With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed Read online

  Editors too had come and gone, almost on a seasonal basis, but that wasn’t so bad, because mostly they kept themselves to themselves. And if they tried anything clever, Lillian was a highly effective means of damage control, since she paid absolutely no attention to anything they asked her to do. At the time of this story – the early 1990s – Come Into the Garden had seen four editors in five years, but it would be fair to say that ‘seeing’ was literally the limit of the acquaintance. A police line-up featuring all four of them would not necessarily elicit a flicker of recognition. By now, the long-standing staffers had grown quite blasé about meeting new bosses – content merely to count them in and then count them all out again. Indeed, when this dull Mainwaring chap (James? John?) had first settled his ample bum into the editor’s chair in July, Lillian had asked him straight off, day one, what sort of thing he fancied for a leaving present, on the principle that it would save awkwardness later on.

  Lillian thrived on the chaos of mismanagement. Half the time she had no boss at all (and she refused to work for anyone besides the editor), and the other half she could spend in playing lucky dip with the post-bag, or aggressively blocking the paths of busy, timid people (such as Tim) with sudden rockfalls of inane chat. Lillian’s behaviour was quite easy to predict, by the way, once you realized she was talkative in inverse proportion to the amount of talk anyone cared to hear at that particular moment. It was an infallible gift. Thus, when she was asked to disseminate important news, she automatically clammed up, kept her counsel, went home, phoned in sick next day. Whereas when everyone was bustling, agitated and far too busy to listen, she did the famous Ancient Mariner impression, expertly mooring them to the spot with heavy verbal anchors about sod all.

  ‘Oh, look!’ she would announce to no one in particular, flapping an envelope in her tongs too fast for anyone to see what it was. ‘Someone’s written to Mike McCarthy!’

  She would look around to see what effect this was having. And she would know, with the instinct of a top professional, that the sullen, negative take-up (people staring at walls, and so on) meant she actually had the room in the palm of her hand.

  ‘But don’t you see? Mike McCarthy left ages ago!’

  At this point young Tim might rashly attempt to tiptoe past, but be tugged forcibly to a halt by tight invisible chains.

  ‘You must remember Mike McCarthy, Tim!’ she shrieked. ‘He was the editor who tried to do away with the “Dear Donald” page, just because his name wasn’t Donald! For heaven’s sake. I kept telling him, didn’t I, nobody’s name is Donald!’

  And not for the first time, Tim would wriggle miserably, like bait on a hook, and think how clever Ulysses had been, in the old story, to lash himself to a mast, with ear-plugs.

  That Tim did not remember Mike McCarthy, Lillian knew full well. Tim had been deputy editor for only a year, and had taken the job straight from a postgraduate journalism course. In fact, at the time of Mike McCarthy’s ill-fated editorship, Tim had still been a quiet bespectacled schoolboy dreaming of a career modelled on Norman Mailer’s, and wondering how his myopia, general weediness and night-time emissions would affect his chance of success. But it was Tim’s newness, more than his youth, that put him at a disadvantage where Lillian was concerned, despite the fact he had done more for the magazine in a year than she had done since circa 1978. Michelle and Lillian had come into the garden long before everyone else, and the length of their stay was an accomplishment for which they both demanded a high level of respect. At the all-too-frequent leaving parties – for the transient editor (or whoever) whose nugatory role in the magazine’s forty-year history was ruthlessly scratched from the record the moment he hit the pavement outside (‘Mike who? I don’t recall’) – the heroic span of Lillian and Michelle was usually trotted out again, mainly because it was the one single topic either of them could be persuaded to talk about in company.

  For people with so little in common, it was noticeable how much Michelle and Lillian made comparisons with one another. True, they were the same age, forty-two; they had both worked at Come Into the Garden for fifteen years; and neither could stick being in the same room with the other. But that was it; these were the only points at which their experience coincided. On this crucial length-of-service issue, in fact, Michelle could just remember life before Lillian, in that same wistful glimpse-of-yesterday’s-sunshine sort of way that some people can just remember being happy before the war, or sex before Aids, or global innocence before the Bomb. And when asked politely by craven sub-editors about the changes she had seen (at those godforsaken leaving parties amid the crisps and sausage rolls), Michelle was good at saying, with her eyes fixed musingly on the ceiling, ‘Well, funnily enough I can just remember life before Lillian,’ pronouncing the words with such perfectly judged emphasis that everyone latched on to the war-Aids-and-Bomb analogy without it ever being openly stated.

  Come Into the Garden was a miserable, inert place to work, no doubt about it. Osborne’s joy in turning up once a week to soak up the atmosphere was a measure of his desperation, nothing more. This was the sort of office where the plants embraced easeful death like an old friend, the stationery cupboard gave a wild, disordered suggestion of marauders on horseback, and nobody washed the coffee cups until the bacterial cultures had grown so active they could be seen performing push-ups and forward-rolls. There is a theory that says if employees have few outside distractions (i.e. don’t have much of a home-life), they will make the most of work, but in the case of Come Into the Garden the opposite appeared to be true. Miserable at home meant dismal all round. The words ‘Get a life!’ were once hurled at an affronted Michelle by a fly-by-night sub as he stalked out one day at the typesetters, never to return. It was a brutal thing to say (the other subs exchanged significant glances before silently dividing the recreant’s bun), yet nobody could deny it was an accurate assessment of the problem.

  For Michelle’s self-sacrifice was an appalling trap, with glaringly few personal compensations. And unfortunately it affected everyone, because she measured commitment by the yardstick of her own strict voluntary martyrdom. People resented this; it put them in a no-win situation. Besides the sub-editors under Michelle’s control whom we have heard about, there were four colleagues with status equal or superior to hers – art editor (Marian), features editor (Mark), advertising manager (Toby) and deputy editor (Tim) – all of whom periodically took grave offence at Michelle’s continual assertion that she cared a hundred times more about the magazine than they could possibly do. ‘No, no, you go home, Tim,’ she would say. ‘Why should you hang around? I know how you love Inspector Morse. Leave everything to me. I’m usually here until half-past nine anyway. I’ve been here for fifteen years, don’t forget; I ought to be used to it by now!’

  Michelle’s big mistake was to suppose she had no illusions. Just because she had seen a few dozen colleagues come and go, loam-free, and had sub-edited several hundred celebrity interviews about sheds (in which Osborne did indeed make all the sheds sound the same), she thought she had seen it all. But alas, she was wrong. A lifetime of rewriting ‘Me and My Shed’ was not the worst hand fate could deal you, not by a long chalk. What she was yet to discover, as she sat on the kitchen floor on that Friday night with only the unknown whereabouts of Mother’s trick severed hand to disturb her mind, was that James Mainwaring (or was it John?) had already been declared the last editor of Come Into the Garden. The last ever, that is. If all went according to plan, those anxious readers who had phoned about ‘Build your own greenhouse’ had been absolutely right to worry: they would soon be left high and dry with a stack of panes and a lot of wet putty on their hands. And Come Into the Garden, for all the sacrifice it had wrung from Michelle, would return to the earth from which it came; ashes to ashes, compost to compost, dust to dust. No one at Come Into the Garden would survive to say ‘Michelle who?’ some day; nothing would remain.

  For while she knew that the publishers, Wm Frobisher, had sold the title along
with its lucrative seaside postcards business to an extremely youthful entrepreneur in the West Country, she did not yet know that the said young whippersnapper had decided immediately to close it down, merely retaining the Victoria premises of Come Into the Garden for his own personal headquarters. She did not know that the typesetters and printers had already been contacted by the whippersnapper’s solicitors; or that a personal letter to each of the staff was already sitting on the whippersnapper’s breakfast nook, awaiting signature. The little upstart had already inspected the building with his dad, in fact, and the spooky truth was that he had taken one look at Michelle’s little corner and earmarked it immediately as the proposed position for his own executive desk. He had even helped himself to one of her Extra Strong Mints and admired her range of nail varnish.

  Come Into the Garden was nothing like paradise, and never had been. But being cast out of it was going to be a pretty grisly business.

  The decision to close Come Into the Garden, by the way, had taken only a few seconds.

  ‘Dad,’ said young Gordon, ‘I’ve bought this old magazine. What do you think?’ Frobisher’s had sent Gordon a few recent issues, with a compliments slip.

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Come Into the Garden.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘No, that’s right.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Gordon’s dad, turning it over in his hands. ‘Your Nan used to read this, when I was little. I can’t believe it’s still going.’

  And that was it.

  Gordon Clarke, at nineteen, was a red-headed, freckly prodigy of the computer software business; his father a nice-looking, broad-shouldered ex-fireman running a pleasant B&B. They were good people, Gordon and his dad, and considering their recent soaring fortunes, not a bit flash. Devon was their adopted home, the family having been transplanted from south London when Gordon was ten. Gordon had grown up knowing how to make a bed in three and a half minutes and carry four cooked breakfasts without a tray; apart from that, however, he was no better equipped for a managing directorship than most boys of his age. Given this background, then, Gordon’s acquaintance with magazine publishing was scarcely intimate; and his concern for the continued job security of a bunch of anonymous deadbeat journalists on a dusty old magazine like Come Into the Garden was bound to be in the rough vicinity of nil.

  His phenomenal early success he owed to a computer game invented in the wonderful summer of 1986, which he had named Digger. It had made him a teenage millionaire and a darling of feature-writers everywhere. In fact, if Osborne had only been more alert to the happenings of the world in general, he would have been down to interview Gordon’s shed. The idea of Digger was simple: it used the principles of the traditional treasure hunt, mixed it up with some significant ancient legend and some primitive three-dimensional virtual reality, and somehow caught the public’s attention so utterly that, overnight, the Digger became a fashionable figure for the first time since the seventeenth century. ‘Where’s young Jason?’ spinster aunties would say on visits to family homes. ‘Oh, he’s upstairs digging,’ would be the apparently meaningless reply. It was one of those instances where the new meaning of a word almost supplants the old, so that blokes heading for their allotments with shovels over their shoulders were obliged to explain to their kiddies what kind of digging exactly they were referring to.

  Not surprisingly, Gordon’s position at the cutting edge of the games software business was itself usurped, in time, by even younger tykes with even fancier ideas, but by then he had made a decent fortune from Digger and had listened to the advice of his wise old dad, with the result that he now controlled a modest, diversified business empire, with leisure as its loosely connecting thread, and a break-even B&B in Honiton as its base. His dad sometimes lamented that Gordon’s mum had not lived to see it all – but Gordon did not mind so very much. His mum had died when he was a baby; and anyway he adored his dad. His main concern at the moment, in fact, was that, if Digger Enterprises moved to London, his dad would be left behind to run the B&B alone, a thought he could hardly bear.

  One of the ingenious features of Digger, much remarked upon by adult observers of the game, was that the player sometimes dug up stuff that looked like gold, only to find that it stuck to his hands and afflicted him with debilitating pain and anguish. Gordon’s classical education was not extensive, but he knew about the Midas touch, and had also been horrified as a child by the story of Hercules and the shirt of Nessus, so he had simply put the two ideas together. Digger devotees (as well as Gordon’s many interviewers) had often pointed out the maturity of his moral insight, and posed the obvious poor-little-rich-boy question of whether Gordon himself might have dug up more than he could handle. Would the unexpected wealth turn sour? Gordon’s generally cheerful disposition gave the lie to this idea, but it had certainly struck him lately that the possible separation from his dad would be just the thing to make him rue the day of Digger’s success.

  It was his Auntie Angela who offered him the best advice on the subject of success. ‘Expect to lose all the pals of your ba-zoom, Gordon,’ she warned him flatly on the day Digger came out (Gordon was fourteen and motherless, as aforementioned). ‘Auntie’ Angela (no relation) was American, with a house just up the road. She sharpened a cracked fingernail briskly with an emery board and took a deep drag on a cigarette, with the effect of turning her already dry-throated delivery to pure essence of razor-blade. ‘Listen, Gordon baby,’ she snarled, ‘it is harder for a camel to thread a needle with its goddam eye than for a friend to forgive you success. Okay?’ She was a bit of a dragon sometimes, Auntie Angela, toughened by years of working in light comedy on British television, her skin tanned to a leathery yellow hide by decades of sun and cigarettes. But although she breathed fire and snorted smoke, she was not alarming to Gordon; he basked in the warm ashes like a fledgling phoenix not sure whether to rise up flapping or snuggle down for a bit more cosy snooze. Science, by the way, had not yet revealed the full perils of passive smoking.

  As Gordon remembered it, this important conversation took place one sunny afternoon in Angela’s shed; the same shed that Osborne and Makepeace were planning (as you will long since have guessed) to visit for Come Into the Garden in a couple of days’ time. Thinking back, Gordon could visualize the smoke and dust hanging in equal density in a shaft of sunlight from the small window; he could see Angela’s stacks of yellowing sheet music mixed in with the pots and trowels, and he could smell the earthy bulb fibre in its bag. He had spent many happy afternoons in that shed, actually, with Angela narrating the plots of Broadway musicals for his delight, and belting out all the songs by way of illustration. He was particularly fond of Showboat – especially ‘Just My Bill’ and ‘I Still Likes Me’.

  So for now all was rosy in Gordon’s particular world. He played football on Sundays, made visits to Angela, reaped ever-increasing royalties on Digger and kept up with the latest research into the technology of virtual reality. He was a genius, of course; but not a bit overbearing with it. He seemed to have the enviable capacity of enjoying his good fortune; a talent that the profile writers, after consulting child psychologists, had deduced at length to have a rather banal explanation – viz., that he owed it to a lifetime of ‘proper parenting’. Really. One of these psychologists used an analogy which would almost have endeared Gordon to readers of Come Into the Garden (if he weren’t just about to close down their magazine): she said that Gordon had had the luck of being ‘planted in a soil that nourished him’; a luck, she went on to say, that was as rare as a snowdrop in August.

  And the luck was still with him, because her comment prompted him to think of a new virtual reality program, which he now hugged to himself, for he knew it would revolutionize the whole leisure-perception-Gameboy business and place the name of Gordon Clarke on the rollcall of history, along with Newton and Buddha, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Because in this new virtual reality program, the player would not vanquish opponents or dig for treasure, b
ut would feel himself grow. Just by strapping a computer-generated visual world on to his bonce, he would experience an unfurling, an expanding, a reaching towards the light – like a snowdrop, a yucca plant or a mighty oak, depending on preference.

  Gordon’s provisional title for it was Phototropism (though he suspected this might have to change), and his ambitions for it were boundless. Imagine returning to the real, warped, stunted world after an experience such as Phototropism! It would be like reporting back from heaven; it could change people for ever.

  Meanwhile Come Into the Garden does well to shelter indoors from the harsh pelting weather sweeping towards it from the west. No point getting the corduroys damp in a misplaced effort to stay the inevitable. Its demise will be significant only to a small number of people – and, being mostly gardening types, the readers are well acquainted with the ruthless survivalist principles of pruning, dead-heading and plucking out anything that’s got a bit rusty round the edges. In short, they will be cross, but ultimately they will understand. But still, one can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old mag as it waits unawares for its sudden end. It has no idea it has done anything wrong. It thinks it has permanent roots; it thinks it’s a perennial. And it even expects Osborne and Makepeace to hit the road next Monday and bring back a ‘Me and My Shed’ so brilliant, witty and generally wildly glorious that it will make the whole world of gardening journalism sit up and say, ‘Wow.’ Which just goes to show how out of touch it really is.