Sixty two plots, one rent book, one committee. Plot 41 is the best worked ground on the site, the rent is paid by cheque every January, and in thirty one years not one of us has seen anybody on it.
I have been secretary of our allotment association for nine years and I have had a plot on the site for twenty six.
The association leases the whole site from the council and sublets sixty two plots. I collect the rents, I keep the waiting list, and I write the letters when somebody lets their plot go to seed, which is the worst part of the job and which I have done eleven times.
The rent is thirty four pounds a year now. It was eleven when I started.
Everybody pays by bank transfer these days except four, who pay cash at the AGM, and one, who pays by cheque.
Plot 41 pays by cheque.
It arrives in the second week of January, in a plain envelope, hand addressed to the association at my home address, which changes every time a new secretary takes over.
That is the first thing that stopped me treating it as ordinary. My predecessor had it come to her address for eleven years. It came to me the January after I took over, and I have never advertised my address anywhere except in the association's minutes, which are pinned in the shed.
The cheque is for the correct amount. Every year, including the years we put the rent up, and including 2019 when we put it up mid year and wrote to everybody in July, and the January cheque after that was for the new amount.
The signature is the same every year and it is legible and it is a name.
The account is at a bank that was taken over in 2001 and again in 2014, and the cheques have changed design three times with those, which is exactly what happens to a real chequebook holder over thirty years.
The last three have been on the current design of the bank that exists now.
The plot.
It is the best plot on the site and it is not close.
Four beds, rotated properly. Netting on the brassicas. A cordon of apples on the north edge, trained, which takes a decade to get right. A rhubarb crown that must be older than my tenancy. Comfrey in the corner for the feed, which is what people did before you could buy tomato food.
The paths are edged. The shed is creosoted, which you cannot buy any more, so it is either old stock or something else, and it is done every few years because I have watched the colour change.
There is never anything ready and rotting. That is the tell for a plot that is not worked: the courgettes become marrows and the beans go stringy and the whole thing tells you nobody came. Plot 41 is picked.
Who works it.
Nobody has seen them. That is not me being dramatic, it is the fact I have tested harder than anything else in my life.
Sixty two plots. On a Saturday in June there might be forty people on that site. It is a small town and everybody talks and there is a shed with a kettle in it.
I have asked, over the years, about thirty people, in the way you ask when you do not want to start a thing. Nobody has met them. Two old boys who have been there since the seventies both said the same sentence, which is that the plot has always been like that.
The waiting list is nine people long and has been for years, and the first question a new tenant asks, every single time, is who does 41, and I say a chap who comes early, and they say fair enough, and after a year or two they stop asking and start saying it themselves to somebody newer.
Things I have done that a secretary should not have to.
I went at four in the morning in the June, twice, because early is the answer everybody gives.
The site is locked and every tenant has a key. Both times I was there from about half three until seven and I saw two people, both of whom I know, both on their own plots.
Plot 41 had been watered. Not dew. Watered, in the way a can does it, with the dry ring round the edge of each bed where the throw stops.
I put my hand in the soil. It was wet down to my second knuckle and it had not rained for nine days.
The council.
They hold the head lease and they have a schedule of the plots as they were let in 1953, which somebody typed and which is in a file.
Plot 41's original tenant is a name.
It is not the name on the cheque.
I looked the original name up in the town's war memorial book, which is a thing we have, because I had run out of respectable places to look, and it is not there either, and I do not know why I expected it would be.
What I do about it.
I bank the cheque. It clears. I put a tick in the rent book against 41 and I get on with the other sixty one.
The one thing I changed is that in my first year I wrote to plot 41 with the annual circular, the way I write to everybody, to the address the association holds.
The address is the house at the end of the lane by the gate, which is a real house with real people in it, and they are lovely, and they have lived there since 2004, and the woman brought the letter down to the site and handed it to me at the shed and said, very kindly, that she thought somebody had made a mistake with their address.
I said I would look into it and I have never sent another one.
Plot 41 does not need the circular. It knows when the AGM is, because in nine years the association has never once had to chase that rent, and it has never once come late, and it has never once been wrong.