I arrived at the house of my illustrator clutching a pot of Verbena. At least I call her my illustrator, though she is not mine, nor is she an illustrator for that matter. Or not yet anyway. This might be her opportunity and if it is hers then it will be mine also. I will be her writer and she my illustrator. The pot of Verbena is irrelevant.
I didn’t know she was going to illustrate my book when she rang me on Wednesday afternoon. She’d been away and come back again as nineteen year olds sometimes do. I thought she was inter-railing around Europe. But no, she rang me up asking if I had a scanning machine. To make digital images for her portfolio, she said.
I replied that I had that very article on my desk where it shared a casing with a fax, a copier and a printer. It’s called an ‘All-in-One,’ and the fact is that the machine is not very competent at any single one of those functions. On the one occasion when I tried to make the scanning function work I wasted an hour with leads and wireless link-ups, succeeding in putting my otherwise delightfully temperamented computer into a state of high dudgeon and the ‘All-in-One’ into a fiendish sulk. If either had a voice it would have said, ‘you don’t expect me to work with that!’
So I never tried again. But then I remembered that I had a second scanning machine which has sat in a cupboard ever since my daughter moved to the West Country and passed on ten years worth of miscellaneous belongings. I didn’t know whether this worked either, but it was portable and I had a lead and a plug; the necessary drivers could be obtained via the admirable services of Google, and - I told Kitty - Bob would be her uncle.
It was then that I had the idea that she might become my illustrator. ‘Could she draw flying carpets?’ I asked, and Persian Kings upended on their bottoms? And a garden with cats and bonfires and mysterious forbidden books and charred pieces of paper with Arabic script; a house shaking in a earthquake and Granny’s best china falling off the dresser?’
‘Of course,’ she said, with the confidence of a budding Quentin Blake, for illustration is what she has always wanted to do and how many nineteen year olds get the opportunity to start their careers by illustrating a story that has as yet only been rejected once?
‘Share proceeds?’ I suggested optimistically?
‘Wonderful! I’m so grateful.’
And she was. Though whether for the opportunity of illustration, or the scanner I wasn’t sure. I would deliver both script and scanner that very evening, I said.
Kitty lives close to an Edwardian mansion, built from the proceeds of the shipping trade, and now in the ownership of the County Council. The 55 acres of gardens are open to the public and in them the Council hosts events that range from Shakespeare and opera to lesser drama such as this week’s summer evening tour of the flower beds, to which, somehow, I had been invited.
Now when it comes to gardening I am still in the nursery (if you will excuse the pun). Foxgoves and nasturtiums; geraniums and marigolds. Bright colours and plenty of them. So I wasn’t quite sure why I was joining a party of fourteen eager gardeners to study Amaranthus Aurora and Alcea Rosea Nigra and discuss the usefulness of Lysimachia as edging or Coreopsis Sunshine as infill. These long words floated over my head as serenely as the clouds in the sky.
Nevertheless, it was all rather fun, doing the tour and occasionally muttering ‘but not against a south wall, I think,’ should I be required to speak.
Then, in the herbaceous border, I found found a plant suited even to my base levels of gardening skill: a perennial sweet pea, with beautiful pink flowers, growing with bindweed vigour up a twenty foot wall.
Perennial! So none of this business of starting a handful of cripplingly expensive seeds in damp trays that clutter your windowsills. I must have expressed fierce approbation at this cross between a triffid and praying mantis for the Head Gardner immediately plunged into the border returning with four seed pods.
‘If you really want them,’ she said dubiously. ‘They’re terribly invasive.’ But I did. Oh yes, I did!
Afterwards we were all given a Verbena plant. I still haven’t understood why. Perhaps it was so that we could make our own tisanes and so be guaranteed a good night’s sleep without worrying whether Torenia Purple edging would clash with an infill of Geum Mrs Bradshaw. I must warn Kitty when she’s illustrating the book.
I appear to be taking the picture one handed. The evening sun makes me look rather large!
