With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

Contents

Cover

Title Page

1

2

3

4

5

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8

9

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15

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Not having a hand free for a more dignified entrance, Osborne gave the swing door a mighty push with his foot, so that it boomed and echoed where it struck the wall beyond. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and shuffled awkwardly through the gap, sliding his back along the door to keep it open. He was distinctly overladen. From each wrist dangled various coloured string bags, bulging with parcels, fruit and scarves; and across his chest (as though to break an expected fall) he wore an old BOAC airline bag stuffed thick with dog-eared papers.

The subdued brown editorial offices of Come Into the Garden, though accustomed to having their peace-and-quiet vacuum broken by this weekly intrusion, gave a collective wince at Osborne’s rough approach. The sudden draught of air that sucked the venetian blinds away from the windows and plucked the last rusting leaves from the parched, spindly weeping figs was like a sharp exasperated huff of disapproval. Someone once said you should never trust a doctor whose office plants had died. For some reason this dictum came back to haunt Osborne each week when he made his entrance. By the same token, you see, perhaps you should not pay too much attention to a weekly gardening magazine which looks as though it has just received a visit from Agent Orange.

‘Ah,’ he said (by way of greeting) to Lillian, the editor’s secretary, but she made no reply. Her head thrown back at a tricky angle, Lillian was engrossed in savouring the last dregs of a cup-soup, tapping the vertical mug with a practised hand so that the last shards of soggy croûton came sliding and tumbling mouthwards, like rocks down a mountainside. Osborne knew from experience that there was no point expecting a response from Lillian while a single iota of monosodium glutamate remained at large. To judge from the distinctive aroma that hung like an iron curtain across the office, today’s flavour was celery.

‘Lillian?’ A phone was ringing, and Osborne wondered vaguely whether someone should answer it.

‘Lillian?’

‘Ngh,’ said Lillian, preoccupied with running her tongue around the inside of the mug.

‘Shall I answer this?’

‘Ngh, ngh,’ replied Lillian.

‘Right you are, then,’ said Osborne cheerfully, and left it to ring.

Heaping his string bags on a free desk, he felt strangely happy. Come Into the Garden had always felt a bit like home to Osborne, a shelter where he was welcome and beloved. As a regular contributor, blown in weekly from the cold, he felt tended, nurtured – like a special potted geranium brought indoors by a caring husbandman at the first sharp sting of autumn frost. What colour geranium? you might ask, if you were a gardening person. Well, Osborne was not dogmatic on the subject, but in his mind’s eye he leaned towards cerise. But the colour was largely immaterial. The point was that though he might be hibernating (professionally speaking) at Come Into the Garden, at least he was not in imminent danger of rusting, wilting, perishing, or being hoicked out and shredded for compost. And occasionally – to push the geranium analogy to its furthest limit – a colleague with a kind heart and advanced ideas might even take the trouble to stop beside his desk and encourage him with a few kind words.

So every Wednesday Osborne came to the office to compose his time-honoured ‘Me and My Shed’ column and soak up the atmosphere. These pieces could equally well be written at home, really (in fact, the idea had been suggested to him more than once), but throughout his career he had always written in offices, from his early days as a staff reporter on a South Coast evening paper, and all through his time as a second-string drama critic in the sixties, so it was how he felt most comfortable. Physically, being a large, broad-shouldered person, he looked slightly out of place at an office desk, as if when he stood up he would tip it over. But Osborne merely felt cosy. He warmed to the very mottoes on the walls – ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’; ‘It is not spring until you can plant your foot upon twelve daisies’ – and thought of the parable of the seed on fertile ground. Also, not for the first time, he wondered whether anyone on the staff actually had a garden.

A man who has been buffeted by life needs a place where he can lay down his string bags. He needs a place where he can sit at an old Tipp-Ex-spattered Adler, treat himself to a free cup of tea, miss his deadline by hours, stand helpless at the photocopier until someone rescues him, fill his pockets at the stationery cupboard, and make hour-long surreptitious phone calls to old journo muckers in faraway foreign parts. Come Into the Garden was that place for Osborne.

Today, however, it seemed there was no one about. Osborne removed a few thick, dank layers of navy-blue outdoor garment (the month was November) and hung them on a coat stand, which promptly collapsed under the weight. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and ran his fingers through his short, grey hair. Where was everybody? He looked around for clues. A half-empty mail-sack lay limp in the middle of Reception, but he was aware that little could be deduced from this. Lillian (who had now disappeared) famously claimed to have a medical problem with sorting the post, due to a rare neurotic-compulsive fear of envelopes. Such a condition was obviously unfortunate in a secretary (almost a disqualification, you might think), but there you were.

This unfortunate and improbable malady meant that post sorting was an all-day process, with a half-empty mail-sack permanently dumped on the floor as a kind of endless reproach, and most of the editorial staff sensibly steering well clear and simply learning never to depend too heavily on the prompt dispersal of correspondence. Lillian’s wont was to stoop and sigh over a heap of letters, laboriously examining each one with the aid of tongs, and stopping chance passers-by with faux-naif questions evidently calculated to drive them mad. ‘Look, this says “John Mainwaring, Editor”,’ she might say, waving the ironware in a wild, threatening manner, ‘but the editor’s name is James Mainwaring.’ Here she would pause to ascertain what reaction she was getting (usually uneasy silence). ‘What do you think? Shall I send it back, or pitch it in the bin?’ No one ever knew what to say to this sort of thing; after all, you don’t argue with mad people, especially when they are equipped to clock you with a pair of tongs. So Lillian got away with it, as she got away with everything else. And in between these bouts of petty tyranny, she would sit quietly at her desk, ignoring the phones, and give her full attention to the smoking of a cigarette – on the grounds, presumably, that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.

It seemed odd to be in the office on his own. Osborne was assailed by an understandable fear that he had forgotten an important appointment elsewhere – an appointment that his green-ink-fingered friends had evidently all remembered. Even the tireless sub-editors were missing from their work stations, and Osborne marvelled when he peered into their little book-lined room and saw their four empty chairs – a sight, he realized, that few people other than night cleaners had ever previously witnessed. The fabric on one of the chairs turned out to be a jaunty rich tartan – but no wonder he had never suspected it, when a sub-editor’s drab, grey jumper and unkempt shirt (not to mention his drab, grey, unkempt body) had always blocked the view.

Like many writers, Osborne was afraid of sub-editors, the trouble being that they had a disarming habit of changing his prose automatically, without telling him. ‘Ah, the further musings of the giant intellect,’ the chief sub-editor might say, with gratuitous cruelty, as she took his copy each week; and then, the moment he had left the room, she fell on it savagely with a thick blue pen, taking out all the bits he was most proud of. In his more gloomy moments, he wondered why he bothered to write the piece in the first place, when the subsequent contribution of the sub-editor so often outweighed his own. He had been known to quote the lament of Macduff (‘What, all my little chicks?’) at the thought of his innocents, massacred. And you couldn’t blame him. ‘Not in my back yard’ he had once confidently typed in a piece about a politician, only to discover, a few days later, in the printed magazine, that it had been rewritten as ‘Not on my patio’, which was not quite the same.

In the stealthy, unnatural quiet of the sub-editors’ room, dictionaries and half-corrected proofs lay open on abandoned desks. Osborne tiptoed guiltily, like a schoolboy finding himself alone in an after-hours classroom when everyone has gone home. To stay his nerves, he helped himself to an Extra Strong Mint from a roll next to the chief sub-editor’s typewriter (careful not to disarrange her impressive selection of nail varnishes), and peered from an awkward position at the proof she had been correcting, which was covered in tiny blue marks and explanatory notes circled with a feminine flourish. ‘NOTE TO TYPESETTER,’ he read, upside-down,

Far be it from me etcetera, but it seems to me that despite our best efforts a twinge of confusion remains in your mind between ‘forbear’ – a verb meaning ‘abstain or refrain from’ – and ‘forebear’ – a noun denoting an ancestor. May we bid adieu to these intrusive ‘e’s? I hope this clears things up. I have mentioned this before, of course; but how can you be expected to remember? You lead such busy lives, and Radio 1 must absorb a lot of your attention. I do understand. Sorry to take up your valuable time. And far be it from me, etcetera.

Michelle

Osborne gulped in amazement at such erudition, which was an unfortunate thing to do. For the Extra Strong Mint promptly closed over his windpipe, like a manhole cover over an orifice in the road.

Thus it was that when the three subs re-entered the room in wordless single file a few moments later, they discovered their ‘Me and My Shed’ columnist bent double with a gun-metal litter-bin held to his face, making mysterious amplified strangling noises. Since nothing louder than the whisper of a nail file was usually to be heard in this room, they naturally flashed their specs in annoyance. However, having all received the statutory sub-editor’s training (involving, one suspects, the same kind of rigorous football-rattle personality testing undergone by the horses of riot police), they simply resumed their solemn work of skewering other people’s chicks with their thick blue pens.

‘Are you in difficulties, mon cher?’ asked Michelle, the chief sub-editor, archly, adjusting an embroidered collar and seating herself carefully so as not to rumple her dirndl skirt. Osborne shook his head (and litter-bin) emphatically, to indicate that any difficulties were of only passing significance. The sub-editors swapped glances (or did they signal Morse code with those specs?) and sighed. Osborne discharged the mint with a loud ptang-yang sound and fled red-faced from the room, and all was peace again.

It was quite some time before Osborne discovered the reason for the empty office; obviously, if he had asked a few questions, there and then, he might have been saved a lot of the palaver of the ensuing week. Unfortunately, however, he did not. The fact was, there had been a crisis meeting. The magazine had been sold to a new proprietor; a new editor had been mentioned, along with a rationalization of the staff. He did not yet know it, but a cold wind was blowing at Come Into the Garden; his shelter had been torn up and blown away, like so much matchwood.

However, since nobody had yet informed him of this, Osborne merely dragged his airline bag to his favourite corner, and from a safe distance waved hello again to Lillian. She was flicking through a mail order catalogue now, turning each page with a practised insouciant finger-technique not involving the thumb, while a motorbike messenger stood in front of her desk, waiting for her to look up. Above her head, Osborne noticed, there was a new sign. It said, ‘What did your last slave die of?’

He produced his notebook, flipped a few pages and attempted to compose his thoughts. Now, Osborne, old buddy, who have you got for us this week? He typed the words ME AND MY SHED at the top of a sheet of paper, and added a colon.

ME AND MY SHED:

A name ought to follow, but for some reason it failed to come. Osborne frowned. Every week he interviewed a famous person about their shed – Me and My Shed: Melvyn Bragg; Me and My Shed: Stirling Moss. He had been doing it for years. In certain professional quarters people still raved about his Me and My Shed: David Essex; it was said that for anyone interested in the art of celebrity outhouse interviewing, it had represented the absolute ‘last word’. Osborne treasured this praise, while in general being modest about his job, deflecting the envy of non-journalists by saying merely that he had seen the insides of some classy sheds in his time. But today, despite remembering a bus journey to Highgate on Monday morning – despite, moreover, remembering the interior fittings of the shed in some considerable detail – it was only the classiness of the shed that stuck in his mind. He just could not put a classy face to it. The words

ME AND MY SHED:

looked up accusingly from the typewriter. Especially the colon on the end.

He flicked through his notes again, but they offered little help. After twelve years of writing ‘Me and My Shed’ he had come to the unsurprising conclusion that all sheds are alike in the dark. Even when the column’s remit had been extended, in the mid-1980s, to include greenhouses and any other temporary garden structures (such as the ivy-covered car-port), the interviews had always required a masterly touch to bring them alive. Here, for example, was a sample of this week’s notes:

Had shed since bght house. Quite good sh. Spend time in sh. obv. Also gd 4 keeping thngs in. Never done anythng to sh, particrly. Cat got locked in sh once, qu funny. Don’t thnk abt sh often. Take sh for grantd. Sorry. Not v interstng. House interestng. Sh not.

Time was pressing, The official deadline was 2.30, and it was now a quarter past twelve. Osborne typed a few words, hoping that the act of writing might jog his memory. He looked out of the window and tried to free-associate about Highgate, but curiously found himself thinking about Marmite sandwiches on a windswept beach, so gave it up. The experience of thirty years in journalism, a dozen of them in sheds, seemed to have deserted him.

In fact, he was just beginning to consider turning the column into a kind of mystery slot this week, calling it ‘Who and Whose Shed?’, when Tim, the deputy editor, ambled past, carrying a page proof towards the subs’ room. Tim was one of those aforementioned people who sometimes dropped a few encouraging words in the direction of a torpid geranium, and he did so now. But it was no big deal, actually. Tim was a thin, aloof young fellow (twenty-four, twenty-five?) with a generally abstracted air, tight pullovers and bottle-thick kick-me specs; a young man whose emotional thermostat had been set too low at an early age, and was now too stiff to budge. Now he stopped at Osborne’s side and crouched down to read on the typewriter ‘Me and My Shed’s’ recently composed opening sentence:

When the cat got stuck in the shed for 24 hours last year, there were red faces all round at a certain house in Highgate.

Tim wrinkled his nose and chewed his biro. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘How did things go with Angela Farmer?’

Osborne thought for a second. Angela Farmer?

‘Quite a coup getting her, I thought,’ continued Tim. ‘In fact, I made a note somewhere. I think we’ll splash it. Nice to have your name on the front of the magazine again before –’

Tim stopped abruptly, but Osborne didn’t notice. He was experiencing a strange sense of weightlessness. Was it possible to meet Angela Farmer, glamorous middle-aged American star of a thousand British sitcoms, and have no recollection of it? He tried picturing the scene at the door, the handshake, the famous smoky voice of Ms Farmer barking, ‘C’min! What’re ya waitin for? Applause?’ but nothing came. His mind was a blank; it was as though he had never met her. Panic welled in his chest, and in a split second his entire career as a celebrity interviewer flashed before his eyes.

‘So what was she like?’

‘Is it hot in here?’

‘Yes, a bit. But what was she like?’

Osborne decided to bluff.

‘Angela Farmer? Oh, fine. Fine, Angela Farmer, yes. Very’ – here he consulted his notes – ‘interesting. Very American, of course.’

Tim nodded encouragingly.

‘Good shed, was it?’

‘Angela Farmer’s shed, you mean? Yes, oh yes. Ms Farmer has a surprisingly good shed.’

‘Did you ask about those hilarious gerbils in the shed in From This Day Forward?’

‘Did I? Oh yes, I’m sure I did.’

‘And I think I read somewhere that she was actually proposed to in a shed by her second husband – whatsisname, the man who plays the shed builder in For Ever and Ever Amen – but that they broke up after a row about weather-proofing.’

‘All true, mate. All true.’

‘Should make an interesting piece, then.’

‘I’ll say.’

They both paused, staring into the middle distance, pondering the interesting piece. ‘The cat got stuck in the shed overnight once, too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The cat. Got stuck in the shed. Overnight. She said it was quite funny.’

The deputy editor wrinkled his nose again, and changed the subject.

‘Oh, and you ought to mention the Angela Farmer rose. Smash hit of last year’s Chelsea. No doubt propagated in a shed, of course, ha ha. But I expect you covered all that.’

Osborne gave a brave smile.

‘Well, mustn’t hold you up.’

‘No.’

‘See you later.’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you ever get tired of sheds, Osborne?’

‘Never.’

‘Unlike some,’ said the deputy editor darkly, and girded himself to do battle with the subs.

Waiting for Osborne’s column later that evening, after everyone else had gone home, Michelle donned her pastry-cuffs, strapped a spotless pinny over her outfit, and tackled the reference books, rearranging them in strict alphabetical order, fixing them in a perpendicular position, and drawing them neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves. Having accomplished this, she scoured the coffee machine and dusted the venetian blinds, in the course of which activity she deliberately elbowed a large economy packet of Lillian’s cup-soups into a bin. Then she sat down at her typewriter and wrote some much-needed letters for the ‘Dear Donald’ page.

She loved this task. Few bona fide readers were writing to the magazine these days, and Michelle’s particular joy was to write the bogus letters ungrammatically and then correct them afterwards. Subbing was a great passion of Michelle’s; it was like making a plant grow straight and tall. ‘Dear Donald,’ she would type with a thrill. ‘As an old age pensioner, my Buddleia has grown too big for me to comfortably cut it back myself …’ She could barely prevent herself from ripping it straight out of the machine, to prune those dangling modifiers, stake those split infinitives. How quickly the time passed when you were having fun. The only thing that stumped her – as it always did – was the invention of fake names and addresses, because she could never see why one fake name sounded more authentic than any other. ‘G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon’ was how she signed each one of today’s batch, hoping that inspiration would strike later. She often chose G. Clarke of Honiton. She’d never been there, but she fancied that’s where all the readers lived.

Time to check up on Osborne, she thought, when ten letters from G. Clarke were complete, photocopied and subbed within an inch of their lives. She dialled Osborne’s number on the internal phone. It rang on his desk and startled him, so that he dropped an open bottle of Tipp-Ex on to his shoes.

‘Bugger,’ he said, as he answered the phone.

‘Going well, oh great wordsmith?’

Kneading his face, Osborne watched in helpless alarm as the correcting fluid seeped into the leather uppers of his only decent footwear.

‘Anything wrong?’

‘No, no. Nearly there, actually. Just got to think of the pay-off.’

‘Oh marvellous.’ Michelle sounded ironic, the way she often did on Wednesday nights. ‘That’s dandy.’ There was a pause.

‘Far be it from me,’ she said sweetly, ‘but have you mentioned that he writes in his shed? And that this explains the repeated use of weed-killer as a murder weapon in the books? You know what I mean: he looks up from his rude desk of logs for inspiration, and there’s the weed-killer, next to the bone-meal. In the one I took on holiday last year, he killed off the prime suspect with a garden rake. One blow to the back of the neck, and that was it. Nasty. In the latest book, I understand, someone is dealt the death-blow with a pair of shears.’

‘What are you talking about? Who do you mean?’

‘Trent Carmichael. This week’s “Me and My Shed”. The crime writer.’

Osborne thought a minute, thought another minute, remembered everything – in particular the bestselling author laughing apologetically, ‘Well, er, the cat got locked in the shed once, but no foul play was suspected!’ – and said, ‘I’ll call you back.’

Things were looking bad. He unlaced his shoes, took them off, and on bended knee started to scrub them upside down on the carpet, hoping to remove the worst of the whitener while deciding what to do next. He looked up to see Michelle standing beside him.

‘No, you’ve got it wrong,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the floor, his pulse pounding in his neck. ‘Trent Carmichael is next week. You wouldn’t know whether this stuff washes out, would you?’

‘So who is it this week?’

‘Angela Farmer,’ he mumbled.

‘Who?’

‘Angela Farmer.’

‘No. Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘That’s very odd.’

‘No, I met her on Monday. Not odd at all. Nice woman.’

Michelle narrowed her eyes as though to contest the point, and then decided not to bother. She stretched her arms instead; this conversation clearly had nowhere to go.

‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I’d better not hold you up, then. Have you mentioned she’s got a tulip named after her?’

‘I thought it was a rose.’

‘No, tulip.’

Osborne looked like he might be sick. ‘Tell you what,’ said Michelle. ‘It’s been a hard day, I’ll look it up for you.’

Osborne sat in his stockinged feet, stroking the keys of his typewriter and staring into space. In all his years as a journalist, he had never before written up an interview that had not taken place. Why ever had he believed Tim? Tim didn’t know. How, moreover, could he extricate himself now he had gone so far? Not only had he cast all Trent Carmichael’s faint and unamusing witticisms into a broad American slang, but he was now also stuck with sentences referring to (a) love being like a red red tulip, and (b) a woman who viewed the world through tulip-tinted spectacles.