But if Pitton were not as equable as he was, if he couldn’t live easily with the idea of ruin, if he had been one of the original sixteen and had been weakened by elegiac fantasies, he might not have been able to do what he did do.
That summer, my first, word came down from his employer, my landlord, that the “hidden garden” was to be opened up and cleaned. Hidden? Was there something in the grounds — apart from the lawn and the wood and the walks at the other side of the house that were for the exclusive use of my landlord — that I didn’t know? There was. The “hidden garden,” as it turned out, was so successfully hidden that, though I walked past it every day, I had never suspected that there was anything unusual there. It was a trick, like false books on a shelf. It was at the back of the main garage; and what looked just like the vegetable-garden wall at the back of the garage was, in fact, the outer wall of the hidden garden.
Behind that outer wall and the true wall of the vegetable garden was the hidden garden. It was enclosed on all sides, and entered by a wooden door. This door, which I passed every day, was permanently shut and seemed from the outside to be one of the many doors or gates to the vegetable garden which, with the diminution of staff, the thinning away of the sixteen, had been closed forever. That door was now opened, and Pitton went to work, carting away barrowloads of old wet dead leaves flattened by their own weight, and earth mingled with old beech mast. (I noticed then his precise way with the loaded wheelbarrow, before pushing it off. He stationed himself carefully; and then, holding his arms straight down, after a pause bent his knees, so that in the process of holding and raising the handles of the barrow his back remained more or less straight. It made me think that this was probably how the men who carried sedan chairs in the eighteenth century handled their bodies, to prevent ache or damage.) Barrowload after barrowload Pitton carted to the refuge; and in the hidden garden, below the tall, spindly-branched blossom trees, there came up, almost as new, a little tiled fountain, the tiles pale blue with spangles of gold. A frivolity, a little extra, a gilding of the lily, a little something else to do when all had already been done, something from the twenties or early thirties.
The Phillipses called me to witness. Pitton called me to witness. We exclaimed, all of us, dutifully, at the secretness of the garden. The Phillipses exclaimed that something so beautiful could be so neglected; we all exclaimed that so many people had walked past the place without knowing; and we felt we were a little privileged, seeing what we did. But then no one seemed to know what to do with the hidden garden. The door was closed; the garden and the tiled fountain became secret again; and no doubt soon began to be covered again by the debris of leaves and beech mast and dead beech twigs.
The fantasy of a summer for my landlord. Something one day — some quality of light, some object in the house, some letter — might have reminded him of that garden of his childhood. He wanted to see it. He sent down instructions. Pitton worked for a week. And when he had seen it he forgot about it again. (Had he seen it, though? Had he walked so far from his usual, protected beat? Had he come so close to my cottage and what he would have considered the public part of the grounds? I never heard from Mr. or Mrs. Phillips that my landlord had actually gone to have a look.)
What had disappointed me no longer disappointed me. Pitton couldn’t do the job he did, couldn’t work with the knowledge that his labor was eventually to be wasted or mocked, couldn’t keep a kind of order, couldn’t hold back utter vegetable decay, if the glory of the old manor garden and the grounds had been part of his romance, if he had been one of the legendary sixteen. Pitton could do what he did because he had his outside, army or army-officer, fantasy.
And as a result, perhaps because of resentment of this outside life, this self-sufficiency of Pitton’s, or perhaps because of resentment of his manner and pretensions, the idea that was put about was that, in the business of gardening, Pitton didn’t really “know.” He grew vegetables and certain kinds of flowers that were required by the house — and that meant his employer. But somehow, in spite of this, he didn’t really know, wasn’t a true gardener, a man who possessed the mystery.
And in this rebuke or resentment of Pitton there was contained an idea of the gardener which I felt to be very old, going beyond the idea of the gardener which I had found at my Oxford college, going back to the beginning of worship and the idea of fertility, the idea even of the god of the node: the gardener as the man who caused the unremarkable seed to grow into leaves, stalks, buds, flowers, fruit, called this all up from the seed, where it has lain in small, the gardener as magician, herbalist, in touch with the mystery of seed and root and graft, which (with the mystery of cooking) is one of the earliest mysteries that the child discovers — one of the earliest mysteries that I, my sister, and my cousins discovered when in the hard yellow earth of our Port of Spain yard we, taking example one from the other, and just for the sake of the magic, planted hard dry corn, maize, three seeds in a shallow hole, fenced the hole round with a little palisade of sticks (to protect it from the chickens that ran free in the yard), and then three days later, in the morning, before going to school, discovered the miracle: the maize shoots that morning breaking the earth, the green outer sheath developing quickly into a thin leaf curling back on itself, like a blade of grass, like sugarcane, developing until the child became bored, ceased to watch and protect, and the chickens knocked the stick palisade down and pecked the still tender plant down to nothing.
It was this childhood sensation, this childhood delight in making things grow, that was touched in England when I saw the vegetable allotments at the edge of towns, beside the railway tracks. I attributed to the people who worked in those allotments something of what I felt as a child when I planted my corn seeds; felt it as old, that emotion, that need, surviving here, in England, the first industrial country, surviving in the hearts of dwellers in the ugliest and most repetitive Victorian industrial towns, surviving like the weeds that grow in the artificial light and polluted air of railway terminals, growing in the oily gravel between the rails almost against the buffers.
That instinct to plant, to see crops grow, might have seemed eternal, something to which the human heart would want to return. But in the plantation colony from which I came — a colony created for agriculture, for the growing of a particular crop, created for the great flat fields of sugarcane, which were the point and explanation of everything, the houses, the style of government, the mixed population — in that colony, created by the power and wealth of industrial England, the instinct had been eradicated.
The vegetable fields of Aranguez in Trinidad, on either side of the American highway, had been created by accident, with the debris, the accidental diffusion among laborers, of the learning of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture. They looked like the allotments in England, and there was a connection of learning, of science. But the plots of Aranguez at the edge of Port of Spain and the allotments at the edge of English towns spoke of different instincts, needs, different hearts now. The old world, of planting and fertility, the very early world, perhaps existed in the colony, and only for a short time, in the child’s heart. Adult eyes saw in agriculture not magic but servitude and ugliness. And that was why the English allotments touched something as small and as far away and as vague as my memory of planting three seeds of corn in the yard of our family house in Port of Spain.