My Life on a Hillside Allotment Read online

  Although we paid our rent to the council, the land actually belonged to the farm that owned the whole of the mountain. To one side of the site was a tip where the National Coal Board dumped all the waste from the old Glamorgan Colliery, while at the top were the farm buildings and a golf course (also owned by the farm) that stretched for about six miles. As youngsters we would go up to the top of the mountain and search through the bracken for lost golf balls. Sometimes you’d find no end of them, and we would collect these in a bag and take them to the golf bar, where we’d get a few shillings for them.

  Unlike today, when golf is a game for anyone, the sort of people who played golf then would be senior police officers, schoolteachers and professionals who had the time to spare. Ordinary people in the valleys generally worked six days a week with only Sunday off, so there was neither the leisure nor the energy to spare for golf.

  For the same reason, the people you found on allotments tended to be manual workers who had retired, mostly men in their sixties who had the time to garden, and there were very few who were actually employed, as my father was. During the summer months especially, allotment gardening can be quite time-consuming. I’m not saying it’s hard work (it isn’t if you enjoy it), but if you were doing manual work all week it would be more difficult to set to on the plot on your one day off or in the evenings.

  Another reason colliers tended not to be on the allotments was that most of them would grow their vegetables at home, in back gardens that were quite large by today’s standards. We didn’t fit into this typical pattern. Although our back garden was a reasonable size, my uncle kept show canaries and had two large sheds that occupied most of the ground there. The small remaining area was used for growing flowers.

  So for us it was a choice between getting an allotment or going out to buy our vegetables. My father chose the former, hence our family’s long association with allotment life. Even though my father was one of the youngest plotholders there in his early days, he loved the challenge of growing and I think he also enjoyed the peace and solitude you can find on your own little plot of land. And of course by putting food on the table for most of the year he helped supplement the family budget.

  One distinct advantage of growing vegetables in your own garden at home was that housewives could do a bit of tidying up or weeding to help out, which they couldn’t do on the allotments. In fact, I can hardly ever recall a woman coming through the allotment gate, let alone gardening on a plot, because it was strictly the men’s domain. The only occasion you ever saw wives was when there was fruit to be picked. There was no rule explicitly barring women; it was just one of those features of the almost military style and discipline (chauvinism, it might be called today) of the committee men who ran the site.

  Nor would you see any young people on the allotments. I was the sole exception when I took on my own plot at the age of eleven, and I don’t remember, at least until the last decade, anyone under the age of forty or forty-five ever taking one. But that’s all changing now.

  When I first took on my own allotment at the age of eleven, both the older allotmenteers and all my mates thought it would be a flash in the pan. They knew I had a passion for growing vegetables but they thought my enthusiasm would soon fade. No chance! I loved the way of life and I could make money doing it as well. I still did all the same things as my mates, but my gardening enterprise meant I had more money than they did. The teasing and ribbing soon passed then, and those same friends in years to come were more than happy to ride in my car, bought as a result of my hard work on my plots.

  When I was a child the allotment site was immaculate. There were forty-two plots altogether and a waiting list for vacancies. The plots were laid out on the hillside in three distinct tiers. A newcomer started in the far corner, at the top of the slope and the greatest distance from the gate, so he had to walk along several paths to reach the plot and transporting anything to it was hard work. It was a long way to cart it, and uphill as well.

  This hierarchical arrangement was based on length of service. When anybody left the allotments for whatever reason, alive or dead, other plotholders could apply to move lower down, and that way you would start your descent down the hill and closer to the gate, at the same time creating a gap at the top for another applicant.

  The site was managed by a committee, headed by Alf Daniel, owner of the blackcurrants I tried to scrump. He was a very tall man, without an ounce of fat on his body, sporting a long handlebar moustache and looking every inch the authoritarian he was.

  Tommy Satchell was another who remains in my mind. He was our cobbler and he had a shed in his back garden where he repaired all the locals’ shoes. His work left him with lots of leather offcuts and I remember seeing him digging his bean trench and burying all these offcuts in the bottom. To me it seemed a strange thing to do, because most of the members used only well-rotted manure in their trenches. (These days people put all sorts of things in the bottom of a bean trench to help conserve moisture.) But Tommy had a vast amount of this natural material available and this was a way of putting it to good use. He always grew good beans, so the method clearly worked.

  Another imposing individual on the allotments was an Irishman by the name of Bob Cullen. It always seemed strange to me as a young boy that he had this soft accent that no one else shared, and a different way of speaking. Like the others, he was a very tall man. Perhaps there was something in the soil on the Rhondda hillside, which not only grew good vegetables but also sprouted tall men – it worked for me too, as I stand over six feet. Bob Cullen was very kind too. He grew lots of roses on his plot and as I was leaving the allotment he’d say, ‘Do you want a bunch of roses for your mammy?’

  These committee members were tall, lean regimentarians who reminded me of military men. They used to go round the whole allotment site on a Sunday morning, checking the plots and examining the paths. If your path was more than eighteen inches (45 cm) wide or not cleanly cut, or if there were any weeds growing on the plot, you were summoned before the committee and given a period of time in which to remedy this. If nothing was done after that, you were out: there was always a queue of people waiting for plots. In those days you could be kicked out in just a couple of weeks, whereas nowadays eviction could be delayed until the end of the year. In the majority of cases people knew they had to make improvements and a warning quickly brought them to heel. The committee would only take into account illness or perhaps some genuine problem within the family: the fact you just hadn’t done the work wasn’t acceptable. It was a system which might seem a little heavy-handed to us now, but it worked very well at the time and plots were generally kept in pristine condition.

  Most allotment sites today are provided with a number of standpipes where plotholders can get water on tap for their crops, but ours has no mains supply at all. The mountain behind us is like a honeycomb, full of hollow chambers left from the coal levels, and that’s where we get our water from: there’s a constant flow draining the old workings and running out of the mountain, which amounts to a huge catchment area.

  Just outside the top fence we’ve cut a big trench so that all this drainage water is channelled into a culvert. People sink plastic buckets or old containers in there, dip a hosepipe in their particular bucket and siphon out the water, which then cascades under gravity down the slope. The bucket in the trench is yours and it is your responsibility to keep it clear of silt, but because there are so many on the plots some of us share a bucket. For example, I share with Albie on the next plot above me, and I have my own pipe tapped into his supply and left in place down my path in the summer.

  Albie’s one of the truly long-serving plotholders, on the allotments since 1971. I knew him even before then because he lived in the house that backed immediately on to ours, and our back gates were in line. But I was only a passing acquaintance until I moved to my current plot immediately below his. After that he soon became a good friend and, as he retired before me, he regularly looked after my gree
nhouse and kept it watered while I was at work.

  He’s a man of few words and doesn’t believe in using a sentence in reply if a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will suffice. He’s famous throughout our allotments for his habitual gym shoes and the range of bandanna headgear he wears to keep the sun off his thinning locks, and is fondly known among us as ‘Johnny Dap’ (Welsh slang for plimsolls is daps).

  Like the rest of us, Albie started his gardening career on the upper plots, but now he resides on the second tier, one plot in from the gate. He has been there for many years and has no intention of leaving. He’s got his buildings and plot exactly how he wants them and no longer has any desire to reach the ‘promised land’ just inside the gate: with his ‘café’ the meeting point for those on the lower plots, I think he is content to stay put.

  To provide for the twenty-five gardening members these days there are about ten different water pipes, running everywhere like a maze of spaghetti, and the rest of us share. We usually pull them out of the stream for the winter, and then to start the water running again you have to suck hard at the end of the pipe, often getting a mouthful of silt and ending up coughing and spluttering. I remember once when Mickey, one of the lads there, was sucking and sucking at the end of his pipe.

  ‘I can’t get this water to come through,’ he complained.

  ‘Well, suck a bit harder,’ we urged helpfully.

  So he carried on sucking. Suddenly the obstacle came free, he staggered back and we could see this thing sticking out of his mouth. It was a dead mouse which had caused the blockage, and when it had finally come free it had shot into his mouth with its tail sticking out. He was coughing and heaving for ages after that, but at least he got his water running.

  The only trouble with that water is that it is freezing cold, even on a hot summer’s day, because it comes from deep inside the mountain. I feel that it chills everything if used direct – plants are like us and don’t take kindly to being soaked in freezing water after standing in the warm sunshine all day. Instead I store it in a series of 45-gallon (200-litre) drums, which collect the rainwater from my glasshouse and overflow directly from one into the next. In summer I fill them with the mountain water one evening and wait until the next before using it, to give it time to warm up a little.

  So that’s our unique (and, so far, unfailing) water supply system. Another respect in which we differed from some other sites, in those days at least, is that we weren’t allowed to keep poultry. At one stage the committee began to permit small poultry sheds on the lower plots as long as they were fully enclosed with runs, but some people started off on a small scale and then lost interest in gardening, so the amount of space the poultry took up started to expand.

  Eventually these lower plots (which, being near the main gate, were the prized sites it might take you years to reach) became quarter-or even half-full of chickens. So the committee decided to get the poultry out altogether, and as anyone down there finished on their plot, whoever took over was not allowed to keep hens. At one point we got back to where we started, with all forty-two plots being cultivated solely for crops.

  And then the Gas Board came through the top corner of the site with a new pipeline. This seriously disturbed the ground, which settled and sank afterwards, completely ruining it for the purposes of cultivation. About the same time the demand for allotments was dropping, and so that area was allowed to go gradually back to nature. That was in the sixties, when many of the original tenants were getting too old to do the work, and there was less interest among the up-and-coming generation (a problem affecting allotments nationally).

  About a quarter of our plots went out of use or became derelict, and at one point we were lucky to keep the allotment site because the council was beginning to notice that so many were not being used. So to get the rent coming in again it was decided to allow poultry-keeping at the top. We didn’t worry whether plots there were cultivated or not, just as long as they were kept tidy.

  The advantage of this system is that the lower tiers of plots, where no poultry is allowed even now, are better protected. Plotholders at the top erected outer and inner fences to keep the poultry enclosed, and these are pretty high to stop the birds from escaping. So now we’ve got a complete barrier along the top, where the site is open to the mountainside, and this gives the lower two-thirds of the plots greater security.

  Back in 1950, however, when I first started helping my father, all plots were fully cultivated and there were none of these problems. Dad’s allotment was close to our house, and whenever he wasn’t working he’d go up there, often for the whole day, because he grew a lot of fruit and vegetables and was very conscientious about looking after it all.

  * * *

  The half-hour allotment?

  IT SEEMS TO ME that any idea you can manage an allotment in just half an hour or even half a day per week is wishful thinking. My father would be there for whole days at a time, and I find that from late April through to the middle of September I have to put in four or five visits a week – and that means an hour or so of work minimum at each visit. You don’t want any interruptions either, so you might have to sneak in to make sure nobody stops you. And that assumes you’ve got a plot which is already tidy and in good condition.

  Easy or low-maintenance gardening is a myth, and the ‘half-hour allotment’ isn’t realistic if you’re going to tend the plot well. For example, where do all these weeds come from? Even if your plot is reasonably clean they seem to travel miles just to settle on your soil and grow. I don’t leave any weed to flower on my plot, to try and stop them perpetuating, but they still turn up. And if you are watering you need to spend a couple of hours in one session just doing that: it’s no use just dampening the soil, you’ve got to give it a good soak because tickling just frustrates the plant.

  I don’t think you can keep an allotment well with just a little time each week, unless you revert to the old practice of zapping everything with chemicals and using lots of artificials, rotavating the ground and growing masses of potatoes and other big crops which will cover the surface, smother weeds and look after themselves.

  * * *

  I used to go with my father whenever possible and then make my own way back home when I’d had enough. As I got older I’d stay longer and longer, watching him and helping, and talking to neighbours on other plots (who tended to find me a bit of a novelty), taking an interest in what they were doing and growing.

  In that way I started to discover the background to what I ate at home. For example, the major part of most plots was devoted to potatoes, which everybody grew in huge quantities because in those days people ate them every day. The typical meal each night consisted of hot food: a joint of meat – lamb, beef or pork, usually in rotation – together with cabbage, carrots or beans, and always unlimited potatoes. You didn’t have pasta or rice or any of the other exotics, as we called them.

  These meals were a fairly standard affair: the meat might change but there was little variation in the kind of vegetables, and any there might be depended on the time of year, because we always ate what was in season. My mother did her best to ring the changes, but one ingredient was constant: the liberal supply of potatoes.

  Probably because the produce was cooked and consumed within hours of being picked, it always tasted delicious to me, and with all the energy I was expending I had a very healthy appetite, eating everything my mother put in front of me. I think it was a challenge to her to load my plate so full that I’d fail to eat it all, but I always rose to the occasion, so much so that she would regularly remark, ‘I think you must have worms, the amount you pack away without putting on weight.’

  She was an excellent cook and worked wonders with a limited budget. One of my favourite meals that she’d do in the summer was a huge plate of fresh runner beans, laced with plenty of butter, and a few large chunks of fresh bread. This is still a choice lunchtime snack for me to this day – just thinking about it makes my mouth water.

 
; Broad beans were a popular crop that was always grown early. There were runner beans in summer (but no French beans until later years), cabbages (from spring and summer kinds right through to broccoli and savoys for the winter), and Brussels sprouts, swedes, parsnips and carrots were the main vegetables in winter.

  With no freezers, we were unable to store much, and so everyone grew swedes and parsnips for the winter. Vegetables such as onions and potatoes were stored in a frost-free outhouse for winter use, while my mother preserved loads of shallots as pickling onions and made a whole range of jams from surplus fruit in summer. These all helped supplement the food on the table during the winter months, bringing back memories of sunny summer days on the allotment.

  Despite what some people might assume about Welsh gardeners, I cannot recall in my early days on the plot ever seeing leeks being grown there. In fact they weren’t too well known in the fifties, and my father didn’t grow them until the 1970s. The leek may be the national emblem of Wales, but Rhondda gardeners certainly didn’t grow them – what an unpatriotic lot! With no disrespect to my parents’ generation, I suspect housewives didn’t know what to do with leeks: certainly my mother never cooked them. To many they must have seemed strange long green things, somewhere between an onion and a cabbage. Vegetables generally went into a saucepan on the gas stove and were boiled, whereas to get the best out of a leek you need to cut it into 2-in (5-cm) chunks and put these round the joint to roast and develop their flavour in the oven. Even when making cawl, which always contains leeks now, many cooks tended to use onions instead.

  Another reason leeks were missing was probably that no seed was readily available. You didn’t get mail-order seed catalogues in those days and there were no supermarkets selling a big range of seeds, even as late as the seventies. Instead we used to go to the local ironmonger, who sold seeds loose: broad beans, runner beans and peas were all sold that way, and even cabbage seed was bought by the ounce (25 g). He had a small scoop and used to weigh up the seeds on his little scales, and you tended to grow whatever he had, which limited choice considerably.