Ivy Lane: Spring: Read Online Free PDF

and then they were gone.
    Nobody was paying me any attention and it was the perfect time to slip away. I left the building without making eye contact and collected my bike. A sixth sense told me that someone was calling my name, but it was late and I’d had quite enough social contact for one day.
    Cycling back through the dark streets I tried to make sense of the evening. I’d sorted out the equipment hire, made friends with Charlie again and managed to navigate the conversation without revealing too much about myself. All in all, a successful night. But why was it that despite my attempts to remain aloof, I felt as if this tight little community was pulling me in?

Chapter 5
    As I walked through the gates of Ivy Lane allotments the following Saturday, I was treated to a sight of bums in the air, all shapes and sizes, as people bent over to tend their plots. It was a cloudy but mild day and without exception each and every one of them straightened up and gave me a cheery wave or called ‘Good morning’ as I passed by and then continued with their work – alone.
    I wasn’t sure where I was going wrong.
    So far, allotment gardening (not that I had actually touched any soil yet) seemed anything but a solitary affair. And much as I was grateful for Charlie’s offer of help, I couldn’t help looking forward to today being over. I hadn’t had so much as a minute to indulge in a bit of quiet contemplation, and that, after all, was what had attracted me to it in the first place. But surely once all the hard labour was done and my novelty value as the newbie had died down, everyone would leave me to my own devices? I could live in hope, I thought with a small sigh.
    My bicycle was at home today on account of the fact that I had brought my rake with me and hadn’t fancied cycling with a potentially lethal weapon dangling over my shoulder. I had also packed a bag with a flask of tea and a flask of coffee, a tin of biscuits and a tub of jelly babies. What I lacked in useful gardening tools, I hoped to make up for in superior elevenses.
    I stopped to allow a scruffy-haired man to cross the road in front of me with his wheelbarrow. He was wearing a holey jumper and a papoose containing a sleeping baby with spiky black hair. We smiled at each other, he whispered something that sounded like ‘rhubarb rhubarb’ and I watched him as he went on his wobbly way.
    No sooner had I resumed my wander along the road when a stout man with grizzly white hair and quiff-like eyebrows jumped out in front of me from behind a water butt. I gasped and reeled under the weight of my heavy bag and narrowly avoided knocking his block off with the rake.
    ‘Sorry!’ I yelped.
    He scanned the road from left to right, keeping his body bent double like an elderly international spy. He gripped four cans of lager tightly under one arm.
    ‘You never saw me,’ he muttered, leaning close, one finger pressed to his lips. And then spouted a whole load of nonsense from which I managed to decipher ‘heresy’, ‘chaser’ and ‘the King’. Before I had chance to retreat from his beery fumes, he’d scuttled off and disappeared between the pavilion and the toilet block.
    The poor soul. Obviously delusional. I dithered between turning the requested blind eye and reporting him to the powers that be.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Charlie, Gemma, Christine and Nigel awaiting me on plot 16B.
    Nigel was pointing out things to Charlie on the rotavator, Christine was picking up stones from the earth and throwing them into the trees beyond and Gemma was applying hand cream. For once I was glad of the crowd.
    ‘Has anyone seen an alcoholic round here?’ I said, propping my rake up against Gemma’s tree next to an assortment of implements.
    ‘Why, love, have you lost one?’ Christine tittered at her own joke. She stood up, nudged her bobble hat out of her eyes and plonked her hands on her hips. Her cheeks were red with exertion, or possibly wire wool,