Naughty Paul

Naughty Paul Neal was a big bad boy who rode a Raleigh Chopper. His hair was brown, and his smile wickedly crooked. I was told he talked like a Cockney, though I'd never heard one of those ! He appeared at our house in Ireland one summer, the nephew of one of our tenants in the Mews House. My sisters, brothers and other children we knew all shared the enormous Victorian garden, and enjoyed the usual bike-riding, gravel-spraying, tree-climbing and sandpit Empire-building games, until Paul came along.

It must have been a quiet year, in between my cousins Fiona and Duncan's permanent departure for England and our own leaving. Most of our usual games were led by girls (my older sister, known here on Blip as TMLHereandThere and her friend Louise), but the boys added an extra element of danger and excitement. Not that we needed it: we already knew how to mix potions with weedkiller, paint the oil tank with indelible black paint, and walk en masse on a thin glass roof! By the time TML came home from boarding school, we younger siblings and my friend Esme from down the road had already formed a little gang with Paul, and got ourselves banned from our own kitchen garden for stealing too many gooseberries.

Banned! A padlock on the gate! Not allowed on our own property! The injustice rankled. Eventually we hit on a plan, and waited till the adults were out of the way before approaching a small wrought-iron window in the side of the old summerhouse. It was hidden behind some bushes, and therefore easy for us to remain unobserved. The space was small and high, so we hoicked my chubby little brother Ben up and in first, still wearing his little felted turquoise jumper with reindeer on it. The premise was that if he got stuck, he was expendable, but we wouldn't waste any more troops on that approach.

"Ow! you're squashing me!" he protested.

"Sssssshhh, Ben, someone will hear! We need you to go first because you're the bravest!" we improvised.

Reader, we succeeded! We forced our skinny scab-kneed bodies through the window on to the sill, down through the summerhouse and round the rose garden, keeping to the edges so that we wouldn't be glimpsed through the gate, and made it through the fragrant box-hedge entrance to the kitchen garden.

Row upon row of empty fruit bushes greeted us. Someone, with deft little fingers, had already picked every single gooseberry. Someone had slashed down the rhubarb stems and used the leaves for umbrella-weapons, discarding the stems like so many pale corpses. Someone, as cunning as children, as nimble as only we were, had stolen the entire soft fruit harvest.

Was it the birds?
the fairies?
or maybe, just maybe, us?

Whoever did it left us us a rich basket of memories. We never forgot how to break in and enter our own garden, nor to how to ride a Chopper standing up, nor fight to the bloody, stringy death with swords of rhubarb.

The location for today's entry is the likely location of the kitchen garden at Knocksinna, Co. Dublin, where we lived. I shot the photo in Stroud.