Double digging…

This battered little fork hangs on the wall of my toolshed in perpetuity, its tines now so worn as to render it almost useless. I would never part with it: as with so many of my unlikely family treasures, there is story or two attached.

This is the garden fork with which my mother prised a new vegetable plot out of a raw field of twitch (couch-grass) at Drumcudden, the house she built in Cullicudden on the north side of the Black Isle, which was to became my childhood home. She levered so many boulders out of the thin soil that a small cairn rose in one corner of the garden to mystify future archaologists. Every time the fork struck another sullen lump of glacial quartz or granite (rounded and pounded by the river of ice which flowed from Ben Wyvis to Rosemarkie 13,000 years ago) it wore away the steel tines, just a fraction more. Mum said the sound of it, the feel of it, made her heart quail and her spine jangle – but she was, in this, as she was in all things, indomitable. Her garden kept us fed with delicious fruit and vegetables (and sprouts) all year round.

In retirement Mum moved to Fortrose and the fork went too. Her garden was smaller and less challenging so she took on the restoration of a dowdy area of rough ground on a new roundabout at Chanonry Point. With the help of a team of local people over several years, she planted wild bushes and flowers and grasses, creating a haven for wildlife; she found her fork could easily vanish into the undergrowth, so she added a circle of red insulation tape to the handle to make it more visible.

Then one day the fork toppled over and its handle split. She bound that up with black insulation tape – insulation tape always her go-to mend material. Why not just replace the handle? She was frugal, of course, but it goes deeper. For the same reason that I cannot take the fork to the Smiddy to be re-tined, she could not reheft it either. This wasn’t ever just her fork; so it is doubly not just mine.

As readers of Major Tom’s War will know, Tom, my mum’s father, returned to England from Germany some months after the end of the Great War. His wife Evie had already secured them modest rented accommodation on a farm in Burmington near Shipston-on-Stour (where both my aunt Libba and my mother Numpy were born in 1920 and 1922). It was at Burmington Cottage that Tom was finally, after an absurdly long wait, re-promoted to Major.

Five years of warfare had taken their toll on Tom; he was not yet fit enough (mentally or physically) to continue working as a solicitor. Instead he became a farmhand, operating a mechanical steam plough. Perhaps that is when he acquired this small fork – not too heavy, a tool he could handle without his damaged lungs struggling for breath. He has routed his initials, T.H.W., deep into the handle, perhaps to avoid confusion with those of others working on the land.

Eventually Tom recovered enough to take up a country solicitor’s practice in Manningtree, Essex. He and Evie bought a burned-out shell of a mediaeval house called Abbot’s Manor in Lawford. Restoring it must have been cathartic after the devastation Tom had witnessed in villages and towns in France. Together Evie and Tom made a garden, planting an espaliered Doyenne du Comice pear against one wall. The fruits were plump and green-golden, speckled with russet. Against another wall nodded the fat and floppy egg-yolk heads of an old rose named Climbing Lady Hillingdon. Doubtless Tom’s fork wore down its tines a little more in planting those.

Thirty years later, my mother left my father, in the bitter winter of 1968. She drove north through blizzards in an old blue Austin A40 which leaked oil the whole way to be reunited with her sister at her home at Drynie Mains on the Black Isle. Bobby, our feckless Dalmation and myself slithered on the beltless back seat, squeezed between an assortment of Mum’s most precious possessions: the family portraits and photograph albums (though she left one propping open the door of the marital home she fled), a silver teapot, some porcelain and this garden fork.

My turn now to have planted a Doyenne du Comice pear, a Climbing Lady Hillingdon rose and to add another, an old black-red French rose named Guinée, a gift from my own beloved sister. I think of it as Harnam Singh’s rose, the rose which represents all the Indian troops alongside whom Tom served: valiant and dutiful warriors, but also sons of farmers, who loved the countryside and who admired roses. It is a Guinée rose which graces the cover of Major Tom’s War, shedding its blood-coloured petals over the steel-grey cover.

These days I seldom use the fork, but once in a while I will take it down from its peg on a sunny day just to press it into the soil as far as it can go. It pleases me to think of its short tines being reduced still further by my own land.

My genes, precious gifts from Tom and Evie and my Mum, have taught me always to dig as deep as I can.

Happy gardening – and if you have a garden tool you also love irrationally, do share it…