The Allotment – Part 1: Plot Seventeen

"You're planting those too close," said Frank.

"I'm sorry?"

"The cabbages. You've put them too close together. They'll choke each other."

Maureen straightened up with a trowel in her hand and looked over the low wooden fence. A man of sixty-three in a flat cap and a green waxed jacket looked back, serious as a magistrate, leaning on a spade. "I've been growing cabbages for forty years," he said.

"And I've been growing them for forty minutes."

"Well, then."

It was the first week of April, damp and cold, on the allotments behind a Leeds railway line. Maureen, fifty-nine, a retired bookkeeper, had taken on the neglected Plot Seventeen after her husband died in the winter. She had told her daughter she was going to grow vegetables. In truth, she had needed somewhere to stand in the fresh air with her hands busy.

Frank, her neighbour, was a retired joiner with a deep Yorkshire voice and a flask of tea that never ran dry. After ten minutes of correcting her cabbages, he built her a cold frame out of an old window. After a week he taught her to read the soil. After three he was leaving a packet of seeds on her gate with a note: Try these. F.

"You don't have to do all this," she said.

"I like doing it." He cleared his throat. "I'm a widower myself. Six years. It helps to have someone to grumble at."

"I don't grumble."

"No. You're very polite about it." He smiled. "I like that, too."

They shared a bench on the hill at lunchtime, eating cheese sandwiches and watching the trains.

"Maureen," said Frank, one drizzly afternoon. "I don't know how to say this properly. Would you like to come to tea? At the house? Not out of the flask."

"I'd like that," she said, and found she meant it.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Harvest Tea.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Harvest Tea.