Plot 31 is on the council's vacant list. The waiting list is four years long. Nobody has ever been allocated it, and every August the runner beans on it are the best on the site.
I have had plot 32 since 2016.
If you have never had an allotment I should explain that it is not a hobby, it is a second address. You go on a Tuesday evening and a Sunday morning whether you feel like it or not, because if you do not go, the couch grass takes six weeks to undo two years, and everybody on the site can see it happening. There are forty one plots on ours. It is behind the old gas works, down a track that floods, and there is a standpipe at each end and a shed that the committee calls the office.
The plot next to mine is 31.
It has been on the council's vacant list for the whole nine years. I know that because I check, the way a person checks the price of a house they are never going to buy. There is a four year waiting list for our site. Four years. There is a woman two rows over who waited five and cried when she got the letter, and she is not a crier, she drives a skip lorry.
They will not allocate 31.
I asked about it in the first year, obviously. Everybody asks about it in the first year.
You get one of two answers. The committee, which is Barry and Denise and a man called Ivor who has not attended since before I joined, says it is a drainage issue and it is with the council. The council, when I finally got through to a person, said it was flagged and they could not discuss individual plots.
The old boys on the top row say a different thing, and they say it in a way that closes the conversation. They say: leave it.
You are picturing a jungle. Everybody does, and it is the wrong picture, so let me put it right before I go any further.
It is the tidiest plot on the site.
The paths are edged with the same green plastic as everyone else's, going soft in the sun at the same rate. There are four raised beds made of scaffold boards, and the boards are silvered but not rotten. There is a water butt on a pallet with a brick on the lid. There is a row of canes in a wigwam every year from about May, and by August there are runner beans on it, and they are better than mine, and mine are good.
There is a fork stuck in the ground by the compost bay with its handle worn pale.
Nobody goes on it. I have had the plot next door for nine years and I have never once seen a person on 31.
You are going to say somebody comes at night.
That was my first thought too, and I want to walk you through why it is not that, because I spent two summers on it.
The site gates are locked at nine and it is a committee padlock, and Barry does the keys and there are nineteen of them and he can tell you where every one is, because he is that kind of man. There is no way in from the back, it is the gas works wall and it is eleven feet and topped. There is a gap by the stream that a dog can get through and a person cannot, I have tried, I got stuck and had to be quiet about it.
And it does not look like night work. That is the thing.
Night work looks like night work. It is rough, it is done fast, you find the edges left ragged and the tools left out. Plot 31 is done the way you do a plot when you have the whole of a Sunday and nothing else in the day. The beans get tied in as they grow, a bit at a time. Not all at once. The tying is spread out across weeks, and I know that because in 2021 I photographed that wigwam every Tuesday from the first of June, thirteen weeks, and you can watch it being done slowly by somebody who was never there.
The water butt goes down in a dry spell and up after rain.
The butt has no downpipe on it. It is on a pallet by the shed with nothing running into it.
I did the thing you would do in the end. I went on it.
It was a Sunday in September, early, and the site was empty because there had been a wedding the night before at the club and half the plotholders had been at it. I stepped over the little wire fence between 32 and 31 and I stood on somebody else's ground for the first time in nine years and my heart was going like I was robbing a house.
The soil was worked. You can feel it through your boots. Nine years fallow and it would have been like standing on a road, and it was not, it gave under my weight, turned and mucked and worked.
The compost bay was hot. I put my hand in the top of it and it was that clean hot that a good heap gets, and there were eggshells in it, and eggshells crushed small, in a palm, by somebody not thinking about it.
I pulled a carrot.
That is the part I am ashamed of, and I do not know why, out of all of it. I pulled one carrot out of the second bed and it came up clean and long with the fern still bright and I stood there holding it like an idiot.
And the shed door was open about four inches.
There is no shed on plot 31.
I need you to hold both of those things at once for a second, because I did, standing there, and it is the closest I have come in my life to something coming loose.
There has never been a shed on 31. There is a shed on 30 and a shed on 32, which is mine, and between them on 31 there is a bed, and I have looked at that bed across a wire fence for nine years while I have had my tea out of a flask.
I was looking at a shed. Black felt roof, one window, the door open four inches, a bit of blue nylon rope holding the hasp because the catch had gone. There was a bucket by the step.
I did not go in.
I want to be very clear that this was not restraint. I got out. I went over the wire and I caught my boot and I went down on my own path on my hands and I got up and I went to my shed and I sat on the box in it with the door shut for about twenty minutes.
When I came out the shed on 31 was not there, and the door of the shed on 31 had not been there for nine years, and there was a bed with leeks in it.
I still had the carrot in my hand.
I ate it. Not that day. Two days later, in a stew, with everything else, and I am not going to make anything of that because nothing happened. It was a good carrot.
I told Ivor.
I looked him up. He is in a bungalow off the ring road and he had to think about who I was for a minute and then he sat me down and gave me a cup of tea out of a pot with a knitted cosy on it, and I told him, and he did not laugh and he did not look at me sideways.
He said: how much did you take.
I said one carrot.
He said, that is all right then. Put something back next time you are up there. Anything. A trowel is fine.
And then he said the thing I have not been able to put down since, which is that plot 31 has been on the vacant list since 1974, and that he was on the committee when they took it off the allocation, and that he is the last one left who was in the room, and that they took it off because of what happened when they gave it to somebody.
He would not tell me what happened. I asked him three ways and he drank his tea.
He said: the ground does not mind being worked. It minds being owned.
I put a trowel over the wire the following Tuesday. A good one, stainless, not the bent one. I laid it on the path by the compost bay.
It was gone the week after. Not moved. Gone.
That was three years ago and I still have 32 and I still go on a Tuesday and a Sunday, and I still have my tea out of a flask looking at the neatest plot on the site.
And every year in about the last week of May somebody puts eight canes in as a wigwam on plot 31, and ties the top with green twine in a knot I do not know how to do, and I have got up at four and sat in my shed in the dark to see it and I have never seen it happen.
But last May the wigwam went up on plot 32.
Mine.
Eight canes in the corner where I had not planned anything, tied at the top with green twine, in that knot.
I have not touched them. I have not planted anything up them and I have not pulled them out. They are still there.
The beans came up on their own in July, and they are better than anything I have ever grown.