by Jason Hewitt

‘Oi! What’s a tit-bit like you doin’ in here?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Nothin?’ said George. With boys like this it was never nothing.

George’s eyes slowly acclimatised to the gloom, and he took the boy in – all four and a half feet of him. A first year, he thought. And rooted to the dusty floor of George’s potting shed, with his arms hanging by his side as if the tendons had been cut and looking so much like he was doing nothing that – knowing boys as George did – it couldn’t possibly be true.

‘You ain’t pinching pots?

‘No, sir.’

‘I got a new pair of secateurs. If they ain’t where they’re supposed to be I’ll know who to blame.’

‘I wasn’t stealing anything, sir,’ said the boy.

‘What you doing then?’

‘I was hiding,’ the boy spluttered.

‘Hiding?’ George snorted. ‘This ain’t the place for hiding. Or snooping. I don’t want young scallywags like you cluttering up the place.’ There was enough clutter as it was, he thought – tower blocks of seeds trays, flowerpots, brooms, brushes, buckets, trowels, propagators, sun-bleached seed packets and even more faded gardening books (most of them circa 1970 – not that gardening much changed). He pushed aside a sack of compost with the side of his foot that didn’t much want to budge. Then he dumped his flask on the workbench and gave the boy a glare, before shrugging his gardening jacket off and letting it slither down over his arms like a slow unpeeling. He hung the jacket on its nail. ‘Anyhow, who you hiding from? I don’t want a whole blasted mob of you bounding in. This is off limits. You ‘ear?’

If he did, the boy did not respond.

It was hard to keep this annoyance up, George thought, when he was getting nothing back in return. He crossed his arms and, summoning a frown, considered the boy properly.

Even for a first year, he was a short little runt – blonde straight hair that was just long enough to drift across the boy’s pitiful eyes and lips tightly pressed together as if, should he dare open them, they might let out a cry.

‘I’ve not seen you about,’ George said. ‘You’re new.’

It was the start of the summer term and most the boys’ uniforms were, by this stage in the year, looking a little worse for wear. This kid’s uniform, however, was still pristine: sharp navy blazer, grey and cerise striped tie neatly knotted about his neck. And it all still fitted. The spring term was a season of optimum growth and by the start of the summer most of the pupils were starting to look a little stringy.

‘Whose you hiding from then?’

‘No one,’ said the boy. ‘I was just…’ He came to a halt and shrugged.

George pulled the grubby curtain aside from the shed window with his equally grubby finger. He peered across the field where there were boys kicking a ball about, laughter, shouting, whole groups filing back and forth.

He glanced back at the small boy who in turn glanced at a split sack of chippings and then at the shears, the pitchfork, the rusty hoe, anywhere it seemed but at George.

‘Oh, I see,’ said George, twigging.

By this late stage in the year, every group of friends, even first years, had formed a little knot and weren’t willingly undone to let a newbie in.

‘Well, you ain’t gonna make any friends in here, that’s for sure. What’s your name, anyway?’

‘Marat,’ said the boy.

‘Maret? What sort of name is that?’

‘It’s Russian, sir,’ explained the boy.

George tried hard not to roll his eyes but couldn’t help himself. He’d spotted nothing more fanciful than the vaguest tinge of an accent that sounded rather like George might sound if he had a mouthful of half-chewed caramel.

‘I wasn’t born in Russia,’ said the boy. ‘I’m from London.’

‘Is that so?’ said George, although that barely made it any better. The boy looked more German than anything. It was so hard these days, he thought, to be able to tell what was what. ‘Well, it weren’t so long ago that you lot were all English,’ he said.

‘In Russia?’ said the boy, confused.

‘No, you tool!’ George had not meant that at all. ‘Anyway, ain’t you got lessons?’

‘Not for another half an hour. It’s lunch.’

‘Well, I’ve got things to be getting on with.’

Too much, George thought, scanning the shed. There were his files that needed to be put in order, for a start, and all the out-of-date seed packets to be thrown away and the rest clipped together with clothes pegs, let alone the various jars and pots that needed to be sorted, organised, and labelled, all the nails and hooks and balls of twine... For all the apparent simplicity of gardening he’d acquired a bewildering number of things.

‘I could help,’ said the boy.

‘I don’t need your help.’

‘Just for twenty minutes,’ the boy said. ‘I won’t get in the way.’

*

The following lunchtime he was back.

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘Hello, Mr Cartwright.

‘How’d you know my name?’

‘Miss Yardley told me.’

He stood in the doorway of The Potting Shed as if it was a burrow that George happened to live in and he was politely waiting for George to invite him in.

‘So, you ain’t made any friends yet?’

The boy shook his head. ‘I’d rather help you.’

‘Yeah, and I’d rather you didn’t,’ said George, but that didn’t seem to make much difference, and with the boy looking at him like that, he hadn’t the heart to turn him away.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake. How long you got then?’

‘Forty-five minutes,’ said the boy with an expectant grin.

‘Forty-five minutes?’ George exclaimed. ‘What about your lunch?’

‘Got it,’ said Marat, patting the protrusion in his blazer pocket.

 ‘Is that all?’

‘I ate the apple.’

‘Oh, all right,’ he huffed. There was no winning. ‘Come on then.’

They ambled across the back field with George pushing the wheelbarrow, it juddering over the grass with the secateurs reverberating around inside. Marat walked alongside, grabbing the rake every time it threatened to slide off.

George tried to think of something to say but what with the conversation at the shed he’d already talked more than he was used to in a day. As they passed the huge windows of the sports hall he caught their reflection – a young boy with a wiry old man in gardening jacket and with a shock of white hair. This might have been him with his grandfather. This might have been seventy years ago. Life, George had always thought, was too long to harbour grievances and too short to dwell on regrets.

They deadheaded the daffodils in the borders around the Lodge, the boy nervously using the secateurs while George used the emergency scissors that he kept in one of his pockets, and the boy saying little more than, ‘like this?’ and George saying little more than, ‘That’s right.’

They wheeled the barrow across to the library and an unruly climbing rose that George wanted to cut right back to encourage it to bloom.

They parked up and, standing on the edge of the border, George slowly struggled to one knee. As he tried to steady himself in the dirt he felt the boy’s eyes on him, not on his shaking frame, but on the trouser leg that was hoisted up, revealing the rods and configuration of metal where George’s ankle should have been. He said nothing. George never did. He let the boy stare.

‘What can I do?’ Marat said finally. He was looking up at the plant, the long neck that reached up until what looked like the start of a rosebud could be seen knocking against the guttering.

‘You can keep hold of the stalk,’ George told him, ‘and stop it from coming down on someone’s head. You know what Health and Safety’s like.’ Except that Marat probably didn’t.

The boy came in close to him, watching where he put his feet; and, as he reached across George to take a firm hold of the stalk, George suddenly felt aware of the other staff and pupils that would be walking past them, all seeing this boy half-stood in the flower bed with him.

The rose was a brute of a plant and the stem had grown so hard and compact that the secateurs wouldn’t cut through. Even with his gardening gloves and all his strength, George couldn’t force the blades together. His arms quivered as he squeezed harder. The joints in his fingers felt rusted and an unsteadiness took his knees so that he could barely maintain his balance, let alone cut through the stem.

‘Let me help,’ said the boy.

‘I’m fine,’ grumbled George. ‘It’s just these blasted clippers.’

Then the boy’s hands were on his, much smaller than George’s, and hot to his skin. He felt the pressure against his as, with their hands almost interlocked, together they both squeezed.

‘Gosh,’ said the boy.

‘Ay, it’s a devil,’ said George.

They gritted their teeth and strained, until, with a slow-crunching clip, the fibres of the plant were severed and the secateurs snapped through.

Thank God, thought George. He watched as the towering rose faltered and fell, scraping against windows and walls, before disappearing with a heavy huff deep into the flowerbed.

‘Did it,’ said the boy. He looked about to clap.

‘Hands ain’t what they used to be,’ said George, as if that was an explanation.

Then the bell rang and George sighed with relief.

‘Right, well, that’s you done, Master Green Fingers. I reckon you best be off.’

‘Do you need a hand getting up?’ offered Marat.

‘No, no, I’m fine. Ta.’ The last thing he wanted was this boy trying to manhandle him. He’d wait there on his knees until the sudden rush of coming and going to classes had quelled and the humiliation of him trying to haul himself back up onto his feet would be seen by as few as possible.

*

In Lacies Court he sat on the edge of the sofa, scared of making himself too comfy in case he inadvertently got dirt all over the floral coverings.

He knew the downstairs rooms of the Head’s house well but had only ever seen them through the windows as he tended the flowerbeds or secured a drainpipe. Now it felt slightly alarming to be circled by the furniture that, until this point, he had only viewed from behind the safety of the glass.

Miss Lint poured him tea and, with a graceful hand, pushed it across.

In between them, on the coffee table, was a silver cake stand, each tier with a different array of cakes, all bought, George thought, especially for him. The sponge fairy cakes were so stuffed with cream that they looked impossible to eat without stuffing up your nostrils. Miss Lint chatted about her plans for the garden and whether Mr Cartwright thought that peonies were the things for a hanging basket or whether they would be happier in beds, like the bed alongside the moon arch, she said, for example.

‘I think peonies would look very nice alongside the wall,’ he offered, eyeing an altogether safer muffin.

‘I expect, Mr Cartwright,’ she said, smiling, ‘that come the end of term you won’t much care what goes in the borders.’

‘Oh, I’ve tended this garden far too long for that,’ he said.

This is what it had come to. He could deny it to himself if he liked, but no longer to anyone else. They had seen how he grew tired and was so now often out of breath. Even getting up on to the seat of the mower sometimes felt like a major procedure.

Don’t you think it’s time? Miss Lint had said.

For as long as he could, he would not hear of it, but now… Well, here he was.

He tentatively lifted the cup from its saucer and saw the murky tea quiver like wind across the school pond.

‘And I expect you’ve got plenty of things to keep you busy,’ Miss Lint said.

‘Plenty,’ he said, although he couldn’t think what.

‘And you’ve family, haven’t you, to keep you in check?’

‘Yes,’ he said, using the need to answer as an excuse to return the untouched teacup to the table. ‘A wife. Two sons. Grandchildren.’

‘You’ll not be on your own then.’

Except that all of that was a lie.

The moment his final term ended and he shut The Potting Shed door that last time, he would be in uncharted territory, nothing but a sea of unfilled days spreading in every direction.

Miss Lint, however, had moved on to something else and he struggled to catch up.

‘On the front field, I thought,’ she said. ‘A few light refreshments. A few words from me, and then I thought perhaps you’d like to say something about your time here. I’m sure the boys –’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any fuss. I’d rather, if it’s alright with you, just, you know, slip away.’

‘Nonsense. No, no – we can’t have that.’ He heard the tone he had sometimes imagined that she used with some of the more unruly boys.

Inside, something within him deflated.

So that was that. It was decided. Other people, it seemed, knew his mind better than he did.

Then, from out of nowhere, she produced a small box and edged it across the table towards him.

‘Just a personal thank you for all your time here,’ she said, ‘from me to you.’

‘Oh.’ Mr Cartwright flushed.

He tentatively opened the box.

The fob watch inside had a simple classic look – a brass frame, delicate hands. He turned it over and saw the school motto affectionately engraved on the back.

‘Oh, that’s a beauty. Thank you, Miss Lint.’

‘Emily.’

‘Miss Emily, I mean, but I couldn’t. Honestly.’

‘Please, George,’ she said. It was the first time she had called him that.

He lifted the watch up and held it to his ear. Within the metal chamber of its body, he could hear the seconds being slowly chipped away.

*

‘Mr Cartwright,’ said Marat. The boy drew in breath as if the question that was coming would need a lot of air. ‘Were you ever in the war?’

George wavered and then, having already wrapped the twine around the pile of canes the boy was holding, tied a knot and gave it a yank, rather harder than was needed. He pretended not to hear and tied a second knot and then finished it with a bow.

‘Right. In the corner please,’ he instructed. ‘Next to the broom.’

 The boy hauled the canes across while George turned his attention to a pile of stakes that he’d gathered out from under the bench; he had been meaning to find a home for them for months.

‘It’s for an assignment,’ said Marat.

‘What is?’

‘I have to write a story set in the war. Only it has to be true and I can’t find anything.’

‘Assignment? `I don’t know what’s wrong with calling it homework. Makes it sound like you boys are on a bloody committee. You not looked in the library then? All them books in there and you can’t find yourself a story?’

‘All the others nabbed the best ones,’ said Marat. ‘I want something really good. Everyone’s so much better than me.’

‘Well, if you got your backside out there and made some real friends rather than lumbering around here with the likes of me you could be helping each other.’

‘I’ve tried.’

‘Yeah, well, not hard enough.’

The boy went to say something else but stopped himself and George wondered whether he perhaps had over-stepped the mark.

He pulled out a green trug – perhaps he could pile the stakes in there – but then thought better of it. That was where the stakes had started in the first place and he’d been forever cursing them every time he’d needed it and had to empty them on to the floor.

‘Is that how you lost your foot?’ said the boy.

‘My what?’

Marat pointed. ‘I was just wondering.’

George shoved the stakes aside. He’d worry about them later.

‘I could help you finish off in here,’ said the boy. ‘After school I mean, and then you could tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’ said George. He was getting a little annoyed now. ‘You listen – there are some things that folk like me don’t like to talk about. All right? And I don’t need your help anyway. I’ve been doing this job for nigh on sixty years, and perfectly well on my own, thank you very much; and I’ll do it a little longer yet too.’

‘But aren’t you retiring?’ Something in the boy’s tone made it sound like an accusation.

‘Oh, ay? Says who?’

‘Says Miss Jonson,’ said Marat. ‘There’s going to be a presentation.’

George sighed. Sometimes he wished people would keep their noses out.

‘I came bottom of the class with the last piece,’ said Marat, changing the subject back again. ‘They all think I’m stupid.’

‘Well, you ain’t.’

‘It’s just sometimes I get stuck and I can’t think what to write.’ There was a pause, then Marat said, ‘Father told me I’m not to be bottom again. Or…’

George glanced up.

‘Or, what?’

He could feel his heart beating.

‘Nothing,’ said the boy almost under his breath. ‘I just don’t want to be bottom again.’

*

That afternoon, after classes, Marat sat on an old cushion on the floor that George used as a kneeler whilst George perched on a couple of sacks of compost, leaning against the side of the shed, and nursing a flask of tea. George told him to write everything down.

‘I don’t much care how you write it but just make sure that it’s right.’

He told Marat how, at the age of sixteen, he had joined the RAF and trained as a pilot, and, during the last months of the war, had flown eleven sorties over enemy territory: three in a Wellington bomber and the rest in an Avro Lancaster. And how, on his twelfth sortie, high over the French countryside and heading towards Berlin, they had been shot down by a couple of Bf 109s. Ripped right through the wing.

He watched Marat’s eyes widen. He had the boy entranced as he told him how the lines of German fire then rattled through the fuselage, the night’s sky all ablaze. George said things that he had never said before, things that thinking back in the days after, when Marat was gone, he would wonder how it was that he had remembered so much detail, or whether perhaps some of it had been imagined and wasn’t true at all. Like the roar of air around the plane as it started to dive, or the furious heat of the flaming instrument panel, or the shouts of the crew, as the plane had tilted and turned and twisted, and he had shouted: Everyone out!

‘What happened then?’ said the boy. ‘Did you escape?’

George remembered the hatch being pushed open, seeing the rest of the crew with their parachutes strapped tight around them and then, with a sharp kick of their legs and a sudden draft of air, they had been pulled one by one from the plane. He, too, had been about to go, he said. But he could see the lights of a town coming into the view – the plane with its belly still full of bombs had been hurtling towards it. And so, instead, he had stayed. He had strapped himself back in and tried to force the Lancaster out of its fall. When he finally knew that he had managed to turn the plane a little and it was safely over open country he opened the hatch and dropped the bombs. He imagined feeling the slight shudder as they exploded in the fields below, again and again and again. And then, somehow, controlling his landing as much as he could, the plane drove deep into a wasteland, the wings and engines ripping from it, and then finally come to a halt as it funnelled into some trees.

‘Where some French farmers,’ he said, coming to the end, ‘eventually cut me out,’ but his foot could not be saved.

Silence.

Then Marat said, ‘But I don’t understand. You should be in the historical records for the school. We went through all of them, looking at the names. The 122 that lost their lives in the wars. And all the others that fought like you. But you weren’t listed anywhere.’

‘Yes, well, past pupils, that lot, I dare say.’

‘But why doesn’t anyone else know about this?’

With bony hands George screwed the cap back onto his flask.

‘Because perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘no one, until you, ever thought to ask.’

*

The next lunchtime Marat did not come. Nor the day after. Or the day after that. Or, indeed, the week that followed. George tried not to look out for him, but he could not help himself.

He wondered if perhaps Marat hadn’t believed his story or, now that he had it, George wasn’t needed, or whether, perhaps, someone had told the boy that spending so much time with the gardener wasn’t such a healthy idea.

Either way, the stakes ended up in the old garden trug after all, and the labelling of jars that he had purposefully left for Marat to help him with he ended up doing himself.

Then one afternoon, late June, as he was wiping down the shed window, unhooking the curtains to take them home for one final wash, he saw the boy across the school field. He was with two others, laughing – Marat and these two boys that George did not know. He panicked, thinking that Marat might be bringing them to The Potting Shed and all the orderliness that he had spent the last few weeks organising would be suddenly put into disarray. But instead, when he was half dreading and half hoping that they would come, their walk took a swing to the right instead and he saw that they had no mind to visit him at all. He’d not even been a fleeting thought.

*

George slowly shaved in front of the mirror in the men’s staff toilet, the hot summer sun burning through the window and far off voices murmuring in the distant bowels of the school. So, this was it. He mopped his face with the towel that he had brought especially and looked at himself in the glass. He was paling into insignificance. Disappearing, he thought.

He felt awkward, standing in his threadbare suit and with what little white hair he had left dampened and combed across his scalp. He half-wished the boy was with him now, to help him fix his tie.

This school had been George’s life – more than his life, his family. From a distance he had watched the boys come and go, with faces that were new and strange at first, but then, over the years, became familiar. He had watched them mature, boys to men, outgrowing uniforms again and again, and then abandoning them entirely when they hit the sixth form then left. Most of the names he had never known, or where they had originated from and where, eventually, they went; what lives had spanned out in front of them, what achievements they had made. To them, he supposed, he had been nothing more than a distant figure. Perhaps some of them had known his name, perhaps many more had not. After all, he was just the old man that they sometimes saw riding the mower, or trimming the hedge, or who was seen from a classroom window bent-backed amongst the flowerbeds, and then just as quickly forgotten.

In the end he gave up, not just on the tie but on all of it. He walked back across the field, hobbling as he went, and tried to block out the sound of voices gathering on the far side of the school. He closed the door behind him, it scraping over the wooden floorboards, and allowed himself to breath. It took a while for the dank quiet of The Potting Shed to settle once more around him.

*

It was not long before they came. Barely ten minutes.

‘Mr Cartwright? Are you in there?’

‘Everyone’s waiting!’

Two female voices, slightly shrill and out of control as if in the over-exertion of hurrying they might suddenly laugh. He could put faces to them but not names. Names were harder to come by these days. They got lost in his head.

Without daring to look out the window he struggled down on to his knees and then on to the floor where he pulled himself against the wall beneath the window. Barely had he got himself into position when he realised that it would be a struggle to get back up again, and even more of a struggle to explain what he was doing down there when they inevitably came barging in.

I’ll tell them I forgot, he decided. He was of an age now when forgetfulness could be an excuse for almost anything.

But, as it was, they didn’t come in.

There was one final ‘Mr Cartwright!’ and then another voice.

‘He’s not in there.’

It was Marat.

George’s chest tightened.

‘I had a look. He’s not there.’ The boy was such a liar. ‘He must be somewhere else.’

George waited but there was no other sound; and then – when eventually he realised that no one was now going to come, that the drinks, the speech, the hip-hip-hoorays had probably been abandoned, the crowd of staff and pupils drifting begrudgingly away – he thought: With this, at least, I have won, but it felt like no victory at all.

*

The school was deserted, peaceful at last. He took a slow and ponderous route back and forth along the corridors, stopping at each junction to look back and take in the view. He could fill the hallways with the ghosts of voices. He could feel the pound of feet. He touched the door handles, the rails, the window frames. He placed his palm against the wall here and here and then somewhere else, in part to keep himself steady, and in part to leave the essence of him on as much as he could, to spread himself throughout the whole building, for him to be in everything, as – for as long as he could remember – the school had been in him.

In the entrance hall, he stopped. He looked up at the list of previous Heads, and at the hole in the stairwell where, as a boy – when his father before him had been the groundsman, and his grandfather before that – he had played in the school during the holidays, spying on them through the hole and giggling and then quickly hiding away. He breathed in the stuffy air one last time and opened the main door. Outside the summer’s late evening sun raced across the field. He stepped out and shut the door behind him. He took an old rusting key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. He laid his palm on the door, and then the other palm and then his cheek. He stood for a moment, feeling the wood, letting it soak into him. Then, as he stepped back and unpeeled his hand a curl of dried paint broke away in his palm. It lay like a curling petal.

‘Hello.’

The boy, when George turned, was sitting on a football-sized stone looking directly at him.

‘Oh, hello,’ said George. ‘Are you waiting for someone?’

‘Yes,’ said Marat. ‘You.’

‘Oh.’ He didn’t quite know what to say. ‘I didn’t think you needed me anymore.’ He’d not meant to say that. That was for sure.

‘I know. I’ve made some friends,’ said Marat. ‘Like you said. They’re over there.’ He pointed half-heartedly to where the same two boys George had seen Marat with several weeks before were loitering on the wall, They were both of them eyeing George and Marat through squinting eyes. ‘I get seventy-eight per cent, by the way, so thank you.’

‘Jolly good. Seventy-eight?’ George had no idea whether that was any good. ‘Anyway, I ought to be thanking you. You called off the search.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t want a fuss. And, anyway, I saw you behind the curtain. Miss Lint was quite upset.’ George rather doubted this, but it was nice of Marat to say. ‘She made a speech anyway. I wish you’d heard it.’

They started off together down the drive. The boy seemed to want to hold his hand but didn’t. Instead, he curled his fingers around the edge of the outer pocket of George’s jacket. George felt the slight tug of it as they walked as if, in his imagination at least, the boy did not want him to go.

‘You will come and see us, Mr Cartwright, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said George, although they both knew that he wouldn’t.

‘And the story you told me about the war – it is true, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘No, it’s not that,’ said Marat. ‘It’s just…’

‘I wasn’t always an old man, you know,’ said George. ‘Just like you won’t always be a small little runt. We change and I, for one, don’t much like it but there you go, it happens.’

They walked through the gate then stopped. The two boys waiting for Marat jumped down from the wall.

‘You’d best be off then.’

‘Yes,’ said Marat. ‘Alright.’

They lingered and then the boy’s hand let go of George’s pocket and instead hung limp by the boy’s side.

‘Bye then,’ he said.

‘Yes. Bye,’ said George.

He gave the boy a reassuring nod because it was all he could think of to do; and then the boy set off in one direction and Mr Cartwright set off in the other.

*****

This story was inspired by my time as a writer in residence at a private school in Oxfordshire, helping the pupils (and staff) to write a published collection of short stories. I hope I inspired them as much as they inspired me.

Photo Copyright: © Jason Hewitt