My Life on a Hillside Allotment Read online

  About the Book

  As featured on Radio 2.

  This is the story of a man with a great passion in life. Terry Walton has kept an allotment for over fifty years – man and boy – in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. After many happy years of gardening, new vistas opened up when his allotment was adopted by the Jeremy Vine Show.

  Terry’s tale unfolds in fascinating detail as he lovingly documents the way the valley has changed over the years, the characters he meets and his own conversion to organic gardening.

  This is an absorbing and entertaining memoir from a well-loved media personality and a perfect read for gardeners, allotmenteers, and anyone who loves the great outdoors.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Jeremy Vine

  Introduction: The Adopted Allotment

  1: A Closely Knit Community

  2: A Plot on the Mountain

  3: My Apprentice Years

  4: Empire Building

  5: The Pencil Factory

  6: Settling Down

  7: Major Changes

  8: Back to my Organic Roots

  9: The Penultimate Plot

  10: Social Life on the Plot

  11: Pumpkins at Large

  12: Sharing the Adopted Allotment

  Ode to the Allotment

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To my dad, who introduced me to allotment gardening and has given me fifty years of a wonderful pastime. Thanks to his wisdom and knowledge I have lived a fulfilled life and enjoyed every moment of it.

  Acknowledgements

  First I should like to thank my wife, Anthea, for being an ‘allotment widow’ for forty years and allowing me the freedom to garden on a Rhondda hillside. Her patience and understanding have helped me enjoy my pastime, and the wonderful meals she has prepared from the produce have made my life a perfect joy.

  Thanks to my two sons, Anthony and Andrew, for persuading me to join the media. Without them this book would never have been written. Thank you both for sharing your childhood with my allotment.

  To Andi Clevely, who got up weekly to make the trek across from Llanidloes to Tonyrefail to make this book happen. Never mind, Andi, I’m sure the sunrises over the Brecon Beacons were a great reward.

  To Jeremy Vine for the foreword, and for all the pleasant times we have shared on air bringing the allotments into the homes of his listeners. His show launched my new career in the media and has given my life an exciting new direction. Special thanks must go to Jessica Rickson for ‘discovering’ me and for being brave enough to recommend me for the Jeremy Vine allotment spot.

  To Diana Beaumont, for giving me the opportunity to write this book, and to Sally Gaminara for teasing out my long-standing allotment stories and reawakening my brain cells.

  To all the very nice and helpful staff at Transworld for all their hard work and help in creating this book, and to Ian Tripp, a fellow valley boy, for his local support.

  To Albie for all his coffee and a place to meet on the allotments, and to all my fellow allotmenteers for their support and knowledge passed down over the years. I hope any budding allotment keepers out there will take the plunge and grab a plot, the starting point to a whole new way of life.

  To my granddaughter, Megan, who has added a new dimension to my life and has brought even more love and happiness to an already contented man.

  Foreword

  by Jeremy Vine

  Mostly, news ain’t much fun. Whenever someone says to me, ‘Why don’t you report the trains that run on time?’ I come over all queasy and mumble something about news being all the things we do not expect to happen (come to think of it, maybe that includes punctual trains). The day an accident-free factory or a sober judge is the top item on the news, we know we’ve had it. So programmes are packed to the rafters with what doesn’t normally happen. Yes, it is big news in Houston when their underground system moves people successfully from one station to another, but that is because they do not have an underground system.

  I suppose it’s a good enough argument to justify what we do. I say ‘suppose’, with a bit of doubt and the stomach rumble that suggests the queasiness coming on again, because we all know what the end result is – news gets you down. News is things going wrong. A Martian who landed and tuned in to Alan Dedicoat would fire up the reverse boosters and get the hell out of here; sorry, Deadly, but you know what I mean. Just when your personal life is in balance, when you’re looking out of the window of your home at a burst of autumn sunlight on the picket fence and thinking all’s well with your family and friends, you switch on the radio and hear about bird flu or a nuke in a briefcase or some hurtling asteroid that is about to turn Manchester into a pancake. We don’t exactly specialize in the brighter side of life.

  All of which is to explain why we went in search of Terry Walton on Radio 2. We did not know he existed, of course. No one could guess the existence of the other TW without meeting him first. It was soon after the Iraq War began and the programme was full of blood and thunder. One afternoon, just when things couldn’t get much more gruelling, we went local with a special on allotments and got the most phenomenal response. Thousands of calls, all asking about the really important things – How do you stop rabbits eating your lettuce? What’s the best way to grow corn-on-the-cob? – as if from sheer relief that a complicated horror had given way to simple joys.

  ‘Let’s adopt our own allotment,’ the editor Phil Jones suggested. We appealed for a plot on air. Producer Jessica Rickson trawled through the phone numbers of the dozens of allotmenteers who responded. And eventually she came back to me.

  ‘There’s a guy in the Rhondda, he’s hilarious.’

  ‘Does he have a mobile phone?’ I asked.

  ‘He has a phone and it works on his patch of land and he says he can garden live on air for us,’ replied the efficient Jess, one step ahead as ever. ‘But he says he’s not for Bluetooth.’

  Somebody once told me that broadcasting was genetic. You can either do it or you can’t. I had always assumed the opposite: it’s a skill you practise, like playing the clarinet, and when you practise you get better. Terry proved me wrong. From his debut, from the very first millisecond he appeared on the programme – which was, let’s remember, the first bit of broadcasting he had ever done – he was one hundred per cent the finished article. It was wondrous to hear, like unleashing a whirlwind on the air! A real person, talking about something he loved! From that moment we knew we had a star on our hands.

  Over time, I got to know Terry properly. During the 2005 general election we managed to shape the Radio 2 election journey around a visit to the allotment, and despite nearly falling for the famous ‘These strawberries have just ripened today’ joke (which you’ll read about in the book), I left thinking we had connected with a genuine and lovely man whose on-air appearances were only an extension of his normal week and thus the perfect antidote to all the miseries of everyday news. Terry fights the woe with his hoe, and he has proved his credentials time and again … even driving miles to help listeners whose fruit and vegetables are foundering, striking the allotment equivalent of Control-Alt-Delete to get them restarted.

  The Walton story is captivating in the same way his broadcasts are. His early childhood and dalliance with serious crime (well, blackcurrant scrumping); the 42-plot allotment where newcomers ‘start at the far corner’ and gradually move down, surely a parable for life; that picture he paints of the local cobbler working from a shed in his back garden. I never thought I would get so wr
apped up in the origins of the Glamorgan Association of Allotments or keen to know the reason nobody in the Rhondda grew leeks, but Terry has grown us a blooming pageturner here! As befits a man who got his first plot in 1957 (for thirty-five pence a week), and seems only to have lost his temper once, in 1968, the book is full of practical, calm advice.

  Anthea and Terry became grandparents just as I became a dad. They had Megan; Rachel and I were blessed with Martha. He sometimes tells me he regrets working so hard in the scientific instruments business when his two sons were young, and now he’s determined to give Megan all the attention they missed out on. After a show one day, on one of his rare visits to London – yes, he did need oxygen for the trip – we had lunch at the local Italian round the back of Broadcasting House. Listening to him speak about work and family, decoding the implicit warning to a new father, I reflected that the benefits of Walton Wisdom extend way beyond the growing of vegetables into life in general.

  For that reason I think I can guarantee you’ll enjoy the story that follows, whether or not you have any interest in compost acidity or greenfly netting or the purples in a beetroot or any of the ordinary wonders Terry marvels at on our behalf. And if for any reason it’s not your cup of tea, Terry being Terry, he will probably come to your home with a boxful of fresh parsnips to make it up to you.

  Introduction: The Adopted Allotment

  It was 1 July 2003 when Phil Jones, the producer of BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show, rang me up to say, ‘You’re on on Friday!’

  There are a few notable dates in life you always remember, aren’t there? You know the day you were born, and you never forget the day you got married, nor the dates when your children were born. And this was another of those life-changing moments.

  It had all started some time earlier, back in April 2003. My wife Anthea regularly listens to Radio 2, and it so happened that day that my older son, Anthony, was also tuned in. They both heard Jeremy Vine present an hour-long special on allotments. I didn’t hear it because I was up on my own plot, on the side of the Rhondda valley in south Wales where I’ve been gardening for more than half a century, man and boy.

  I’d rather be on my allotment than anywhere else I can think of. My plot has always been my passion and joy (as well as my constant source of good food), and it’s been the theme running through my life since I first opened my eyes in the hospital maternity unit just the other side of the allotment fence. This book is the story of my gardening life there. It began in earnest when I was just four years old and starting to help my father regularly on his plot, on the same site and very close to the house where I was born. And I’m still up there, sowing and planting and harvesting, only now I share it with all the listeners to Jeremy Vine’s radio show.

  Towards the end of that allotment special, Jeremy announced he’d had a tremendous response from listeners, who were all ringing in with comments and questions, and the amount of interest was brilliant. Maybe it was only meant tongue-in-cheek, but he then added that he ought to get out of the studio more and perhaps have an allotment of his own. Was there anybody out there who would like to share their allotment with him and other listeners?

  I knew nothing of this, of course. But when I came back home, first Anthea told me what Jeremy Vine had said and then Anthony rang me up and said I ought to write in, seeing as I was up there every single day.

  My immediate reaction was a firm ‘No!’ Much as I enjoyed being out on the plot, I had always felt that allotments and radio simply weren’t compatible. How could you have a show about allotments on the radio, where there’s no visual element? It is said that a picture’s worth a thousand words, and that seemed particularly true about trying to describe to a radio listener all the smells and sights of a garden in full growth. As I was to discover, it can take many graphic words and sounds to present the scene effectively, but it’s a skill that develops with experience.

  It took a while, about five or six days during which the family pestered me constantly, until I finally decided to get in touch with Jeremy. His original request for an allotment to adopt had sounded like a bit of a joke, so I thought I’d be equally light-hearted. I said I was perfectly willing to share my plot with him, that it was a great passion of mine, and that to me it was not just gardening but a whole way of life, with every visit a social occasion. I added that I thought there was this misconception that allotment gardening was hard work, but said it’s never hard if you enjoy doing something and can mix the effort with the pleasures.

  I explained that to me the allotment is a gym that helps keep me fit, it’s my sunbed because it keeps me tanned, my stress counsellor because it’s my way of relieving tension, and my means of relaxation in the open air.

  I have all those benefits without paying large sums of money to join a club, and at the end of it I have the reward of taking home fresh, organic produce for my salad bowl or lunch plate. The place is so good for my health and well-being that anything I grow is an added bonus.

  Well, I explained all this, not expecting anything to come from it.

  Time passed and nothing happened: it turned out that being accepted for broadcasting is a long and involved procedure. About two weeks afterwards I came home at lunchtime on a mild, sunny April day, made myself a couple of sandwiches and a cup of coffee, and went outside to settle down on the patio. Just then the phone rang, and Anthea came out to say the BBC was on the line, for me. I didn’t believe it, even when the caller announced she was ‘Jessica from the BBC’.

  ‘It’s Keith Harris who put you up to this, isn’t it? Where did he find you then, to get you to ring me up and pretend you’re from the BBC?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘this really is the BBC.’

  ‘I reckon he’s getting his own back for a practical joke I played on him a while ago,’ I said. ‘But go on. Now you’ve gone to all this trouble and he’s obviously briefed you, I’ll play along.’

  I should explain that Keith is a very good friend of mine, someone I’d worked beside since the early 1970s. He’s got a wicked sense of humour, rather like mine; our sons were a similar age and so our families went away on holiday together; and we both tended to take part in anything going, usually winding each other up (and everyone else) wherever we were.

  Now Keith had a habit of making a big thing of other people’s birthdays, adorning the front of their house or garden, for example, with huge banners saying ‘Give a hoot!’ or ‘Go and knock on the door!’ So on his fiftieth birthday I thought I’d dress up as a town crier for a lark, and I managed to borrow the full ceremonial outfit from a real crier: big red coat, tails, shirt, dicky bow, hat and bell.

  Then I went round the houses near where Keith lived, knocking on all the doors and asking if I could borrow the children to go along and serenade him. Up and down the streets I went, ringing my bell and looking like the Pied Piper with this long stream of children walking behind me. When we reached Keith’s house I could see him with his family through the window, sitting down to a meal. All the children lined up behind me, and I produced my scroll and rang the bell as loud as I could, shouting, ‘Oyez, oyez. Keith Harris is fifty today.’ And then all the children burst into a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’.

  I knew he would try to get his own back if he could, but when ‘Jessica from the BBC’ began to interview me it became obvious she really was who she said she was, and I had to apologize for my initial doubts. She went on to ask me a whole range of searching questions.

  Later I found out there had been hundreds of applicants, and I wondered why they had picked me out of all the others. Jessica explained that she would ask each applicant to tell her about their allotment, and most people responded, ‘What do you want to know?’ But I had launched straight into describing my plot and my life on the allotments, which apparently showed the kind of enthusiasm they were looking for and an ability to think quickly. I obviously enjoyed talking about it, which she said stood me in good stead.

  Again everything w
ent quiet for two or three weeks. Then I had a call from Rebecca at the BBC, following up the conversation I’d had with Jessica. They were now down to a shortlist of allotments for Jeremy Vine’s show, she said, and she wanted to ask a few more questions about mine. So we discussed the social life of the allotments, what was enjoyable about being there and what I did there besides actually gardening, how much time I spent there, and so on. And that was that.

  Five weeks went by this time, with nothing more at all until Phil Jones called me on that memorable 1 July 2003. They were down to the last candidates by then and he was ringing each of us for a chat to help him decide who was going to join the show. He did his best to put me off.

  ‘This is a live show,’ he said, ‘and there’ll be no script. Jeremy will probably talk to you beforehand to get a feel for things, but he knows nothing about gardening and has a habit of going his own way, despite what he’s been told. The listeners are there, you’ve got no chance to think, you just go straight in. Do you reckon you can cope with the uncertainty and actually talk live on radio like that?’

  I told him I was pretty sure I could as I had addressed rooms full of people before as part of my job and I was used to thinking on my feet, so that didn’t frighten me. And I appreciated there was nothing worse on live radio than silence.

  It was then he said, ‘Well, that sounds good to me. You’re on on Friday!’

  I had a few lingering reservations about the whole idea. I had just retired from a busy life in industry and was looking forward to working my allotment in peace and quiet. I didn’t want the location of the site made public in a nationwide broadcast, potentially exposing the place to vandals or unwelcome publicity. And I still wasn’t convinced in my own mind that radio was the best medium for talking about allotment life. But I kept all that to myself.

  Little did I suspect then that the programme I was sure would be a one-off would lead to a fortnightly date with ‘Terry’s allotment in the Rhondda valley’ for the next three years, something which still seems to me truly amazing.