The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  It’s too cold for terrapins and teenagers tonight. I stop running, sweat and rain clinging to my skin, breath steaming around my head. At least the rain has eased. I’m alone but buses and cars are just metres away – no one cares to see me. I fumble for my phone and turn on its torch, walk to the edge. I’m a lighthouse, my searchlight scanning the sea. Ripples in the pondwater could be frogs or fish, waving not drowning. Great orange carp surface to greet me.

  Soaked as I am I crouch down into wet grass. In the din of the traffic I can just make out the low rumble of croaking frogs, like the faraway sound of a woodpecker pecking. Little growls and squeezes, ssssh. I walk around a bit to a shallow shelf almost separate from the rest of the pond and here I find them gathering for their party. There are hundreds of them, my torch lighting up an ocean of eyes. Great fat females and blue-stained males, couples in amplexus, the odd three-way. But it seems remarkably sedate, really. I’ve imagined frog orgies as a big mating ball, a writhing mass of rubbery bodies. But here, now, it seems like a waiting game. A bar in early evening perhaps, before the drink flows and inhibitions loosen. The males appear to have stations, each one a little way away from the next, legs splayed, croaking and waiting. What next? Does the party start later? Is this the party? I watch them for a while, sometimes torch on and sometimes torch off, I don’t want to disturb them. The low growling croaks become longer, the splashing more frequent. I don’t know what I’m expecting to see but there’s no spawn yet and no obvious signs of it being produced. The frogs are sitting it out but I can’t any longer. It’s raining again and I can’t feel my legs.

  I leave the frogs, running as fast as I can, back up the hill and down Cromwell Road. Back past the Tesco Express and Hove station, the chippy and now late London commuters – poor buggers. Inside is much the same. Warm but . . . I run a bath and think of frogs, legs splayed, waiting.

  I ask Mum about her childhood garden and she draws me a map. It doesn’t have any detail to it but she adds surrounding gardens, the road, puts her childhood in the context of mine. She draws the field at the end that she and her siblings would break into to ride the pony they named Tiny, the house where the priests and bishops lived, including the shed housing a homeless man called Harry. Granny would make him lunch every Christmas, says Mum, and send her little brother Pete to deliver it on a tray with a glass of beer. She draws three neighbouring gardens, the sports club, the mere. Not my garden. My garden didn’t exist in her childhood but I place it instantly. There was just one neighbouring garden between hers and the sports club. If Grandad hadn’t sold part of theirs to developers I would have been able to glimpse her childhood from mine. Seen its trees, by then twenty years taller than when Mum knew them, climbed them. I think of the photos Dad took from out of my bedroom window, the image of the house roofs beyond the cricket pitch, the people who lived where Mum used to play. People need houses. But can one roam from Mum’s old garden all the way to the woodland around the mere, as children did then? And not just children but wildlife, too. Hedgehogs, toads, frogs – how far can they roam in new estates, land carved up and fenced off? Children had wilder childhoods and wildlife had it easier. Will we ever get that back?

  She was nine when they moved there, in 1963. There are albums of grainy colour photographs of her and her siblings at various ages: sitting together on a picnic blanket, sunbathing, bikes and outdoor play. She spent her teenage years here, breaking out of upstairs windows to go to gigs, throwing parties when her parents were away, drinking wine stolen from Grandad’s cellar. It was sometime in the early 1970s that Grandad and two of their neighbours sold the back portions of the gardens. Mum doesn’t remember the date or if Granny approved; she may not even have been consulted. They sold the house in 1979. I find it online, last listed for sale a couple of years ago but frustratingly with no photos. Next door was listed recently but has only one photo; the house three doors down has twelve photos and an enormous garden – not one of those that was sold off. Was Mum’s garden like this? It’s huge, magical. It has a patio with statues on either side of steps leading down to a giant lawn. The statues look like lions. Did Mum have lions? Mum’s house and garden remain a mystery, known only to me via stories from her and her siblings now in their fifties and sixties. There were, sadly, no statues of lions.

  My plus-size potting bench stays in the living room for weeks, supporting leggy plants and puddles of muddy water. Compost and fungus gnats reign. I’m the crazy plant lady with a flat full of flies and a garden full of mud. We don’t answer the door. We talk only to each other.

  Outside I dig and shift stones, dig and shift stones. I go running still, up into the hills and along the Droveway to the Rockery, where I stop, every day, to look at frogspawn that’s now been laid in enormous clumps. There are clumps on clumps, a mass of gelatinous goo. It’s beautiful.

  And then I stop talking to the flies and I stop shifting stones and I start digging a pond. I didn’t plan to. My garden is too small for a pond, too shady. In digging one I’m creating more work for myself, more stones, more rubble, more mess, less time. But I don’t care. I don’t even know I’m doing it. I couldn’t tell you when I realise, but I do, firmly and passionately, that I never want a garden without a pond again. I love them. I love the hum of insects swarming on the surface on a summer’s evening, the fleeting glimpse of a waterboatman surfacing for air, the ridiculous tail-chasing of whirligig beetles. I love the plop of a frog disappearing into the water as it hears you coming. Tadpoles. Huge, alien-like dragonfly larvae. I could sit and stare into a pond for hours. And I do, I stop and stare into one every day when I go running. The fact that, even at just a metre in circumference, a pond will take up a third of my stupid muddy garden doesn’t matter at all.

  Besides, I have a spare bit of pond liner. And some pond plants. And a million stones.

  We didn’t have a pond in the garden I grew up in. I ruined the chances of it ever happening after I stepped on a lily pad in a garden centre aged six, while my mum filled her trolley with bedding. I’d just learned that Jesus had been able to walk on water and I wanted to see if I could too, given that I said my prayers each night and went to church on a Sunday. So I stood at the edge of the pond and carefully stepped on the lily pad, gradually increasing pressure until I inevitably fell in.

  The water wasn’t deep. Waist height, I was lucky. But it was smelly and there was lots of pond weed. I felt silly. I stood, semi-submerged, for what seemed like ages. Eventually, Mum, alerted by four-year-old Ellie, pulled me out and I was wrapped in a bin bag so as not to spoil the upholstery in Dad’s car. Someone gave me a packet of crisps. Mum left her trolley of plants behind. Years of guilt-induced swimming lessons ensued, plus a refusal ever, ever to have a pond in the garden. I have always blamed Catholicism.

  My life is a patchwork of temporary things. Temporary love, annuals. I’ve grown plants I’ve never seen beyond their first year. Dug how many ponds? Three. Some roots would be nice. Could this pond, this fourth I’m digging, be the one I see frogs spawn in?

  It’s going under the wall, in front of me as I climb the steps from the gully into the garden proper. It will force me to walk around it to get to the back of the garden so I don’t go in a straight line, make the garden look bigger. It should get a bit of light at midday and then more in the afternoon as the sun swings past the chimneys above. It will have a circumference of 1.5 metres, a maximum depth of no more than 30cm, and a gradual, sloping edge where invertebrates can congregate and where amphibians and mammals can enter and exit easily. Birds might bathe in it, dragonflies might breed in it, frogs might spawn in it. I have high expectations for my tiny water.

  In the books, there are various instructions on how to dig a pond, starting with marking out the shape before you start. None of them says start digging and see what happens. But that’s what I do. The revolution is sort of potato-shaped.

  It doesn’t take long. I don’t want to dig too deep, most life is in the shallows. I smooth down soil, cr
eate shelves for plants, level it off so the top ridge sits below the garden’s soil level so I can bury pond liner beneath stones. I remove as many pebbles and bits of glass from the soil as I can, lay down soft liner and then butyl. I manage to cover two stubborn lumps of cement the decking posts had been sunk into. Nice, that. That the tools designed to suppress life are, in turn, suppressed by those that will give it back.

  I have, of course, a bucket full of water and pond plants – water forget-me-not, frogbit, pennyroyal, pickerel weed. Left over from a photo shoot a year ago, brought back on the train, kept alive somehow. Here she comes, with her bucket of plants. I divide them into separate planting baskets, trim them down, arrange them on the shelf. The water they were sitting in goes in the pond, along with some pond snails that seem to have hitched a ride. The rest of the water will come from the sky. And the stones, the endless mountains of stones, suddenly have a purpose. I sort through them, finding the prettiest to place over the pond liner. My pond. My beautiful pond.

  I drink real ale with my new friend Rachel in a micropub that’s opened up by the station. We met through a mutual friend in summer, where we chatted, suddenly and unexpectedly, about our shared, and slightly macabre, interest in death. She attends death workshops and I collect the skulls of dead animals. We also enjoy real ale and gardening – I’ve built friendships on less in the past. We sit on high stools and work our way through the menu of porters, wheat and rye beers, ales made with local hops. She entertains me with stories about soul midwives – people tasked with guiding you on your journey from life into the afterlife; I tell her about the fox, badger and hare skulls on display in my living room, the mole and goldfinch in my freezer. I don’t know what to do with these, I tell her, they’re so beautiful. I think I might learn taxidermy. She’s the only friend, so far, to empathise with my predicament, to not tell me to stop talking. We drink absurdly strong porter, play cribbage and chat about our gardens; hers backs onto the allotments where, a couple of years ago, the rare long-tailed blue butterfly, which comes over occasionally from France, was found breeding on everlasting pea. I will give her some of the everlasting pea seeds Michael Blencowe sent me so she can grow them and keep her eyes peeled. She’d like that, she says.

  At home I’m slightly giddy and I don’t want to go to bed. The new shed, which I bought online a while ago, has been leaning against the wall in the hallway for a week, the smell of fresh wood a constant reminder of my tardiness. Tall and thin, with two ‘eyeholes’ at the top of the front panel that I imagine robins might use and make a nest inside, it’s called a Sentry Shed. It’s a small thing, tall and slim. I can put it together while catching up on the news. It’s only 11 p.m. I fetch my drill and some screws, haul pre-made wooden walls into the living room, turn on the TV, ignore the How-to-build-your-Sentry-Shed instructions.

  It’s not hard to do but I probably shouldn’t have embarked on the task at 11 p.m. on a Friday night, after one too many 7-per-cent ales. And it would have been much easier, and the result less wonky, if I’d had help. The ‘flat-pack’ consists of a back and front wall, two side walls, a floor and door, hinges and latch, two shelves and two roof panels. Putting them together is just a case of working out which bits to fix together in the right order, and ensuring the roof won’t let water in when it rains. The assembly takes a few attempts, especially the alignment of the roof panels. But I manage it, eventually. The job done, I stand back, admiring my handiwork, my pretty Sentry Shed.

  I go to bed sated, having completed one more job that will make a huge difference to the garden. I fall asleep thinking of the things I will store in it, a shelf for paint, perhaps, and another for scraps of wood I’ve saved to make bee hotels. I’ll fix screws to the inside of the door to hang tools, put a padlock on the latch.

  In the morning I wake to find my pretty Sentry Shed is too heavy to move alone and taller than the height of the back door – I’ll have to tip it to carry it out. It stands, teasing me from the centre of my living room, where it will now have to stay until someone comes round who can help me move it. I wonder if I can persuade the postman, Keith, to help, or if that would be inappropriate. I don’t know when anyone is next coming over, the place isn’t yet ready for visitors. I am an idiot who shouldn’t be allowed to assemble sheds after drinking ale and chatting about skulls and soul midwives. I am an idiot with a shed in my living room.

  I’m all alone in my half-made mess, my plot of mud where nothing grows. The mud and the cold, the slow grind of the rake. When will it end?

  Like a robot I rake stones, pick up stones, put stones in a bucket, which I carry through the flat to empty over the ugly cement at the front. This, I hope, will make the area look marginally prettier, like a mini beach perhaps, while I focus on the back garden. This is until I get around to doing something about the cement, which has been poured over (probably) perfectly lovely Victorian tiles. I trudge back through the flat and out again to more and more stones. I sieve builders’ rubble from the soil, which I divide into separate piles, to be bagged up for the tip or hidden in pots to be covered with compost and eventually planted up. I advertise stones on Gumtree to anyone who could use them, use the nicest to cover the liner around the pond. Everything is still brown, everything is still muddy, everything is still stones.

  Yet all it takes is one little thing to lift me. Like the robin that comes to eat the worms or the thuuuuur as a house sparrow flies overhead, still from one garden to the next, on either side of me but nice all the same. The buff ermine moth hiding in the corner – what are you doing here?

  Today the day starts like any other. But there’s a clear sky and I have the whole day to shift stones. I drink tea and lean against the wall, assessing what yet needs to be done. Late April and still this. The new shed, which I eventually persuaded my friend Clare to help me carry outside, has made a difference to the clutter around the garden, but temperatures are still low and nothing knows what to do with itself. The apple-tree blossom has been trying to come out for about two weeks now. Five little flowers. I’m supposed to take them off, let the tree focus its energy on roots and stems. But I can’t. Five little flowers on a stick tree, they’re all the garden has. I finish my tea and start raking, gathering stones. There’s something in the air, I don’t know, an expectancy of something, something I usually feel in March, a change on its way, a shifting of seasons. Or am I imagining it? The five little flowers remain resolutely shut. It doesn’t feel like spring yet.

  The sun wends its slow way, lowering itself onto the fence, over the reluctant apple-tree blossom, the soil, the stubborn plants. And as it comes the garden changes, the space fills with something, it lifts. And I stop raking and stand in my sea of mud and stones, silently, trying to work out what this is. Something’s tickling a memory, something scratching or scraping. A tiny sound, a half-sound. Like the rake but smaller, fainter. It’s . . . it’s my bee hotel. The one made of broken bits of hollow stems that I reassembled in case I missed a bee and then put out against the south-facing wall because I’m an idiot. I throw my rake down, rush to the far corner where it’s propped up against the fence. The scratching is loud here. There’s a bee, a big one, in one of the stems. I can hear it but I can’t see it, although from faint glimpses of black and the size of the new hole I think she’s a hairy-footed flower bee. There’s a bee making a nest in this sham of a bee hotel, this sham of a garden. And I’m human again.

  I make tea and settle in front of the bee hotel, cross-legged, a child in front of the telly. She’s not alone, red mason bees have joined her. I watch them choose holes, arrange themselves, bring mud and pollen. I think they’re waking up from the fancy hotel release chamber and flying straight to the stinking mass of familiar stems. I check the other hotels and, sure enough, there are open egg cases. Yet the viewing panels reveal nothing. They love that ugly mass of hollow stems and no mistake; my fault for putting it back out. I return to raking but I can’t concentrate, not now. There are bees laying eggs here, making nest
cells. Bees laying eggs and making nest cells.

  My friend Helen moves to a three-bedroomed 1930s semi-detached house around the corner. The house is like a time warp. Before Helen it’s owned by a woman in her nineties, who bought the house from her mother in the 1950s, who bought it off-plan.

  This little old lady had lived here her whole life and when she died her son sold it quickly to be done with it, furniture and all. The house comes with Victorian wardrobes and mirrors, beautifully tiled fireplaces, carpet rails and cleats. In the loft are old newspapers, pianola scrolls, a portrait of a moustachioed man and a Second World War flying suit. The garden is a dream, overgrown and bursting with history and magic. There’s a gnarled old apple tree, peonies that have been there for more than fifty years. Ivy has toppled a wall, ancient roses flower at the roof tops. At the back of the garden is a long-forgotten greenhouse, in which I find a hairy-footed flower bee laying eggs in the soil.

  But it’s a mess, uneven and full of broken glass, dangerous for Helen’s two-year-old twins. There’s a huge breeze-block garage at one side, which will be knocked down, the roses and apple will be given new life. She calls me: Would you like the greenhouse?

  I can’t, the garden’s too small. I already have a pond and a shed. It would take up another third of the space and look ridiculous. Where would I put it? I need to focus on the mud and the stones, the creation of habitats. I tell her thanks but no. And then I call her back: Actually, can I have it?