Gardens and Playgrounds

Today is an absolutely beautiful day, but for the next hour I shall enjoy it by looking at all the roses and geraniums in the flower bed that is visible through the open door to my side. I just wish my gardenwas larger, but then again, I am perfectly aware that many people have to content themselves with just balconies or the local park, to catch up with their share of fresh air and sunshine.
That was how it was when I was a child. If I wanted to go outside, playing in the garden was not an option. Balconies used to enchant me. I remember, a friend of my mother had one, in her small council flat, right out in one of those places near the end of a London underground line. I was allowed to water her balcony plants once, but only once. I think I must have watered a little too enthusistically, for she never asked me again. Not that we used to visit her very often, which was just as well really, because once I had exhausted the delights of her balcony, the beautifully-dressed Golly that sat on the sideboard, but I wasn't really allowed to play with, and certainly not take home, and the big seashell in which you could hear the sea if you put it to your ear, I became bored and restless, and probably a bit of a pain too.
There was a large garden behind our London house, but the only time I was allowed to go in it was to accompany my grandmother when she hung out the washing. Then I used to play in the waist-high long grass and make all manner of secret paths through it. I used to blow on the dandelion clocks to see what time it was, and there were plenty of opportunities to try again if the first one did not work. Dandelions would jostle with thistles and all manner of other weeds which thrived in that urban wilderness. My Grandmother always used to say "If you don't plant a garden, it will plant itself" and I had to agree with her.
Unfortunately, although she was only a tenant like ourselves, Mrs B. downstairs had control of the garden, and she didn't want me in it, or anybody else for that matter.
When I was about nine or ten, this same aunt who had the balcony, gave me an Enid Blyton gardening book. It was a bit cruel really, but I read it so thoroughly that I learnt a great deal about gardening. I knew all about how to dig over a flower bed, how to plant seeds and how to prune roses. I even learned about garden pests, and how to deal with them, but the book didn't give me any ideas how to deal with the biggest garden pest of all - Mrs B.downstairs.
Yes, I had actually had the temerity to dig over a bit of the wilderness and plant it out. Over the period of a few days I spent several happy hours out in the fresh air tending to my little bit of garden. Then one morning I came down to find that my plants had been trampled on and just for good measure, bucketfuls of weeds and coal dust had been thrown over everything.
I threw the book away. It upset me too much, now that my little foray into gardening was effectively brought to a close. But I think that incident might have been one of the contributary factors that lead my mother an I to leave London a couple of years later and try our luck in North Wales.
But there were still the Camden Gardens, five minutes walk away, even if you were not allowed to walk on the grass. People looked after things more in those days, and respected them. But the presence of a full-time park-keeper cum gardener definitely helped.
The flower-beds were not trampled on, no litter was left lying around and the actual playground at the end of the gardens, was locked up every night and painted at regular intervals.
From about the age of five, I used to go there on my own. There were always other children to play with once you got there.
There were no sandpits though, so I had to reserve my bucket and spade for visits to the actual seaside or till my mother took me to one of the playgrounds in Regent's Park or Kensington Gardens. There were no baby swings either and definitely only a hard asphelt surface to land on if you fell. But we never did. Not that I can remember, at any rate.
When I think of all the things we used to get up to it sends shivers down my spine. We thought nothing of hanging on by our knees to the bar of a big roundabout called an umbrella, and swinging out while the others pushed it round as fast as they could. Occasionally we even climbed right up to the top and sat on top of it, but that was definitely dangerous, and the park-keeper would then order us down in no uncertain terms.
With the big slide, one of us would slide down it with trailing a wax crayon behind them, with the result, when the wax had worked its way in, the metal slide became extremely slippery, and we used to shoot down it and right off the end, like bullets from a gun.
I think we had the most fun on the swings though. The chains were long, so you could swing really high. You could swing the highest of all if you stood up, especially if there were two of you facing one another. One sitting and one standing was another variation, as was swinging while the twisted-up chains unravelled, throwing you in all directions. The swings on either side had to be hooked up for this stunt, to avoid banging into them.
I have started talking about 'we' rather than I. Most of the time,especially when I was a bit older, I would come down with the other girls from our street. Somehow boys just did not come into the equation back then. I suppose they had their own groups and games. also, I think the girls in the street vastly outnumbered the boys, so, on the whole, we left them to their own devices.
Next time I will write more about all the games we used to play in the street. But right now, i have flower beds to tend to and roses to dead-head.