I'm just trying to sift through my memories to decide what to write about today. Some days those memories are so abundant that I don't know which one to pick, and some days, like today, I can barely summon up any, certainly none that seem interesting. I'm looking everywhere, small person days, school days, work, love, marriage, motherhood and beyond.
Okay, here's what has appeared at last, although how interesting it is, I don't know.
I was probably about four years old, and my parents had an allotment garden. I remember walking back from it one sunny day with my mother and eating some pods of peas she'd grown. The lovely little green balls were so tender and sweet. After I'd eaten the peas one at a time, I ate the pod. First my mother showed me how to remove the inside, which is a bit like greasproof paper in texture, and a bit fiddly to do and then I ate the pod, which was almost as delicious as the peas it contained.
The only other thing I remember about that allotment is that my father dug it over, but my mother did the rest of the work. As far as I'm aware that's the only piece of gardening my father ever did.
No, I've remembered something else - he dug up a weeping silver birch sappling that was growing on some waste ground and planted it in the front garden.
It seemed like quite a tall tree to me, being about twice the height of myself, and before we moved from that place a few years later, it had grown much taller. My father wasn't interested in gardening, although now that I think about it a little more, he used to mow the lawn and trim the hedge - nothing very interesting - that was left to my mother.