The house was in Randolph Avenue, one in a long terrace. I’m afraid that before I even went up the steps to the front door I lifted up my eyes to the rooftops and was pleased with what I saw. The people were a Mr. and Mrs. Houghton, well-off, elderly, owners of the whole house. I never discovered their first names or much about them except that they had five children and twelve grandchildren. That I was a woman amazed them at first but I think they came to like the idea, believing, as many people do, that while women may be weaker and more capricious than men, they are less likely to be criminals or vandals and are more reliable. They showed me the garden, which was large with big unpruned fruit trees, a shaggy lawn, and weed-choked flowerbeds. If my references were satisfactory, they’d want me four days a week.

Job applicants, I know by personal experience, are totally unscrupulous about references. I was. Silver gave me one, though the only gardening I’d ever done at his place was to help dig poor Mabel’s grave. He wrote that I was an expert on the unique flora of Maida Vale. The other came from Beryl, who surprised me with her beautiful italic script, not to mention the headed cream-laid writing paper. Up at the top of her tower block Beryl hadn’t even got a garden, only two windowboxes, which shows the depravity to which we had all sunk.

I worked for the Houghtons for nearly two months. They paid me well and I think I did a good job for them. It was the worst time of the year for gardening, involving as it did no planting at all but only cutting down and mowing and pulling out weeds. Still, I made that large garden neat, got the lawn back into shape with trim edges, and revealed in the flowerbeds, once the nettles and thistles and bindweed were gone, unexpected treasures, the pink lily flowers of Nerine bowdenii, a Himalayan blue poppy, and a snow-white blossomed Romneya, struggling to bloom in the darkness under the dock leaves. And I learned a lot about flowers, mugging up plant lore from Silver’s father’s books on my days off. “What if?,” as you know, is what I sometimes like saying. So what if I had stayed on at the Houghtons’ and got to love it as I might have done? Would I have eventually left and done a horticulture course somewhere? Or gone to university to study botany? I might have become a park keeper by now. More and more women do.

But I was only to have seven weeks as a gardener. It was during those seven weeks that we came to grief.

Chapter 20

20

IT WAS THE FIRST week of August.