| Series One Episode One The Shed That Swallowed Things |
| Certain words ought to make a professional gardener suspicious, and “just” is fairly high on the list. Could you just take a little off the top of that conifer? Could you just tidy the ivy around the garage? Could you just move that small pile of soil while you’re here? The word generally means somebody has been looking at a job for several months, doesn’t particularly fancy doing it themselves and has decided that because they can describe it in a single sentence, it probably won’t take us very long. This particular job began with a shed. “Could you just clear the old shed please, dears?” our client asked as she led John and l down the garden. “I swear it has a mind of its own. It swallows all sorts of things!” She laughed, we laughed, and neither of us gave the remark another thought. Why would we? Clients say things like that about sheds. They also tell you a shrub has “gone a little wild” shortly before introducing you to something that has consumed half the garden. The shed itself was fairly substantial but completely ordinary: about twelve feet long by eight feet wide, timber-built, weathered and obviously quite old. One side had disappeared behind ivy and an overgrown climber, while the roof had a slight dip in the middle that suggested somebody would eventually need to do something about it. The double doors at the front had dropped a little on their hinges, and John had to lift one as he pulled it towards him to stop it scraping across the paving. There was a small window on one side, although so much grime had accumulated on the glass that it wasn’t contributing a great deal to the illumination. When the doors finally opened, we discovered what our client meant by swallowing things. The shed was absolutely rammed. There were terracotta pots stacked inside plastic pots, which were themselves balanced on buckets. Seed trays leaned against bags of old compost. Bamboo canes poked out at every conceivable angle, coils of hosepipe hung from hooks, wire netting had become tangled around pieces of timber, and somewhere beneath it all appeared to be the remains of a wheelbarrow. There were watering cans, garden chairs, plant supports, sacks, boxes, old hand tools, lengths of guttering, trays, containers, and all the other things that end up in a garden shed because somebody thinks they might be useful one day. John looked into it for a few seconds before saying, “Oh, bloody hell.” I couldn’t disagree. There was enough material in there to keep us occupied for a while, although it was hardly the worst shed either of us had encountered. I reached over the nearest pile and extracted an old hand fork. The handle was filthy, but sound and the tines only needed cleaning. “Nothing wrong with that,” I said, placing it to one side. John reminded me that we’d been there for approximately thirty seconds and were supposed to be emptying the shed rather than restocking our own tool collection. We approached it as we would any other cluttered shed. There was no sense trying to decide the fate of every individual object as it emerged, so we created several rough sorting areas in the space we cleared immediately inside the doors. Obvious rubbish went together, pots and trays formed another pile, useful garden materials another, and anything we thought the client ought to decide went into its own group. Once enough accumulated, we’d carry a batch outside. Our rucksacks went down beside the work area, where we could reach our water, tools, and lunch without having to climb over everything. The first part went remarkably well. Once we’d extracted the obvious bulky things from the entrance, there was room for both of us to work without continually getting in each other’s way. John dismantled a particularly ambitious arrangement of bamboo canes and netting while I worked through several stacks of pots and trays. We found six gardening gloves, none of which matched, three hand forks, two trowels, several balls of ancient garden twine and enough plastic plant labels to identify most of Kew. There was also a garden gnome with no nose. John put him in the pile of things to ask the client about. I suggested rubbish. John said the poor bugger had survived in there for years and deserved better. The gnome stayed. As the front section cleared, we shifted the sorting piles slightly nearer the doors and moved our rucksacks farther into the shed with us. That was easier than continually stepping backwards over whatever we’d just uncovered. Every so often one of us took an armful outside, where the definite rubbish was gradually accumulating separately from anything that might be retained. It was dusty work rather than difficult work, and for the best part of an hour there was nothing whatsoever unusual about it. The first oddity was so minor that I almost didn’t register it. I had uncovered another stack of terracotta pots and turned to add them to the pile we’d made behind us. For some reason the pile seemed farther away than I remembered. Not dramatically farther, just enough that I took a couple more steps than I expected before reaching it. I put the pots down, looked back towards where John was working and decided we’d probably shifted things around more than I’d realised. A little later John noticed something similar. He’d filled an old plastic crate with rubbish and picked it up to take towards the doors. Halfway there he stopped, looked at the entrance and then back at me. “I thought we’d put this pile closer than that,” I told him we probably had before we’d rearranged everything, which seemed a perfectly sensible explanation. Once you start clearing a badly cluttered space, your sense of its original proportions changes surprisingly quickly. John accepted that, or at least didn’t argue, and took the crate outside. Our client appeared with tea shortly afterwards, which provided a welcome excuse to stop. We stood on the patio looking at what we’d already removed and felt reasonably pleased with ourselves. There was far more out of the shed than either of us had expected after an hour, although when I glanced through the open doors it still looked remarkably full. John noticed me looking and said, “It doesn’t look as though we’ve done much, does it?” I agreed, but that isn’t unusual with clearance work. The first half of a job often seems to produce very little visible improvement because you’re removing all the material that prevents you from getting at everything else. After tea we went back in and continued. The next section contained old shelving, several wooden boxes, more pots, a folded tarpaulin and what appeared to be the remains of somebody’s attempt to organise the place twenty years earlier. As the floor emerged, however, I began to get a peculiar feeling about the proportions. From outside, the shed was roughly twelve feet long. I knew that because I’d looked at it when we arrived. Yet standing inside it now, with enough of the floor exposed to judge the space properly, twelve feet didn’t seem quite right. “John, how long would you say this is?” He looked towards the entrance, then towards the clutter still ahead of us. “Fifteen feet?” “That’s what I thought.” “Maybe sixteen.” “No. About fifteen.” He shrugged and went back to what he was doing. “Big shed.” “It’s twelve feet.” That got his attention. He looked at me, then at the timber walls. “Are you sure?” “Pretty sure.” “Perhaps it just looked twelve from outside.” “Perhaps.” And that was where we left it. There seemed little point abandoning the job to fetch a tape measure because a shed felt three feet longer than we’d expected. The walls were straight, the floor was level, and nothing else appeared unusual. More importantly, there was still an enormous amount of rubbish to shift. Gardeners encounter strange things in old gardens all the time, and most of them eventually turn out to have perfectly ordinary explanations. We carried on. The deeper section was more awkward because much of the material had been packed against what we assumed was the back wall. There were boxes underneath boxes, a narrow shelving unit loaded with old tins and jars, several lengths of timber standing upright and yet another roll of wire netting that had managed to entangle itself around virtually everything within reach. We moved our rucksacks forward again and began systematically dismantling the mess. The bags weren’t anything unusual either: folding saws, secateurs, trowels, gloves, twine, knives, antiseptic, insect spray, food and drinks, with our water bottles attached outside. They were simply the things we carried on an ordinary workday. Another half-hour disappeared. Gradually the heap diminished until we could finally see sections of timber boarding behind it. That was reassuring because, whatever nonsense we’d imagined about the dimensions, we’d apparently reached the back wall. John started on the shelving while I tackled several boxes stacked tightly underneath it. Most contained the usual shed archaeology: old seed packets, plastic fittings, plant ties, bits of hose connectors, and objects whose original purpose had long since become obvious. The lowest box was different only because it was wedged. I pulled it once, and nothing happened. I moved some timber from beside it, tried again and managed to shift it perhaps an inch. John glanced over and suggested there might be something caught behind it. I got both hands around the sides, planted one boot against the floor and pulled harder. The box suddenly came free. Unfortunately, so did I. I went backwards expecting to hit the timber wall immediately behind me. Instead there was nothing there. For one extraordinarily confusing second I was still holding the box while my backside discovered that the shed floor had apparently ceased to exist, and then both the box and I went through the gap together. I landed heavily on damp ground with the box beside me and a quantity of its contents scattered around my boots. For a few seconds I didn’t move. Nothing appeared broken, although several parts of me had already begun preparing formal complaints. Behind me John was saying something considerably louder than necessary. I rolled onto one elbow and looked back. His face was peering through a dark opening between the remaining boxes. “Rory?” “I’m all right.” “Where are you?” That was a surprisingly difficult question. I got onto my knees and looked around properly. The ground beneath me wasn’t timber or paving. It was soil: dark, damp and covered with a layer of decaying vegetation. Something resembling a fern grew beside my hand, although it was considerably larger than any fern I expected to find behind a client’s garden shed. The air was warm too, much warmer than the garden we’d been working in only moments before, and so humid that I could feel it against my face. John pushed another box aside and widened the opening. From where I was sitting, I could see him framed by shelves, timber and the accumulated clutter of the shed. “What’s behind there?” he asked. “I don’t know.” “Well, can you get back?” I looked down. The drop hadn’t been enormous, perhaps a couple of feet, but the opening was awkward, and the ground on my side sloped away slightly. “Probably. Give me a minute.” That was when I noticed the smell. Wet earth, vegetation, warmth and something else I couldn’t immediately identify. It wasn’t the smell of our client’s garden. It wasn’t really the smell of September in Kent at all. I turned away from John and saw dense greenery extending beyond the little patch of ground where I’d landed. Huge fronds overlapped one another beneath trees I couldn’t properly make out, and shafts of bright sunlight cut through foliage somewhere ahead. I stood slowly. “John.” “What?” “I don’t think this is behind the shed.” There was a pause. “What do you mean, you don’t think it’s behind the shed?” I was about to answer when something called somewhere among the vegetation. It was deep and resonant, unlike any bird or animal I recognised, and loud enough that I felt the sound almost as much as heard it. Somewhere farther away, vegetation moved. Not a little movement either. Something substantial was passing through it. John’s face disappeared from the opening for a moment and then returned. “Rory?” “Yes?” “What the bloody hell have you found?” I looked at the enormous fern beside me, then at the dark soil stuck to my hands. I looked towards the dense vegetation and finally back at John, whose head was still poking through the back of a twelve-foot garden shed from somewhere that should have been approximately three feet in front of me. “I haven’t got a clue.” And that was how it started. Not with a flash of light, a magical doorway or some great moment of discovery. I pulled the wrong box out of a client’s shed and fell through the back. |
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