With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

4

The magazine for which all these people worked was a modest weekly publication, usually running to thirty-two or forty pages, with a circulation of around twenty thousand. In its far off post-war heyday – which none of the present staff could remember – it had achieved a sale four times greater, but during the sixties, seventies and eighties its appeal had dipped, declined and finally levelled out; and today it would not be unkind to say that in the broad mental landscape of the average British newsagent, Come Into the Garden was virtually invisible to the naked eye.

This vanishing act represented a great lost opportunity. Gardening had become a lot more sexy in the past ten years, the garden centre had almost supplanted the supermarket as a magnet for disposable dosh, and the urgent question of morally defensible peat substitutes had become the staple talk of middle-class dinner tables; yet Come Into the Garden still somehow failed to clean up. Michelle was often struck by the sad image of her beloved magazine pathetically sheltering indoors in the breezy climate of the 1980s while other, brighter, glossier monthly publications came stumping heartily into its territory, utterly oblivious to its existence. She imagined these competitors taking a quick glance round, sniffing the wind, and then digging energetically with flashy stainless steel implements, heedlessly scattering the sod.

Michelle’s picture did not end there, either. It was remarkably colourful and detailed. For example, Come Into the Garden wore a pair of brown corduroys, tied at the knee with string, and an old jumper with holes, and plimsolls, while the rivals were togged in Barbour jackets, riding boots and aristocratic flat caps, rather like the pictures of Captain Mark Phillips in Hello! magazine. Michelle was good at mental pictures. Once, when she observed Lillian standing tall, knock-kneed, spare-tyred and stupid in the middle of the office, the word ‘Ostrich!’ leapt quite unbidden to her mind, and she had relished the analogy ever since. She had successfully thought of other animal-types for the remainder of her colleagues, too. But luckily – apart from flinging the odd ‘Oink, oink’ noise at a departing back – she kept this personal taxonomy to herself.

The depressing thing about working for Come Into the Garden, however, was not the variety of wildlife. It was that the general public had this awful habit of remembering it from years ago, placing it on the same conceptual shelf as Reveille, the Daily Sketch, Noggin the Nog and Harold Macmillan. ‘Blimey,’ they said, shaking their heads in disbelief, ‘my Nan used to read that; is it really still going?’ – at which one could only smile weakly and try not to take offence. It was nobody’s fault, this widely held assumption that Come Into the Garden had long since sought eternal peace in the great magazine rack in the sky. Nevertheless, it required strength of character for those intimately acquainted with the title not to take such comments personally. After all, it was a bit like being accused repeatedly of outliving your own obituary, or being dead but not lying down.

Imagine the difficulty of applying for other jobs. Michelle in particular had tried quite strenuously to outgrow Come Into the Garden, but she had been compelled to realize that citing her occupation as chief sub of this magazine sounded suspiciously like Coronation Programme Seller, or Great Fire of London Damage Assessor: prospective employers simply assumed she hadn’t worked for years. On the whole she bitterly envied the sensible, big-headed young journalists who had joined the title only to use it as a tiny stepping-stone en route to bigger things. They had come into the garden (as it were) and then pissed right off again, with no regrets, and moreover without a trace of loam on their fancy shoes. She did not blame them for this, she just despised them – a feeling she expressed quite eloquently by affecting never to have heard of them (‘Paul who? Doesn’t ring any bells’) whenever their names were raised.

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.

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