Page 16 of The Allotment on Willow Tree Lane

Ceri held onto her smile with difficulty and concentrated on greeting the rest of the students.

‘Hi everyone, my name is Ms Morgan, and I’ll be your teacher for the rest of your course. You can call me Ceri,’ she added, remembering that when Mark had shown her around before half term, he had informed her that colleges weren’t like schools in that students usually referred to teachers, tutors and the rest of the staff by their first names.

‘And you can call meMs Selway,’ Portia muttered sarcastically, loud enough for Ceri to hear.

Several students sniggered.

Panic flared in Ceri’s chest. How was she supposed to respond to that? Call the girl out? Ignore her? Take her to the side after the session ended and have a quiet word in her ear?

Was this what was meant by the low-level disruption that she had read about when trying to gen up on what to expect as a teacher? Most of the stuff she’d read had been aimed at teachers in schools, and she’d assumed that it wouldn’t be as relevant in the further education setting, considering this wasn’t compulsory and the students had opted to be here. Maybe her assumption was wrong…

Deciding to take the middle road between confronting the girl and ignoring her, Ceri sent her a level stare instead, holding Portia’s gaze until the teenager looked away.

Feeling that she now had a modicum of control, Ceri straightened her shoulders, scooped a handful of rich crumbly loam from the smaller of the containers on a potting bench behind her, and said, ‘Who fancies eating dirt?’

The group of nineteen youngsters looked at each other, confused.

There, that got their attention, Ceri thought, and she consolidated her small victory by pinching some soil between her forefinger and thumb and popping it into her mouth.

‘Ew!’

‘That’s disgusting!’

‘Did she just eatdirt?’

Their reactions were exactly as she’d hoped, and she turned away to hide a smile. Chewing, she swallowed, took a gulp of water from a bottle she had placed on the bench earlier, then opened her mouth to show her students that it was empty.

Portia’s expression was particularly disgusted, and the others were staring at her in disbelief.

‘Before the invention of soil testing kits,’ she began, ‘some farmers used to tell whether a soil was acid or alkaline by its taste. If it was acidic, it tasted sour. If it was alkaline, it was said to taste sweet.’

‘You ate dirt,’ the girl standing next to Portia said.

Ceri squinted at her name: Eleanor Curtis. ‘Would you like to have a taste, Eleanor? Tell me if it’s acid or not?’

‘No, thanks!’

‘Wouldanyonelike to give it a go?’

There was a great deal of shuffling and exchanging of glances, before one of them, a tall, gangly lad who wore an air of bravado like Superman wore a cape, shuffled to the front. ‘I’ll eat some.’ He was grinning, his expression goofy as he glanced around at his mates.

Ceri gestured to the container.

Hesitantly, he grabbed a pinch and stared at it. With his classmates urging him on, he grimaced as he brought his fingers to his lips, swiftly opened his mouth and popped the soil inside.

The look on his face as the chocolate sponge exploded on his tongue made Ceri laugh – and when the others realised that the loam wasn’t soil after all, they all scrambled for a taste.

All except Portia Selway.

Ceri had a feeling it would take more than a bit of sponge to win that young lady over.

Damon, shirtless, grimy and sweaty, leant on the handle of the shovel and uttered a deep sigh. He was so unused to manual labour that today’s excess of it had been a bit of a shock to the system. He was no stranger to exercise and often went for a run or used the gym in the basement of his London flat: but digging, weeding and lopping off overhanging branches was a whole different bag of compost, so to speak.

He had been at it since ten o’clock this morning and it was now nearly half-past one. During that time, all he’d had was water, and he was now feeling hungry and thirsty alongside dirty and knackered.

Deciding to call it a day, he picked up the shovel and dropped it into the wheelbarrow, feeling disheartened when he saw how little he had achieved. He had been hacking away for hours and the area he had managed to subdue was hardly larger than a couple of square metres. Which, if he was truthful, looked worse now than before he’d started. Bare earth was visible where he had torn weeds up by their roots, and several bushes had been chopped to within an inch of their leafy lives. He seriously doubted whether they would recover from the onslaught. Ragged stems of unidentifiable plants poked through the devastation like accusing fingers, pointing at him. And the path, which had been just about passable earlier, now lay under a mound of discarded vegetation.

With a surly grunt, Damon tried to see the silver lining in his morning’s work by telling himself that at least the compost bins would benefit, and that by this time next year most of those branches, leaves and stems would have rotted down nicely. Unfortunately, he had a feeling that the composting area – hidden deep in a far corner of the garden – would also be overgrown, and by the time he finished clearing the large garden he would have more compostable material than he could handle. Perhaps he should burn it, instead? Or maybe not; he didn’t want to risk a stray spark setting fire to the house.

---