Friends and a view of hills

When I looked like this I was wearing a Swatch watch with babies' faces on - black, white, mixed - it's in a box with birth tags and curls of baby hair. John in LA sent me the pic. I remember the earrings but a stranger wouldn't associate the me I am now with this glossy haired woman. Whose kitchen was I in? With babies came a voracious need to write. It was always part of me and as time went on, I had to garden, too. The children were little when I took on a share in an allotment. It provided raspberries for summer and autumn birthday cakes, plums in mid summer, potatoes and beans. So I'm drawn to writers who garden, like Olive Senior and Jamaica Kincaid, who I'm off to see at the weekend. Kincaid said about writing, “It’s just heartbreaking to see young people thinking this is a career. Publishing is a career. Writing is life. It’s something you do because you have to do it.” I've written most of my conscious life but just as it goes with gardening, it would be impossible for me without friends who sit around my allotment table on warm nights, friends who are further away, other writers I swap insecurities with.....

L to R: Sonya Smith, Jane Fordham,
me, David Parfitt, Michaela Ridgway

I thought I'd go back to a big piece of writing I've been struggling with, often dismissing but which I've felt so strongly about. It's had many names, sometimes it's "that bloody book." I've associated it with humiliation, anger, confusion because I've sent it out and it's come back or not, just been ignored. The writer Robert Hamberger told me it took him decades to write his amazing memoir, A Length of Road. We've also talked about what it takes to keep going? For me sometimes years pottering, doing little except what I would describe as displacement but when you have an allotment, time's never wasted, it produces courgettes. 

And it takes friends who've heard your self-doubt, excuses, attempts to change the subject. If writing is like gardening, if the garden is a place for working it all out, for being in a place without words, or naming things, a place you've made, planting tomatoes outside and hoping there won't be blight, risking seedlings to slugs, wondering why this year there are so many opium poppies, friends offer a view of hills, all the different greys and a dawn sky, reminding you that after midnight in the dark woods you heard a nightingale three nights running, and then the wind shook everything up.