‘I’m not bothered at all,’ I say, when people ask me how I feel about my mother finally selling up and moving out of the home she and my father bought three decades ago. I’m not bothered about leaving this house behind at all — it’s still popping with faint echoes and waves of alcohol, and bottled anger and silences, of illness and waiting and death, at last. But the garden! Oh, the garden! I so rarely go into the garden when I visit now, preferring to nudge the children outside so the adults can all nap in the sunlight through the big windows for a brief handful of minutes. But the last time we visit before my mother moves, the sky is blue, the sun is strong, and I am drawn outdoors.
When we moved here thirty years ago, the garden was genuinely magical. The previous owners, in possession of green fingers and an interest in their outdoor space, both of which my parents lacked, had built a wonderland beyond their back door. A rose walkway, paved, and swagged with blooms and thorns; a stone circle tucked halfway down one side, hedged with box and bamboo and red hot pokers, where a sundial stood for my spell-casting; green-spreading winter heliotrope that we all called triffids, before I knew what triffids were; a pond with bright koi carp, and a clear floating ball like a hardened bubble I could tap with one foot to break the thin ice on the winter water; the Narnian pines occasionally dusted with snow; the abundant apple trees, left to wither and fade under our lack of care. I remember the honeysuckle, drenching the evenings with its impossible liquid scent, and the bats that would flap over our heads if we stayed up late enough, a family talking in soft voices just at the edge of where the house lights reached.
The garden seemed enormous to me; as a teenager, I saw it shrink again — partly the encroaching weeds and unstopped trees, partly that it never quite seemed big enough to ensure our cigarette smoke wasn’t drifting back to my parents’ window. Now, as an adult sunk deep in property market hypnosis, it seems gigantic again. When I sit at the bottom of the garden writing this, the children have to call twice to find me.
The rose walkway became, over a decade or more, an impenetrable Sleeping Beauty thicket, until years later we spent two summers hacking it down and burning the bramble limbs and rotted wood frame. The pond, with the speckled arrival of grandchildren and an acknowledgement that the remaining green sludge was unlikely to grow any more attractive, had the water bucketed out and soil bucketed in. I dug it out a few years later to remove the plastic moulded base, and found it full of potatoes, which my mother had planted then subsequently forgotten about completely.
The willow tree loomed beside the house for years — the rope swing tied over one branch became embedded in the folded-over bark, but it was always the perfect spot to sit, away from everything, watching and listening through the narrow leaves, until it felt safe to return — but the whole tree was cut down when it was found to be pulling up the water pipes and threatening the foundations of the house. Chunks of the willow still lie around the garden, like stage-dressing from a woodland fairytale.
Because I generally only went out in good weather, the garden was always in summer. I remember how long it would take to set up a sunbathing session with my sister: towels, music, books, sunglasses, pints of ice water, ice creams from the petrol station at the end of the road, suncream, barely, and magazines, hats, snacks, cushions. I remember my sister being back at home one weekday, and me telling my manager at the local packing factory that I had a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, just so we could lie out in the garden together for a few hours, before I returned to work beet-faced and dizzied. I remember camping being the same, three hours of preparations and props before it became too cold or scary and we’d ship back inside.
None of us were gardeners enough to take proper advantage of the size and opportunity. Any fruiting plant that survived longer that a few seasons was the victim of sheer luck — we’d harvest blackberries when we tumbled upon them, but we never dug and laid out and cared for the veg beds a garden like that deserved. The noticeable anomaly is the fig tree, still giving out handfuls of fat, splitting figs each summer despite getting no more care than anything else in this semi-wilderness. My sole sign of hostility towards the new owners is a passing urge to snap off all the unripe figs, to prevent these strangers reaping the rewards of our indolence, for this year at least.
The birdsong is so familiar to me, even though in thirty years I have not identified a single one. A chattering, a chirruping, a gentle caw, a repeating coo-hoo-coo that woke me most mornings; I leave them all in this garden for the next child to discover and absorb. (My garden is a fraction of this size, and I wonder what I would pay to transport this garden to my own house, somehow — the kind of thought I would have spent hours pondering the logistics of in the garden, slowly grilling beside the triffids — for our children to become lost in, to feel safe in. I feel sadder to lose this garden than I did to lose my father. I want to stay here, and stay, and stay.)
I never wore shoes in the garden, and accepted the occasional thorn from a hidden thistle as the required price. The soles of my feet were often black, and always thickened. I saw daisies covered in dew, pink-tipped and sleeping. I heard hedgehogs, and foxes, and mice, and never once wondered how much our mostly elderly neighbours could hear us all, or how much they minded. The garden is paddling pools with scuba-gear made from drinking straws, it is my elder sisters promising a warm jug of water over me once I’ve had two more cold ones, and me still growing up to love them, it is a parent-free party where the beers are chilling in the same paddling pool but my sister, left to chaperone, is gently placed in bed at 7.45 after eating too many of the hash brownies while the rest of us hang out in the gloaming; it is filled with children, ours, our nephews and nieces, our friends’, us, it is silence and peace, hope and space, and private worlds a thousand acres wide and a thousand years long. (This garden brings out my buried sentimentality.)
The sundial is gone, the willow is gone, the pond is gone, the rose walkway is gone. What was once a compost heap has grown into a pile of rubble and weeds, so noticeable that the buyers’ surveyor declared it could only be an old air-raid shelter, requiring professional clearance.
I still do not know the bird names.