Digging for Victory

By Keith Nurse - 10/01/2008

First there was Bert. An amiable heavyweight, he’d journey cautiously to his allotment plot on a creaking bike, his trousers tucked into his socks, a black shopping bag looped over the handlebars. Then, stripping to his white vest in summer, he’d plant himself on a plastic chair, beneath the cover of the overhanging oaks, and call out, a friendly ‘Morning’. The greeting always sounded like ‘Mourning’. They said he was 80 plus.  Even in his figure-hugging vest, Bert didn’t look it. 

 

Then there was diminutive Alf, the friendliest, busying toiler imaginable: a warm and deeply human horticultural innovator, who’d offer an array of tips, based of decades of trial-and-error experience working the difficult clay soil. Alf was another earlier era veteran who recalled the dark days of wartime when the our wood-ringed allotment retreat was worked in ‘Dig For Victory’ conditions – in the days when the sky was dark with the Lutwaffe legions drawing fire from the ‘Few’ and their Spitfires from nearby Biggin Hill.

‘Anyway, as long as you enjoy it, that’s the thing’, Alf would say, with a wistful sigh.  But it was an uplifting, encouraging remark.  By ‘enjoy it’, he meant extracting the pleasure (or so it was rumoured) to be derived from double-digging,  working knee-deep in the unyielding soil and mulching in the straw-laced manure from the stables, located a short wheel-barrow trek away.  Then another sage would loom large among the runner-bean poles - a tall veteran of upright guardsman-like bearing who, without prompting, would complain loudly about the attitude of today’s youth.  

‘When you think we shot young Germans to keep this country free for the likes of these idiots, with their graffiti’, he’d growl, indignantly. In this one-time infantryman’s closed book of wartime honed certainties, the wall-daubing ’erberts’, were the new enemy – an awkward squad whose anti-social antics called for the sort of boot-camp discipline that had once come with National Service. 

Then there was the extraordinarily industrious ‘Mrs T’, a dainty widow in large boots who worked feverishly through the undergrowth to produce small but perfectly formed new potatoes for Christmas – thereby managing to overcome the ravages of blight and age (sometimes they seemed one and the same) and the effects of failing autumn light on late-planted tubers. Such experience, such carefully garnered pragmatism often made me feel as vulnerable to the realities of the growing world as a late planted tuber.

 

But times have moved on in our neck of the North Kent woods.  A new breed of allotment holder has emerged in recent years:  younger, energetic, competitive and determined to take advantage of early retirement and/or or ‘redundo’ and explore the sweet delights of the good-life, away from the daily agonies of commuting into Cannon Street. 

So the social plot lines are now clearly defined, all so much neater and the
board-edged vegetable patches ordered in a way that the old order could never have envisaged.

So the dig goes on, for some form of personal victory, often to help make up for the shortcomings of the non-final pension salary era, the pressures of ever-rising council tax burdens and the demands of the credit card merchants,.

The digging – broadly, it is of a different form and crop rotation now a serious, rather than a loosely adhered to discipline. A makeover has taken place, reflecting both social and economic change – but the cabbage, leeks and sprouts still taste much the same.  Change, though, is in the air – nowadays there isn’t one white figure-hugging vest in sight.