Plot 31

Jean has plot 30 and I have plot 31 and for the first two months I'm not sure she knew I existed. She'd nod. That was it. She's eighty-one and has had that plot since 1979, and there's a photograph pinned inside her shed of a much younger Jean holding a marrow the size of a toddler, and I think she saw me and my raised beds from the garden centre and my little app that tells you when to water and she thought: three months, tops. She was nearly right. Then the ban came in. No hosepipes from the first of July. The allotment society sent an email in bold. The standpipe was still on but you had to carry it, and plot 31 is at the far end from the tap, and the first evening I did eleven trips with two cans and got about a third of the plot wet and sat down on the path and thought about crying, and Jean came over. "You're doing it wrong." "I'm aware." "No, I mean." She took one of my cans. "Watch." What she did was: nothing, at the top. She didn't water the leaves, she didn't water the surface. She took the rose off the can and poured slowly at the base of each plant, one at a time, right at the stem, until the ground stopped taking it. Half a can per courgette. Then she put a handful of grass clippings on top of the wet patch. "Mulch. Keeps it in. Your soil's too bare, that's why it's all going straight up in the air." "The app said." "Bin the app." I didn't bin the app but I stopped looking at it. The ban went on. The whole of July, then August. The allotment went brown at the edges and green in the middle, in the plots where people knew. Jean's was green all over. She'd been through 1976, she told me, and 1995, and 2018, and every one of them she'd learned something and written it in a notebook that lives in the shed next to the marrow photograph.

"Seventy-six was the bad one," she said. "Standpipes in the street. My mum used to put the washing-up water on the beans." "Did it work?" "They didn't die." We fell into a thing, over the summer. Not friendship exactly. Jean isn't a friendship person. But I'd bring the cans from the tap for both plots, because I'm forty-four and my knees work, and she'd tell me which of my plants to give up on and which to keep going, and she was right every time, and by September I'd stopped arguing. The courgettes died. She'd told me they would. Too thirsty, too late in. But the chard came through and the beans came through and I had a row of tomatoes that I'd honestly given up on that ripened all at once in the first week of September, and I brought her a bag and she looked in it and said, "Not bad," which from Jean is a medal. The last week of August, it hit 35, and she wasn't at the plot for three days. I got her number off the society list and rang. She was fine. Her daughter had made her stay in. "I hate it," she said. "It's never been like this. Every year now it's like this." "What does the notebook say?" "The notebook," said Jean, "says water at the base and don't plant courgettes. It doesn't say anything about this." She was back on the fourth day, in a hat, at seven in the morning before the heat. I'd already done her cans.