‘Cause you don’t get to see much of the world from underground, lad, and I allus wanted to see what else there was. Have you done much travellin?’
Jay told him he had been to Florida twice with his parents, to the south of France, to Tenerife and the Algarve for holidays. Joe dismissed these with a sniff.
‘I mean proper travellin, lad. Not all that tourist-brochure rubbish, but the real thing. The Pont-Neuf in the early morning, when there’s no-one up but the tramps coming out from under the bridges and out of the Metro, and the sun shinin on the water. New York. Central Park in spring. Rome. Ascension Island. Crossin the Italian alps by donkey. The vegetable caique from Crete. Himalayas on foot. Eatin rice off leaves in the Temple of Ganesh. Caught in a squall off the coast of New Guinea. Spring in Moscow and a whole winter of dogshit comin out under the meltin snow.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘I’ve seen all of those things, lad,’ he said softly. ‘And more besides. I promised mesself I’d see everything.’
Jay believed him. He had his maps on the walls, carefully annotated in his crabby handwriting and marked with coloured pins to show the places he had been. He told stories of brothels in Tokyo and shrines in Thailand, birds of paradise and banyan trees and standing stones at the end of the world. In the big converted spice cupboard next to his bed there were millions of seeds, painstakingly wrapped in squares of newspaper and labelled in his small careful script: tuberosa rubra maritima, tuberosa panax odarata, thousands and thousands of potatoes in their small compartments and, with them, carrots, squash, tomatoes, artichokes, leeks – over 300 species of onion alone – sages, thymes, sweet bergamots and a bewildering treasure store of medicinal herbs and vegetables collected on his travels, every one named and packaged and ready for planting. Some of these plants were already extinct in the wild, Joe said, their properties forgotten by everyone but a handful of experts. Of the millions of varieties of fruit and vegetables once grown, only a few dozen were still commonly used.
‘It’s your intensive farming does it,’ he would say, leaning on his spade for long enough to take a mouthful of tea from his mug. ‘Too much specialization kills off variety. Sides, people don’t want variety. They want everythin to look the same. Round red tomatoes, and never mind there’s a long yeller un that’d taste a mile better if they gave it a try. Red uns look better on shelves.’ He waved an arm vaguely over the allotment, indicating the neat rows of vegetables rising up the railway embankment, the home-made cold frames in the derelict signal box, the fruit trees pegged out against the wall. ‘There’s things growin here that you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the whole of England,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and there’s seeds in that chest of mine that you might not find anywhere else in the whole world.’ Jay listened to him in awe. He’d never been interested in plants before. He could hardly tell the difference between a Granny Smith and a Red Delicious. He knew potatoes, of course, but Joe’s talk of blue jackapples and pink fir apples was beyond any experience of his. The thought that there were secrets, that arcane, forgotten things might be growing right there on the railway embankment with only an old man as their custodian fired Jay with an enthusiasm he had never imagined. Part of it was Joe, of course. His stories. His memories. The energy of the man himself. He began to see in Joe something he had never seen in anyone else. A vocation. A sense of purpose.
‘Why did you come back, Joe?’ he asked him one day. ‘After all that travelling, why come back here?’
Joe peered out gravely from under the bill of his miner’s cap.
‘It’s part of me plan, lad,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be here for ever. Some day I’ll be off again. Some day soon.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ll show you.’
He reached into his workshirt and pulled out a battered leather wallet. Opening it, he unfolded a photograph clipped from a colour magazine, taking great care not to tear the whitened creases. It was a picture of a house.
‘What’s that?’ Jay squinted at the picture. It looked ordinary enough, a big house built of faded pinkish stone, a long strip of land in front, with some kind of vegetation growing in ordered rows. Joe smoothed out the paper.
‘That’s me chatto, lad,’ he said. ‘In Bordo, it is, in France. Me chatto with the vineyard and me hundred-year-old orchard with peaches and almonds and apples and pears.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘When I’ve got me brass together I’ll buy it – five grand would do it – and I’ll make the best bloody wine in the south. Chatto Cox, 1975. How’s that sound?’
Jay watched him doubtfully.
‘Sun shines all year round down in Bordo,’ said Joe cheerily. ‘Oranges in January. Peaches like cricket balls. Olives. Kiwi fruit. Almonds. Melons. And space. Miles and miles of orchards and vineyards, land cheap as dirt. Soil like fruit cake. Pretty girls treadin out the grapes with their bare feet. Paradise.’
‘Five thousand pounds is a lot of money,’ said Jay doubtfully. Joe tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger.
‘I’ll get there,’ he said mysteriously. ‘You want somethin badly enough, you allus get there in the end.’
‘But you don’t even speak French.’
Joe’s only response was a stream of sudden, incomprehensible gibberish, like no language Jay had ever heard before.
‘Joe, I do French at school,’ he told him. ‘That’s not anything like-’
Joe looked at him indulgently.
‘It’s dialect, lad,’ he said. ‘Learned it off of a band of gypsies in Marseilles. Believe me, I’ll fit right in there.’ He folded the picture carefully away again and replaced it in his wallet. Jay gaped at him in awe, utterly convinced.
‘You’ll see what I mean one day, lad,’ he said. ‘Jus you wait.’
‘Can I come with you?’ Jay asked. ‘Will you take me with you?’ Joe considered it seriously, head to one side.
‘I might, lad, if you want to come. I might anall.’
‘Promise?’
‘All right.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a promise. Cox and Mackintosh, best bloody winemakers in Bordo. That do yer?’
They toasted his dreams in warm Blackberry ’73.
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