The Gardener

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Hassie is keen to integrate herself into village life and makes friends with the elderly and opinionated Phyllis Foot and also the recently widowed vicar Peter, also getting involved in the life of a young child called Penny who often hangs around the home. Hassie’s full name is Halcyon, which isn’t a word I’ve heard used as a first name before. However, when she reveals that it’s from a Greek myth, I saw the charm in it and it seemed to fit Hassie very well. In some ways, she resembles a beautiful, small bird taking flight from her past and settling in a new garden. My mother, aged 21, was injured during a wartime bombing raid, in which she nearly died and was burned so badly in the ensuing fire that both her legs had to be amputated. After being treated in Roehampton hospital, she was offered a room in which to convalesce by the Gileses, who had never clapped eyes on her before, but were generous- hearted people, moved by the story of this young woman’s plight, and that was how Betsy Giles became my best-loved godmother. She gave me many gifts, but unquestionably her greatest gift was to plant in my heart an abiding love of gardens. And that leisurely growth is forever stunted – even a power out, or blown fuse, or whatever it is that afflicts the house before it's shipshape, is just mentioned and then ignored. But then, when the same applies to the greater things, those that might have actually provided a plot, you see all that is wrong about this mish-mash. The decorating, as dull as it was? Incomplete, forgotten, ignored. Likewise with the garden. Ditto with the history of the house Hass gets wrapped up in. No, there is some semblance of a story as regards Hass settling down, and some indication of a kind of fairy legacy regarding the building and its environs, but nothing that ever gels into the form of a decent story. My mother didn't die, but the burns to her legs were so severe that they had to be amputated below the knee, and she was fitted with artificial legs at the same hospital as Douglas Bader. I can only guess what kind of conversation my parents had when my father finally returned, having escaped from prison camp. She had kept from him until the last possible moment the news that, while her life had been spared her legs had not. She later maintained that this reservation was out of concern for his morale, but it seems more likely that it was because the revelation would have exposed the fact that in his absence she had fallen in love – with the friend who died, another Communist activist and a charismatic leader in the student movement.

While I was reading The Gardener, I found myself reacting to it, like Hassie regarding her untameable garden, “with a mixture of awe and resentment”. Its rendering of character is frustratingly uneven and its narrative excursions into the past seem so randomly introduced that the pacing often feels wildly out-of-kilter. Viewed as a whole, though, the novel's narrative design emerges as instrumental to its central conviction, as set out in the prefacing letter: that “the certainties we construct are apt to be toppled by reality.” Try as we might to control it, nature has other ideas: Murat is one of a handful of village locals who feel simple and underdeveloped. This is at odds with the promise of depth in the novel’s epigraph, taken from W H Auden’s poem ‘At Last the Secret is Out’: ‘there is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.’ It is only really Hassie’s sister, Margot, who is discovered to be more complex than first imagined. But then again, the story’s simplicity is a deliberate part of its fairy-tale charm. It is the village’s ancient woodland that hides the most secrets in the end. The house is set in an extensive but overgrown garden in need of repair. It’s a job too big for one person, so Hassie hires an Albanian migrant who has broken up with his English wife to help her. Although neither of them has any horticultural knowledge, they work together to weed the overgrown garden beds, mow the lawns, repair broken trellises and plant new plants. These words, impossible to comprehend today, were less remarkable in those politically fervent times. They encapsulate much of what I perceive now when I think about my mother: a fierce courage; a staunch political commitment; an abiding sense of drama; but most tellingly, for me, the fact that her love for my father had already run its course. But overall, The Gardener is a delightful tale about resilience, fresh starts and hope for the future. It’s written with psychological insight, tenderness and poignancy.I jettisoned the boyfriend, and the job and obediently won scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge, where in my mother's script I was billed to embark on a high-flying career in academia. Perversely – or inevitably? – I chose to go to Cambridge where the long shadow of that bomb still loomed; and where I suffered a well-concealed, but necessary, breakdown. My former academic fluency dried up along with my always fragile confidence. In thrall to a nameless dread, I was incapable even of entering the university library. Our narrator, Hassie Days (it is revealed) is writing to her unborn child and the father has got to be Murat, the Albanian gardener with the beautiful white teeth and dazzling smile. Remember that night when Hassie went to look for the lost kitten and was full of sorrow? She saw a figure which ‘began to move slowly towards’ her. It was Murat who had been living in the woods. She refers to this in the denouement, confirmation to readers and, I thought, subtle and moving. Told in a gentle and soothing voice, it’s an absorbing tale that feels like a tonic or balm. It tells the story of the impossibly named Halcyon Days — or Hassie, as she’s better known — and her older sister, Margot, who use their inheritance to buy a rundown Jacobean house in a small rural village near the Welsh Marshes, a short drive from Shrewsbury. The Gardener is a tender manifesto for how what is broken and neglected in us can be restored through care, love and time. If the novel has a fault, it is that it’s too focused on the protagonist. Little time is spent developing Murat’s character and the descriptions of him often speak to stereotypes: he is cautious, diligent, deferential and mostly silent; he has ‘dazzling teeth’ and ‘topaz eyes’, uses formal language and misunderstands British idioms. It is difficult not to cringe as Hassie remarks to the local vicar, ‘I’m all in favour of immigrants … Especially when they’re like Murat. They strike me as much harder workers than the British.’

Descriptively written with warmth, laughter and understanding, a beautiful story. The characters and setting very evocative and lasting. Highly recommend.Foliage like fine green lace poised further blues from the self-seeded love-in-a-mist. The oriental poppies, bought at the garden centre, had spread their veined hairy leaves and the lupins and the foxgloves were pushing up tender-budded spires. Other perennials, from Nelly East’s time, were re-emerging… But happy as I was to see all this, what was most thrilling was the sight of the seeds Murat and I had sown germinating in the darkness of the potting shed.