The Secret Garden Writings by Maureen Lawrence and residents of Seacroft Estate

Section 2

Talking To a Stranger

It's the first real Spring day of the year. Bright sunlight. Waiting for a bus, I'm so dazzled I can't see the numbers. There's a young man standing next to me at the stop, carrying a bunch of paper roses. I ask him to tell me when the bus for Monkswood Gate rolls up and he tells me he's blind. Doesn't bother me, he says cheerfully, I just stop the bus and ask. I tell him I'm nervous because I don't know exactly where I'm going. I've got the address and I've been given instructions, but if I get on the wrong bus or shoot past the stop, I'll be lost. Besides, it's going on for fifty years, since I went to Seacroft by bus, though come to think of it, back then I used to walk. I remember getting blisters and walking on the grass verges to cool my feet. And paddling in a beck somewhere on the way. In those days I'd be heading for my best friend's house in Brooklands Avenue or my cousins' in Redmire Drive. All the houses round there were new, when I was a child. They were known as sunshine houses, because of the big windows. But what I liked best was the gardens at the backs, where we used to play.

Now, all these years later, I'm visiting a stranger. But there's a link and a plan. The link is that I've never grown out of my love of gardens and Sue Whyte has agreed to let me look at her garden. As for the plan: by the time the bus arrives and it's trundling along the familiar route and I'm checking off the land-marks - St. James' Hospital, Gipton School, the Fford Grene, Easterly Road, Hollin Park, Kentmere Avenue - the plan is simply to put our heads together and see what happens and in a funny kind of way something is already stirring. Because for me this is not just a journey into the past or a meeting with a new person, it's what I do for a living and the starting point is always a great adventure. No, I'm not a gardener, I'm a writer. I've been invited to join the Secret Garden project at the East Leeds Family Learning Centre, and this is my first assignment. Sue Whyte is the first person to volunteer to participate in the project and that's the whole point of this meeting. Because time and again I've found there's a bit of a writer in everybody. Everybody has a story. Today, all I have to do is dig a little, and if I'm lucky...

At last I'm walking slowly down the road, reading the numbers. Because Spring is late this year, there's not much sign of life in the gardens. Behind one hedge I catch a glimpse of purple aubretia. I assume that I'll know the right house, because the garden will be something special, even if it's still half dormant. So I'm puzzled when I get there. Panicking. Still half blinded by sunlight and the dazzle of trees. What if I've taken down the wrong address? There's a car parked at the kerb with some camping gear on top. The house itself is up a steep incline and there's a lumpy mass of sub-soil piled up in front of it, and then some steps and heaps of stone. Something is happening, but it's not a garden - yet. I stand there, dithering, until Sue comes and stands at the top of the steps, inviting me up, and suddenly she's telling me about the plan for the garden, as if I'm an expert - how there's no light at the back in the afternoon and nowhere to sit at the front, because of the steep slope; and how they've been collecting stone to make retaining walls and terraces, and how they've cut down brush and how they've marked out the foundations for the shed. I stand there, bemused by the scale of the operation: it sounds like hard-work. I find myself wishing I were one of those magical people from television - Groundforce or something - with a bag of tricks and a lot of muscle, but all I've got is my notebook . I fumble for a pen, needing to write things down before I forget and Sue suggests we go indoors. Just as we reach the threshold I glance down at the car in the street and say - in passing: it looks as if you go camping. And that chance remark of mine strikes the keynote. A man's voice in my ear says: we are campers - authentic campers. Sue introduces her partner, Neil. I'm puzzled by the word authentic, but before I have time to ask, Sue answers my question: we're authentic Western campers.

Then I'm in the sitting room, my pen poised, my notebook open, but I can't write, not yet, because I can 't keep up with the flood. They're both talking, first one, then the other, keeping up the flow, letting me into the secret of their other life. Because it's not just camping they're talking about, it's about entering into a different life, in which they take on different identities, different names, different clothes. In that other life, she's Blaze, he's Kid Kelly, their three boys are Chip, Beaver and Mouse. Their camp is temporary, because they're travelling through the wilderness in search of a new life. The bad old world is behind them, but the frontier is still open and they're heading for a new life. The games they play - roping, hatchet throwing, bows and arrows - are not just diversions to while away a weekend; they are honing the skills they need to live the pioneering life. And when the clothes they brought from home - the heavy brocades and stifling velveteens - prove too cumbersome and hot, they improvise out of calico and gingham. Meanwhile they're in perfect harmony, their voices attuned, their faces alight. They've come to the West along parallel lines, separately but alike in experience through all kinds of up and downs via folk song and folk music and line-dancing, until they both arrived in the same place and found they think and feel alike.

Once I've seen the photographs - black and white photographs, of course, aged to a soft sepia, she in her poke bonnet, he in his wide-brimmed hat, I have the unnerving feeling that the real identities of the two people in the room with me are captured there in the pictures in the past. Sue/Blaze has something indomitable in her spirit. It's not just energy and imagination, it's the kind of strength and common-sense that you can see tearing an under-slip into strips to make bandages. (The under-sllps - flounced and pin-tucked - are spread out by now on the hearth-rug.) As for Neil/Kid Kelly, there's an easy-going laconic quality that covers a depth of yearning and idealism, which comes straight out of those dreams of the West when anything seemed possible.

An hour into this first meeting and Sue needs to get back to work. In a rush I say: we need to focus. Outside the windows, the garden, which was our starting point, is glistening, its grass lush, its dandelions golden. They tell me their work on the garden has been suspended, because the council are giving new faces to the houses, stripping off the old concrete facades and replacing with brick - a renovation which is itself a touch of retro, a rejection of the composite material which seemed a cheap answer to the post-war housing problem. Sue comments rather wistfully that when the garden is finished, when it is all controlled and orderly, full of paths and angles, it will have lost something. Its mysterious, tangled, jungly feeling will have been destroyed. I ask her if she would like to write what she feels about the garden and she agrees to give it a try. Time is running out. In haste we arrange another meeting, stand, shake hands, exchange thanks, and then I am climbing up the street again to the bus stop.

This time I'm in luck. The bus comes quickly and I'm the only passenger. As the houses skim past, I'm struck not by their uniformity of design, but by their hidden interiors teeming with secret lives. And I reflect that before Seacroft was built in the early part of the last century, the land was probably cultivated and relatively tame. So for hundred of years this part of the world has been a far cry from wilderness, in spite of which we each of us keep some part of our primitive past locked inside our deepest memory, purely because there is a time in our infancy when we know nothing, when everything is bewildering, when we are pioneers in life. So that for me as a child forging my way from Harehills to Seacroft on little-known roads, there was a feeling of adventure and exploration, especially crossing the waste ground that we called the hollows, where it was still possible to fish for real stickle-backs and carry home dripping armfuls of marsh marigolds.