people watching

We gave the sparky girl a card signed by most of the people who work at weekends, and a mug.  It was a modest leaving party, with just three people at it, but it showed that we cared.

Alan Bennett enjoys sitting in the lobbies of provincial hotels, so he says.  Not doing anything or talking, just listening and watching.  He'd enjoy standing at the till of a garden centre on a quiet Sunday in August.  The first notable customer was a woman who is a regular though not frequent visitor.  She lives in Wales, but her parents, aged 95 and 94, live just around the corner.  She finds the plant centre a peaceful place to call in to, every now and then.

She is a woman that at first sight you might laugh at, if you were the sort of person who writes clever, cutting articles about lifestyle and fashion.  She is probably somewhere in her late sixties, with untidy hair, an amount of blue eye shadow that would have been too much for me back in the 1970s when blue eye shadow was in fashion and I was in my teens, and a hippyish taste in ethnic bags and scarves.  She is very short, and walks with a stick.  Her hands are swollen with arthritis, or some ailment that turns your hands into rosy, shiny lumps.  She has needed operations on her legs, the last of which left her with deep vein thrombosis, and is still forbidden by her doctor to drive long distances, so she came from Wales to Suffolk by train.  She does not like the change from Paddington to Liverpool Street by underground, and nobody she knows in London was available to help her, so she travelled the long way round, via Birmingham, Peterborough, Ely and Ipswich, which took her eight hours.  When she arrives her parents need help with all sorts of things.  They are fiercely resistant to accepting other help, or changing their house or habits or the way that they live.  Her mother has started to have falls.

I don't know this customer's name, but she is always cheerful.  She doesn't moan about the fact that it took her an exhausting eight hour journey to get here, or that her duties are pretty onerous when she arrives, after which it takes her another marathon trip to get back.  We chatted about how nice the walled garden is, and she told me about her garden in Wales, and how it is full of wildlife, but doesn't meet the neighbour's standards of tidiness.  She was planning to call again later in the week.  She limped off, with her stick and her dodgy hair, back to the domestic chores.

The second notable customer was also short and mobility impaired (and with really seriously bad long frizzy hair, if you are taking a Hannah Betts or Hilary Rose view), and walked bent double with the aid of a frame on wheels that she pushed in front of her.  She was with her husband, a tall, patient man with a sad and anxious expression, who bought a climbing rose.  He suggested they could go to a National Trust property, but she replied in the tone of voice that doesn't brook any discussion that they would all be crowded.  They took a table in the tea shop and he was sent up to the counter to order.  She called across the room to the sparky girl to ask whether she could have a latte and the sparky girl said yes, we did latte.  She asked her husband what he was having, and then pointed out to him that there was a list of what was available, repeating twice with real venom that it was there, look, right in front of him.  He said that he was just putting his glasses on so that he could see and that he would have an ordinary coffee, then stood leaning against the counter, staring into the distance with a defeated expression and slowly removing his glasses again, while the sparky girl loaded up his tray.  If tonight he strangles the companion of his bosom I will act as a character witness that he was treated to an extraordinary public display of casual contempt by his late spouse.

Later on a customer came in who I don't think was at my talk last Tuesday, but might as well have been, as she was buying foliage plants to liven up her border.  She had some Carex in her trolley, a vine, and a Paulownia, and she asked my advice about stooling the Paulownia, which is how I discovered that she was specifically interested in foliage.  Perceptive woman.  We naturally warm to people whose ideas and opinions coincide with our own.

As we went up to the house at the end of the day with the tills and our telephones and radios, the owners had just returned from their holiday.  They didn't come rushing through to say hello to us, but one of my colleagues heard the boss say that somebody had trampled mud up the stairs.  She had a nasty suspicion it was not mud, but something to do with the peacocks.