06/06/2020

Then and Now

Peter Scupham

​

Beating the bounds. Once upon a time there were street friends, garden friends, house friends... Now there are garden friends, but I am not making thickets of twig and grass with them for our toy soldiers to lurk in, or setting up my clockwork Hornby to run on the Rockery Line. We are all oh so polite, perched on our unsocially-distanced chairs, munching and drinking our food and tipple, while the trees slowly shift their outfits from fresh Spring flimsy to their darker summer dress and the grass still hums and flutters with bees, cabbage-whites, small blues, orange-tips and a vivid brimstone. I think of my father, who didn’t need tigers or huge flowers on parade: a beetle would do, or any small patch of greenery which might hold some tiny leaf-pattern he had not previously noticed there. It’s all a matter of scale, he would have said, perhaps quoting Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

​

        To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

        And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

        Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

        And Eternity in an hour.

​

At 87, I can feel like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, with Margaret as my Girl Friday, though my axe and hammers lie idle. I have no musket and have never killed anything larger than a wasp or mosquito, though when I was toy soldier myself I had moments when I wouldn’t have minded having a go at the Sergeant-Cook. How large our garden now seems, with its little copse, small field, cutting garden, pond and bits and bobs. How can a human being possibly get round it all, I wonder, reading of the splendid walks the journal entries show people are taking?   But polymyalgia, a couple of hip replacements, a  spinal fracture and ankylosing spondylitis  do slow one down a bit. So what. How small my grandparents’ garden would now seem. 75 years ago it seemed a huge Blakean world, with its lawn, soft-fruit walls, paths between beds and vegetable garden. I needed no larger fauna than wagtails, a chrysalis twitching in the hand’s palm, the dance of mosquito larvae in a water-butt; no larger flora than my favourite nasturtiums, mignonette and night-scented stock. That was a gardened garden, unlike our own scrubby wartime patch, where my father pumped out a brown stream of cess from our septic tank each evening.

​

So, I look round our garden, quiet in this early summer. Jackdaws pluck out thatch ties for their chimney nests, there are newts in the pond, but no frogs that we can see, swallows are plucking flies from the air - are we unpeopled?  The garden, though, is full of ghosts, not just the formal, brocaded Tudors who once owned this place, but all that throng who came to our Poetry Days and who took part as cast and audience in our Shakespeare in the Garden productions. Crusoe and Girl Friday are less alone than it seems. Theatres may now be going dark, but our green theatre is a full house of memories.