MORNING SERIAL

THE ants would emerge through cracks in the concrete in thin lines of march. Normally we ignored them, but if any turned up in the kitchen I would be tasked to pour boiling water from the kettle onto the cracks in an attempt to kill off the nest.

The hot water hissed and crackled its deadly way through the little fissures in the path, seemingly destroying all it flooded, but it never worked and the ants just kept on marching.

Next came the rows of onions swelling in the earth, the lacy fronds of carrot leaves and pea sticks laden with pods.

Then cabbages, under constant attack from caterpillars and slugs. Often my grandfather would ask me to help deal with these pests, and I would scan the undersides of the cabbage leaves looking for the little green caterpillars, dispatching them by smearing their fat bodies with my thumb.

The slugs I flipped up with a garden cane onto the path before dousing them with salt, watching them roil in a chemical burn – the watching of it both compulsive and repulsive at the same time.

When bored with this, I would go after the cabbage white butterflies that laid their eggs on the cabbage leaves.

I fenced and swiped at them with the cane, and on the rare occasions when I managed to hit one, their dusty wings would shatter and then be blown away like scraps of tissue paper in the breeze.

Beyond the cabbages were two long rows of runner beans with peach-fuzz pods that snapped with a satisfying crack, trained on sticks seven feet tall.

Next to my grandfather’s brick-built shed was a shady patch of ground reserved for rhubarb, where it thrived and grew leaves wider than my outstretched arms.

At the bottom of the garden, nearest the river, banked rows of potatoes would provide enough crop to last right through the autumn, and part of winter too.

But best of all were the redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes, close by the fence separating Dada’s garden from Martha Annie’s next door.