part.

One thing that she wanted to keep close to her was a chair that her grandma, the woman who brought her into the world Grandma Clifton, had once owned. Her allotment shed was the only place she was allowed to keep it, It had previously been kept in the attic before that room had been converted into a storeroom/a bedroom for me. It was a fold up chair with long side poles, the varnish on them scuffed and worn, and it had a faded pale green cloth on the back and the seat. When Mother was on her own at the allotment and wanted rest she would sit in it and talk to her gran as if her gran were present via the chair with her.

I was a bit of a ghost at the allotments too. I did not know how to be the grown up that I was expected to be. To do anything serious I needed that much instruction that it was easier for the teacher (always Mother) to not teach but do it themselves. I don't know what her father was like with Mother when the two of them went to his allotment and therefore how he dealt with teaching vs doing dilemma. What I do know is that she learned a lot, which tells me that he gave her time and attention sufficient for her to gain from being around him. There was not the same reciprocity between Mother and me. The difference between Mother and her father and me and Mother was mainly location. But there were more differences between Grandad's allotment circa 1940 and Mother's allotment circa 1968 and beyond. The pace of life was faster. Her dad could find the slow and consistent rhythm of the village life and teach her through it. Mother's parenting was not just mechanised, by washing machines and vacuum cleaners etc, but it was also hastily assembled in an ad hoc manner. The way she organised her self and us gave her little time for reflection or improvement through reorganisation, much less did it allow her to pass on life skills to anyone.

When Mother went to the allotment she left the machines behind, but for having to look after me could not leave the require to be parent behind as well. Gardening is often quite mechanical, but as actions repeatedly applied to organic materials rather other mechanical materials and mechanisms. The reward comes from the organic material making the activity seems more organic. Her father was a professional gardener. He knew his Latin names and growing seasons. He knew what to plant and when to plant it. He knew when to leave the ground and what to plant whilst 'digging for Britain' as the phrase had it during the 1940's. I was not a butterfly set on a flower listening in to when they talked and she learnt from him so I have no notion of what they shared in the quiet of his allotment. The nearest I ever got to being a butterfly on a flower was when Mother planted flowers at the front of one of the first of her two allotments on the new site. She planted about ten or twelve different types of fairly common types of flowers in a strip next to the central path down which all gardeners walked.

She said that that flowery part of the allotment was mine. It was bright and colourful, so it mine in so far as it symbolised her hopes for me. But I always had problems when Mother said anything was mine-in reality nothing was mine and everything was hers or somebody else's property. If anything was mine it was mine in name only at the time I was told and it would cease to be mine the moment anyone did anything with it. My education was 'mine' but I could not tailor what I was taught into a pattern that was in any way personal to me. I had nothing and was nothing beyond what I wore and the instructions I was obedient to, all of which I tried to do willingly even when I could only complete tasks badly because I needed more help than I could be given. Mother mistrusted me even walking between the rows of plants, the smaller the plant the less she trusted me. I tried to take what Mother said at face value about the flowers and appear to be this colourful 'free spirit'. But inwardly I was trapped by mistrust, being the property of others on other people's property and my own inability to know what to do without being told. 

The jobs I was safest doing was cutting grass paths with a push mower and keeping my sister entertained. I don't know what amused my sister but she tolerated the lack of choice without knowing how grudgingly I accepted it too. She would rather have been minded by her dad, who she felt closer to than I did. Some of the easier fruit and vegetables, such as peas and blackberries, I was instructed to pick and permitted to eat a few of on the way, to put the sense of play into my being useful.

There were worse times to be had than being an awkward non-gardener. Dentistry in the 1960's was vile. I was given gas for my first visit to the dentist for the removal of some baby teeth. The sleep was fine, there were even pleasant enough dreams that came with it. But to wake up with a headache, stood over a large sink lined with blood that had come from my mouth, knowing that I'd gone to sleep in a comfy chair and not knowing how I came to be awake and standing up was both memorable and horrible. 

Other ventures with Mother could be more unpleasant, longer term. Her buying of school clothes for me became an endurance test. There was in the Britain of WW2 an ordinary cruelty with clothing that marked many of the children of poorer parents, like Mother's,  that to them felt like it was the equivalent of wearing one of those six different coloured stars in public that the Nazis expected of jews, gypsies, political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, prostitutes and homosexuals. The wartime government declared the rationing of cloth and the handing down of clothing to be thrift, and part of the war effort, therefore they were virtuous ideas. But when richer parents passed on their children's surplus clothing to poorer parents, however ill fitting the clothing was, for poorer children to wear the children of the rich parents found ripe opportunities for snobbery when they saw other children wearing clothing that used to theirs.

There is an ancient rhetorical device where one person tells another what they are not going to tell them in great detail and the listener is split by having been told something they are also told that they were not meant to know. If had a want that I thought would help me in school then it was to be in long trousers sooner rather than later, to be the equal of my peers. But when Mother walked me to the local Cancer Research Shop to buy me school clothing she related to me how she had to endure how much she was not and never could be the equal of her peers when she was my age, how endured snobbery and bullying from other children during WW2. So even when I got the second hand long school trousers and she got the shirts 'with growing room in them' I could not enjoy having them because I now had better clothing, because Mother had gone without and been horribly bullied a generation before for me to be able to have them. The way Mother told her story of how I had so much more she ever had at the same age I became responsible for her being bullied. 

I knew the stories backwards. Not only did she lose her toys to St Barnados and the Church of England Children's homes, but she was clothed and shod with ill fitting cast offs donated by the parents of the children she went to school with. In the playground she was often reminded in bullying tones by the former owners of the clothes she wore, who were bigger than she was, and who her clothes once belonged to. The drama of her parenting, education, and 'community', made me want to give her my choices in schooling since they seemed better, and made me willing to do without if it improved her life. But such ideas of what to offer Mother did nothing to make her happier and made me feel more trapped for being unable to change the record of how inconsistent and unfair life seemed.

In the parental house on other occasions she claimed that she passed her 11+ but her father refused to pay for the Grammar School uniforms, which of course fits the 'woe is me' script but I Don't see now how she was so bullied and yet still bright and firm in spirit enough to pass that exam. Anyway passing the 11+ exam and not going to the better school the result designated for the parents being poor and not wanting grants was a common story in the 1940's, and since. But the bullying and her father's refusal of support can't have been so bad, it is more likely to have been conventionally sexist.

Dr Who with Patrick Troughton was popular at the time and it was a show that tried to process paradoxes with the plots it had. One narrative I told myself as we walked to the Cancer Research Charity Shop was that I had in a previous life actually watched her being goaded and bullied in the school playground by the children whose parents gave her parents the clothing Mother wore, and I had done nothing about it. That was partly why she was telling me these stories now-to make me feel an apt guilt for where I could have redeemed her suffering, but I had not done so. Her stories of poverty put me in debt to her and she was the one who virtuously said 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be'.

It would have been better for me to have concluded that with relative poverty then relative empathy was also in short supply and with relative poverty greater empathy is a necessity. But Mother's recounting of the material poverty she was raised in lacked empathy in itself. Something in the way she told her stories which ate through me. By the time I became an adult and my understanding of the detail and process of what she said improved, Mother had totally clammed up about what those cruelties of her past were like. Like the adultery and other events, it was was baggage she felt it was better to hoard without being seen to. She was absolutely closed up about about a lot more besides too.

My one time love of Mother's stories of enduring WW2 resurfaced when I started reading novels and essays as a teenager, rather than restricting myself to what my parents read, the red top press. As an attempted adult I developed a lasting taste for books about the Germany and the Europe of the 1930's and 40's, where the people of the time, including many talented writers, could not explain how they had endured a cruelty and ignorance that seemed so methodical and absolute that surviving it seemed to be unnatural. Which was why fiction had to be used to disguise the truth.

I am happy to credit Mother with my lifelong appreciation of the writings of George Orwell, in particular the infamous '1984'. I hope she wants that credit. The love of '1984', with it's paradoxical and black humoured recurring loops of suffering, was the most profound effect that listening to her stories has had on me.

Find Chapter 8 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.