Casting nasturtiums on the past
When journalist Allan Jenkins was five years old, he was rescued from a tough children’s home in Plymouth and given the chance of a better life in the south Devon countryside. It was here, in the early Sixties, that his passion for gardening was sparked after he was given a small patch of land and a packet of nasturtium seeds by his foster parents.
These garish annual flowers pop up regularly in the pages of Jenkins’s moving memoir, named after the plot he now tends at Branch Hill allotments in Hampstead, north London.
‘I sow nasturtiums because they are tangled up like bindweed with thoughts of the boy I was, the boy I became, the brother I lost, perhaps the father I’ll never know,’ he says.
Originally conceived as a gardening book charting a year in the life of his allotment, with some ‘personal stuff’ added in, Plot 29 has turned into something far more remarkable: the magazine editor’s quest to discover the long-buried secrets of his family’s past, with entries from his sharply observed allotment diary demonstrating how cultivating the soil brings him happiness and peace of mind.
Born on January 15, 1954, Jenkins spent much of his early years in and out of care, before he and his elder brother Christopher found some stability at Herons Reach, their foster home on the banks of the Avon. He has happy childhood memories of building dens, playing in the river and endless summers, but as he grew older Jenkins wanted to know more about his early life, ‘to sift reality from uncertain memory’.
Having to apply for a new passport in 1987 was the catalyst. Tracking down his birth certificate proved difficult but led to the unearthing of adoption records, care notes and, most importantly to his story, the name of his mother. More determination on his part results in a telephone call, where he hears his mother’s voice for the first time in 30 years. ‘Relief comes off me like steam on a horse,’ he says. His relationship with his brother, Christopher, is a constant presence in the book. They were close as youngsters but their lives changed when Jenkins was sent to boarding school and his brother packed off to the Army. As adults they were more distant and barely saw each other. Christopher’s death from cancer left Jenkins racked with guilt that they had drifted apart.
His memoir is moving and often gruelling, with little in the way of light relief. The occasional humorous story is a welcome respite. I particularly liked his recollection of a trip to the beach as a 10-year-old. He had hoped to impress a teenage girl by looking like Sean Connery in Speedos, but failed dismally in a pair of loose, woolly swimming trunks knitted by his foster mother.
Gardening is clearly therapeutic for Jenkins. His writing is tight, vivid and rich with detail, and he manages to make even the most mundane tasks seem interesting, whether that’s stirring cow manure in water to make fertiliser or controlling aphids.
On weeding, he writes, ‘everything seeding is lifted except wild rocket and amaranth, too magnificent to mess with: more than a metre tall, episcopal red leaves like cloth wrapping a sacrament’.
Jenkins would have undoubtedly written an engaging, finely observed gardening book but has instead delivered a haunting memoir that will live long in the memory.
‘He hoped to impress a girl by looking like Sean Connery in Speedos, but failed in knitted trunks’