At the end of my childhood garden, beyond the old Nissan hut, was a wasteland which still appears in my dreams. Once it had been the site of allotments, which I imagine saw good service during the war years, but which had been deserted long before my parents moved there. When I was young it was a seemingly endless tangle of brambles and nettles, colonised by seedling ash and sycamore. Compared to our suburban garden, where dad mowed stripes into the lawn on Saturdays and the shrubs were regimented in beds to either side and pruned regularly to keep them in check, the ‘Plot’, as we called it, was a feral place rich with shadows and the possibility of adventure. It was also the home of the ogres, witches, wolves and murderers that haunt childhood imaginations. It was a place where I could conjure Middle-earth or Narnia on my own back door step.
There were two long derelict glasshouses, which we had been forbidden to enter, but of course did, our hearts racing a little at the danger of such disobedience. Broken glass crunched underfoot and sometimes a pane would crash to the ground and splinter sending us running for the doorway, our arms clasped over our heads. An old whitewashed beehive still stood in a clearing and buzzed to bursting in summer with the wild colony that had taken it over. Once they swarmed into our garden and dad called a man to come and take them away in a box. The beehive stood near an impenetrable thicket of bushes, which made a great hiding place during games of Hide and Seek, unless you happened to push yourself into the thorns of the gooseberries and raspberries, since these were the mature and unkempt remains of somebody’s wartime fruit garden where, alongside the berries, were red and blackcurrants.
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