MORNING SERIAL

INTENDED for baking tarts, these red and black drops of crystalline brightness were so juicy and tempting that we grandchildren ensured they rarely made it as far as the kitchen.

Today, no fruit I taste matches the deliciousness of those berries from long ago, when my seven-year-old taste buds had not yet atrophied.

There were many gardens and allotments like this in the two villages, all made with great effort and often from some necessity. Expertise was shared by word of mouth; I recall no gardening books or magazines being read.

Havens of autonomy, they were the domain almost exclusively of men; here, in complete contrast to their experience of the world of work they were free to create for themselves order and excellence and beauty.

Most grew vegetables, but flowers had their devotees, too, and some would compete in local shows, striving for perfection. Mr Jones at number 5 in our street grew chrysanthemums for competition; flawless orbs of colour.

He engineered their perfect symmetry by timing to the minute their exposure to the sun by means of paper bags tied around the blooms.

Others worked with animals; Tom Cornwall at number 3 bred rabbits for his Sunday dinner; at number 4, Penry Clements bred and raced pigeons. There was at least one pigeon loft in every street in those days. Penry’s loft was amongst the biggest, made of offcuts of wood hammered together, and almost as high as his house.

My Uncle Wyndham once took me to see the homemade aviary of a friend of his, and I walked through a nondescript shed door into an eruption of exotic birdsong; tropical plumage flashing in fifty different colours as the tiny birds whirled about my head and perched on my hands.

These gardens were places where the greyness of the world could be driven out and where, through careful guardianship, better worlds could be made in miniature.