The Outside Of Everything

Chapter 7
The Allotment

We had good reason for giving The Quiet One his name. He liked to keep his own counsel. He liked to give nothing away. He thought only fools babbled on. He didn’t have a lot to say for himself. He hated crowds. And he liked to get away from it all.

So it seemed sort of right when he took to gardening, and got himself an allotment. It was very him. Out there in all weathers, whiling away his days. Although he claimed it was tough going. Very disciplined. Though every time we popped down to see him he’d be sitting on an upturned milk crate watching the world go by. But he loved it. He even signed on as a budding market gardener with the Social Security, and got an additional allowance for being what we thought of as spectacularly unenterprising. Not being outdoor types ourselves we left him to the Good Life.
And in all fairness, he made quite a go of it. Some space he gave over to flowers, but mostly it was varieties of vegetables he took to cultivating. Cabbages, carrots, lettuces and the like. Quite the green fingered one, and we saw very little of him during daylight hours, though of an evening he was uncharacteristically full of it.
What I should have mentioned at the start is that our Quiet One is an exceptional listener. His quiet assurance seems to draw others out. People trust him. People open up to him. And if you’ve a story worth telling you couldn’t ask for a better audience. Anyway, apparently our man with the green fingers had come across some old boys down on the allotments he really took to. He loved listening to their advice and the tales they had to relay.
One old contemptible particularly appealed to him. A chap called Leo, as curmudgeonly as hell until he let his defences down. A retired accountant by trade though he defied every stereotype you could think of. The Quiet One adored him, and we often had to sit of an evening listening to Leo this and Leo that. To be fair, he did sound quite a character. A real cock sparrow who qualified as an accountant after many years of night classes and correspondence courses, though you’d swear blind he’d worked outside all his life. He was as tough as old boots, but as sentimental as anything when telling his tales of growing up in the old East End.

Leo’s parents were Polish Jews, and growing up when he did where he did it was hardly surprising that he was as a youngster wholly immersed in the milieu of British Communism, fighting fascism, and campaigning for the greater good. Understandably The Quiet One had a wonderful time winkling out accounts of Cable Street, characters like Joe Jacobs, Nat Cohen, and so on. Though always Leo’s words were cautionary, and he warned The Quiet One against romanticism. Trust no one, he said. Every leader, every boss, he argued they were all the same. Labour leaders, shop owners, shop stewards, politicians and profiteers. All the same at heart. Sell you down the river every time as long as someone saw them right. That’s why he worked hard. To escape. To preserve himself. To have a trade to fall back on. Which is where he found it so hard to understand The Quiet One and the rest of us. Even though he thought it was a good thing we read so much. Learning is important, but you need a purpose, he advised. But times change, we said.

Times do change. And after a while it wasn’t all sunshine and smiles for The Quiet One. He came in one evening looking particularly perturbed. When we could get him to talk about what had been going on, he found it particularly painful. He had spent pretty much the whole day helping Leo and some of the other guys repair the damage caused by vandals, who had overnight wantonly destroyed an area of the allotments. We didn’t know what to say. We knew how much love and care those guys had been putting into their plots. It really did not seem right.
Things didn’t get any better either. Whoever was committing these outrages kept up their campaign. It wasn’t just that the hard work of planting and nurturing was being undone. Worse still some of the sheds, the holiest of sanctuaries for these old boys, were being daubed with racist graffiti. That hurt Leo particularly, and The Quiet One said he was beginning to look quite ill. And that hurt our Quiet One.

Leo was hopping mad, understandably. He said he’d fought Mosley, his blackshirts or brownshirts, on the streets of London, and that he’d always fought fascists, always stood up for what was right, and now it’s come to this. Stupid kids playing at being Nazis. They needed to be taught a lesson. He had a point. And we couldn’t leave it to Leo and his pals. That wouldn’t be right. And the police weren’t that interested. Some direct intervention was called for, but first we needed to know what we were up against.

So that night I went with The Quiet One to keep a vigil. We were determined that whatever happened we would just be taking notes, and assessing the situation rather than taking direct action. It was a bit spooky to be honest, and at first eerily quiet sitting there in the dark, watching and waiting. Though we didn’t have to wait too long. For sure enough in they came. About four of them. Shaven headed. Big boots. Bottles of cider. Solvents. Lumbering around. Pushing each other around. Horseplay. We’d been here before. I wanted to do something. Urgently. But The Quiet One, he was wiser. He put a restraining hand on my arm, and fingers to his lips. So we just had to sit there and watch. Watch them trampling all over the place. It was hard. Harder than they thought they were. And then they were gone.

Stretching limbs, clenching fists, emerging from our hiding place. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t need to. We knew that they’d be back, and so would we. The next day we had a sort of council of war down at the allotments. Leo and some of the others were all for turning up, tooled up. Crowbars and jemmies. We’ll give them a good traditional old East End welcome, he said. But no, we said, leave this to us. We mustn’t sink to their level. We have to do this with style. Give them something to remember. Leo said he would trust us. That was something to live up to. And we spent the rest of the day planning and preparing.

Cometh the hour, we were all four of us in position down on the allotments. The plan was pretty much conceived by The Redhead, to give credit where it’s due. And he’d got the idea from his kid sister, another redhead and as canny as can be. So there we were, all dressed in black. Like the song said, sometimes good guys don’t wear white. We were spread out across the allotments, crouched waiting. And to give the fascist thugs their due, they turned up right on cue.

We had agreed The Redhead would sound the signal for the fun to begin. And so when he did it was like a tremendous release. Suddenly the skinheads were surrounded. The collective look of alarm on their faces was priceless. After all when you’re out for a night’s wanton vandalism and destruction the last thing you expect is to be confronted by four figures all in black, wearing luminous Planet of the Apes masks, clutching enormous vegetables, and singing The Red Flag. For that was The Redhead’s plan.

I have to hand it to him. The plan had a certain style and poetic justice. The tender loving care the old boys had put into cultivating these outlandish vegetables and whatever would at least, at last, be put to good use. Marrows, pumpkins, leeks, rhubarb. That sort of thing. In the right hands they can be useful weapons. Particularly when the element of surprise is on your side. And we certainly did have surprise on our side. Think of the comic strip exclamations. Zap! Pow! Kaboom! Whaam! Ah the slap and smack of marrow on bone. The satisfying thud of a pumpkin caught right between the eyes. Rhubarb? They didn’t like it up ‘em. Those skinheads skedaddled and made no bones about it.

The allotment’s council of war met again the following morn. We left it to The Quiet One to relay the evening’s events. Leo laughed, loving it all. I don’t think we’ll see them back again, he declared. And he was right. And while the demographics of allotment management may have changed over the years, I am particularly proud that somewhere there still grows a species of rose called The Outside of Everything, named in tribute to what happened that night.