The Garden

Our garden is long and narrow. It used to slope downhill, but we dug the earth into flat descending platforms and hemmed it in with red bricks and railway sleepers. A cross between Thai rice paddies and the steppes of Mongolia, hewn in the temperate soil of British suburbia. Wild strawberries spill over the sleepers' tarred edges.

It is surrounded and invaded by trees. A squirrelly sycamore in the neighbour's garden that spills its spiralling seeds onto our lawn. A statuesque fir that drowns our patio in shade each morning. A huge holly tree whose leaves might have been spiky once, but have all but given up now. Once every three winters it is weighed down with a million blood red berries, but by Christmas they have been devoured by pigeons and blackbirds. Bamboo and clematis shoot and climb and cover. Behind the purple-leafed cherry tree ferns sprout from damp and softened wood.

The trees and plants are greedy for sunlight; they leave our garden cast in emerald shade. The sun pours through in pied patches of white like spilt milk. Rickety white garden chairs with peeling paint sit in the white hot pools; if you want to sit in the sun you have to pick up your chair now and again, following the light across the garden.

In the corner is a tree house that our dad built. It's not a real tree house; it's a wendyhouse on stilts. Painted cornflower blue but faded. The inside is white and full of photos of our ancestors and spider webs. In the evenings the sun hits it full beam, streams through the smoky plastic windows and fills the tiny room with milky light.

On rainy days I sit inside, and close my eyes, and pretend it's a beach house.