Chapter Eleven
Jim woke with a start. Where was he? Then it all came flooding back to shock him, as it did most mornings. Tears welled in his eyes. No avoiding the facts: his beloved wife was dead and without Gracie he not only felt like a lost soul, he was lost.
He’d had a disturbed night’s sleep as was usual since he’d been on the tramp and he still felt tired, deep down weary as well as sad. And he didn’t feel well today, nothing specific, just felt feverish, couldn’t seem to think straight and had a bad headache. Flu, perhaps.
He stood up, trying to tidy his clothes as best he could. When he looked round, he wasn’t even sure where he was. He must have been trudging round the countryside for a week or two now, moving blindly, not knowing where to settle or what to do with himself without Gracie.
As he walked, he began to worry. Oh dear, he definitely was feeling worse physically today! And it was suddenly all too clear to him that he was too old to cope with this sort of life for long.
He was desperate to find somewhere he could stop for a while, longed for some undisturbed peace and quiet mostly outdoors, surrounded by trees and shrubs and plants, especially now when so many of them were in bloom. Their blossoms made him feel better; they always did, just to see their beauty.
The trouble was where to settle. He’d just about given up hope of finding somewhere. There seemed to be people and houses crammed in everywhere he turned. How could he ever find a quiet path through life for himself again crammed in with others like sardines in a can? Perhaps he should have bought a car. He could have slept in it. But he’d be shut in and the weather had been kind to him, sunny with only a day or two when there were showers.
He shook his head sadly. He still hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with himself, couldn’t seem to work anything out. He’d seen a few new places, some of them very pleasant, but few open spaces. There were people everywhere. He’d looked in the windows of a couple of estate agents’ and found that he didn’t have enough money to buy himself anything except a tiny flat and they didn’t have gardens at all. Even a small home in the country would cost more than he could afford. And he wanted, no, needed a decent-sized garden to spend his time in.
He wanted to earn a living, not go on the pension. You needed to do something you could be proud of. And for him that meant something to do with gardening. He loved tending plants and was still perfectly capable of doing that, given half a chance.
The social worker he’d spoken to after Gracie died had wanted to take over his life and re-organise it for him. People like that young fellow meant well but Jim didn’t think they really understood what he wanted because it didn’t fit in with how they usually looked after oldies.
They’d insisted he’d get used to an old folks’ home, would quickly make new friends and settle down but he’d never been able to make friends easily, had never had a lot of them or needed them either. Gracie and his plants, and one or two people who also loved gardens had been enough. Even on rainy days he’d worked in his shed with the doors open. There were always lots of small jobs that needed doing, except in winter, and then he’d done wood carving at one end of his shed, and sold some of his pieces too.
He had never liked living in groups or even walking along crowded streets, and he never would. He belonged outdoors, had done even as a child. Gracie had known that before they married and had let him spend his days as he chose. And she’d been so very special and so good with house plants that he’d enjoyed her company during their quiet evenings together. Eh, there had been greenery on nearly every surface in their house.
He sighed and even his thoughts seemed to pause for a moment in tribute to her. He’d been lucky in his wife, very lucky indeed.
Then, just as he felt he couldn’t manage another day’s tramping, he found a garden shed behind a house which had a big FOR SALE sign at the front. The family must have moved out already because when he peeped in through a downstairs window where the curtains weren’t properly drawn, he saw that there was no furniture at all inside.
Whoever had owned the house had left a couple of folded and rather tatty tarpaulins in the garden shed and those softened the ground for him to sleep on more comfortably that night as well as preventing the damp from creeping up on him. That made it one of the better sleeping spots he’d found. This place would do him for a few days – well, it would if no one found him and kicked him out.
That evening he went to bed early. He still thought about it as ‘going to bed’, even though there was no actual bed these days. He enjoyed the peace and quiet, especially with the door of the shed left open to a calm, still night so that he could watch a beautiful sunset and then see the stars twinkling down on the world.
That respite and the pleasure of surroundings like these only made him more determined that he’d find another garden to tend. He’d do whatever it took to stay away from those old folks’ homes.
His poor friend had had no choice and ended up in one of them because he wasn’t well. Jim had gone to see Stan there regularly till the cancer killed him. Only for such a good mate would he have gone back again after the first visit. It left him shuddering at the memory of the cramped conditions and the shuffling old people in the corridors, many leaning on those walking frames.
He pushed the sad memories away and let himself enjoy this place with its big, comfy shed. Over the next three days, the neighbours who lived near the empty house noticed him, of course they did. But they could see that he wasn’t doing any harm so they didn’t try to chase him away.
They were nice folk, these, always polite to him. Some even stopped to pass the time of day and one of them offered him some food leftovers, which he accepted gladly.
That saved him moving on, because there were no shops within walking distance. He began to relax and felt he was starting to recover a little from losing his wife – as much as you ever could anyway.
He was still managing to get money out of Post Offices with that temporary pension book, so he hadn’t needed to touch what he thought of as his own money, which was sitting waiting for him to find a use for it. If only there had been enough to buy a cottage with some land.
He wasn’t spending a lot of the temporary pension money because he didn’t seem to get all that hungry these days. Since he’d learnt better ways to manage this tramping life, he’d not been reduced to grubbing in dustbins again. Eh, he’d been so hungry that day he’d have eaten an old shoe if you’d fried it, as an uncle of his used to joke.
Jim smiled at that memory. He was starting to feel a bit better and was hoping he could stay in this nice little shed for a few more days.
Then an estate agent turned up to show people round the house. He thought he’d got away quickly enough to avoid being seen, but when he saw the big luxury car drive away and went back, he found that the shed now had a sturdy padlock on its door and his possessions were neatly piled at the side hidden from the street.
At least the woman doing the selling hadn’t thrown his things away. But he’d cried at having to move on again, couldn’t help it. He was still feeling exhausted underneath and the thought of tramping further that day almost overwhelmed him.
When he’d stopped weeping like a child and pulled himself together a bit, he muttered, ‘Looks like we’re off on our travels again, Gracie lass.’ It was comforting to chat to her sometimes, and he always knew what she would have said in reply. ‘Chin up,’ she’d have said today and ‘Just get on with it.’
He looked down at his walking stick, taking comfort from it too, as always, because she’d bought it for him their last Christmas together when he was recovering from a bad sprain of his right ankle. He might not know the exact calendar date these days, hadn’t even known which day of the week it was in the beginning. He kept an eye on that better now, though not as many shops closed on Sundays as they had in the old days so he could usually find somewhere open to buy food.
However, he knew exactly how many days had passed since he’d lost Gracie because he marked each one on her stick at teatime, doing it every day just before he ate his tea. He didn’t think he’d missed a single one.
On that thought, he took the stick and made a neat little scratch in the row down one side. There! Another one added to it, so many days without her. That was the hardest part of his new way of life, turning to say something to her and then remembering.
He was too old to live like this for much longer, though, and certainly wouldn’t be able to do it when the weather got colder; even late autumn would be too much of a problem at night. He admitted that to himself now. But at least he was trying to find a new way to go, looking more carefully at the places he found himself in.
Only, none of them appealed to him and he couldn’t seem to work out what to do beyond moving further on the next day to wherever his current road took him.
He needed to find a place where he could bear to stay. And he would do that one day, surely? There was no rush at the moment. The weather was still warm and he could wash himself all over in streams or ponds, wash his clothes too sometimes.
He didn’t want to see any of their old friends, or for them to see him in this sad state. His redundancy payment would be waiting for him in the bank together with the savings that now belonged only to him, but he was managing without any of those and it was good to know they were mounting up. The temporary pension was more than enough for the time being.
Strange, that. Even though he had never been a money-hungry sort of chap, he hadn’t fully realised how very unimportant money was compared to the people you’d loved and lost, and the home you’d lost too.
Since he and Gracie had never been blessed with children, in spite of their efforts and the doctor’s help, there wasn’t anyone who would have reason to worry about where he was, so he could do what he wanted, whatever he seemed to need. He knew that Gracie had had a child once, a daughter, when she was quite young, but her parents had forced her to have it adopted and though she’d told him about it, they’d decided to leave the situation be and not upset somebody’s life. It was a pity he had no one to turn to now if he met trouble suddenly. That worried him sometimes.
His feeling of being lost in a bewildering, empty world sometimes threatened to overwhelm him completely, though not as badly as it had at the beginning.
He supposed he was getting used to the emptiness of his personal world but he hadn’t realised men could cry as often and as bitterly as women.
A few weeks had passed and his desire to stop tramping around had grown stronger, but he still didn’t know where to settle to make this new life.
He kept thinking he’d carry on for just another day or two. It was a lovely summer, with very few rainy days. He passed through some beautiful places ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.
Now who had written that? He racked his brain but didn’t remember till he woke up the next morning and said it aloud again. William Blake, of course. If he couldn’t find his own book of poetry among his things that his friend was keeping for him once he settled down again, he’d buy another one.
One of the few things he was still quite sure of, however, was that he wasn’t going to live in an old folks’ home, definitely not. Once they got you inside, they locked the doors and kept you there, perhaps because they needed to lock in the ones who were losing their wits, poor things. They sat you in rows, made you all do the same sort of thing, childish things too, like sing-songs using music from World War Two, which had taken place well before the younger days of his own generation. Why did they think every old person had sung those particular war songs?
No, Jim had spent most of his life out of doors and that was where he hoped to end his days. Whatever it took, he’d find a place he liked.