Notes – Marion Hume

Notes: Refocusing our
efforts – how small changes can have
a big impact

HITTING THE ROOF

Marion Hume on how she and her husband created a garden on top of their house and embraced London lockdown

We knew it was coming. I’m not trying to be smart here, but Pete and I actually did. My husband is a climate artist, his practice circling around the threat of rising temperature and, connected to that, mass migration and disease. He’s been known to interrupt a perfectly pleasant dinner party – back in the days when we had those – with grim reaper predictions of apocalypse that had people saying they wouldn’t be staying for dessert.

So I know it was on February 14th – the date sticks, not because of love hearts, but because of compost – when a bunch of us were laughing as Pete spelled out why we should order it now, to be ready to dig in. While others started bulk buying toilet rolls, in this little London house it was wood, nails, soil, in order to build not a bunker to hunker down in, but a garden, up on the roof, to see it through.

It’s up on the roof that Pete and I become aligned. While his gaze is forward, to the end of time (what is the male of a Cassandra?) my focus tends to be back; I have some expertise, for example, on Lee Miller, the American photojournalist who saw through the London Blitz not far from here. In any case, Pete and I live with history. In November 1940, the fallout from a bomb smashed the back off this house. For all the summers I’ve lived here, I have given thanks to the Luftwaffe for their aim, because when this house was rebuilt, it was not with the traditional pitched roof, instead with a flat one, fenced and legal. So should we be up there, pulling up the daffodils and planting cabbages instead like they did in the war?

By mid-March, before everything closed, Pete, who usually builds large-scale installation pieces, started drilling together a rather vast planter, the expression of his creativity and, although it sounds somewhat overblown, his survival plan. It had Perspex lids (for spring warmth and to repel cats, including ours) and sections along the back designed to be removed once the sweet peas and the beans were headed upwards. Once Boris got around to locking the nation in, Pete was way ahead of him. ‘You were lucky,’ said the bloke from Boma, the garden centre in Kentish Town when he drove round to drop off a few sacks of preordered topsoil before they bolted their doors. But we suspected it wouldn’t be enough.

It was cold up on the roof to begin with. Chilling too because as we popped seeds into seed trays, the noise that travelled through the strange new silence was the sound of sirens. Yet there was also birdsong. Who knew London was home to so many birds, until we could actually hear them?
Our little street hunkered down as March turned to April, emerging every Thursday, as we banged pots and rang bells to ‘Clap for our Carers’ which soon segued into ‘Drink with our Neighbours’. Those of us not known to each other before forged allegiances by swapping seedlings. Josie was nurturing tiny tomato plants and thought she might have some action when it came to courgettes. Finn had sprouted mung beans. We, by this time, were roaring ahead with our coriander, chives and parsley thriving under glass.

But Pete’s ambitions had hardly started. With everything shut now, he scoured the house for timber to build raised beds, levered shelves out of book cases, then stood back to see whether they’d hold. His pillaging reminded me of that scene in The Great Escape where they take the planks out of the bunks to shore up the tunnel. I wondered if I should learn to whistle.

Meanwhile out in the countryside, a lovely lady called Val who, with her husband, runs an online garden supplier called Richard Jackson, heard about the little London street that was growing everything in anything. She had supplies but no customers – garden centres being shut. We had trowels at the ready but were running out of supply. When the bags of compost, the bottles of Miracle-Gro and the seeds for growing sprouts that she sent to us got through the blockade, we shared them out with a nod and a wink. No need to be showy. If you know your classic war movies, you’ll remember it's not Steve McQueen with his razzle dazzle stunts, but the pair in the rowing boat, the chap on the bicycle, who make it.

By May, you should have seen our kale! Although no one could, given we weren’t accepting visitors, and we just kept eating it. And the chard. Meanwhile, downstairs in the house, there was action too. One thing we had bulk-bought was onions (Pete cooked suppers, right though lockdown, for friends on the front line and neighbours who were shielding). It didn’t take long before the onions start to sprout. What to do? I phoned a farmer. ‘Do you have any fishnet stockings?’ he asked. ‘No? Any tights then?’ A neighbour, corporate job, working from home, donated laundered pairs then we embarked on the distinctly odd activity of feeding root vegetables past the gusset of every pair. We hung the extremely extended legs from the coat hooks in the hall, where they looked like a provocative exploration of feminism by YBA artist, Sarah Lucas. Then a few started really going for it, sending out vast green shoots through the nylon. In the face of evidence of a will to live at a time of so much death, we broke them free, planted them, had no idea what they would do next. Soon they sent up phallic sculptural stalks then added pom-poms on top, which led to some amusing comments on Instagram. Around them grew the deep purple leaves of the sprouts, behind them, a chorus line of sweetcorn. Our neighbour across the street, in her Eighties, said when the corn got as high as an elephant’s eye, she was tempted to burst into the songs from Oklahoma.

While others were shopping online for sweatpants,
for us, it was strawberry plants; not wise back when deliveries were taking weeks to arrive. They did turn up, alas mangled and rotted en route, yet Pete wanted to at least try to save them. He popped a few in the trenches he’d made out of timber we found while out foraging the city streets, then bedded down the sickliest in one of the foil containers he was using for his nightly food orders. He called this the Nightingale, after the field hospital; his humour at its darkest when London’s death toll was at its highest. We’ve had three sweet little berries from those in the trenches, hardly a good yield, yet an example of hope over adversity. As for the ailing ones, just one made it out alive. While it has not borne fruit, it has sent out a runner. Next year.

Now Pete is ready to plant winter greens. ‘Er, are you planning any art?’ I say. ‘This is it,’ he tells me. ‘Before, my work was trying to get people’s attention and frankly, it was depressing. Yet this…’ he gestures across a not very big roof top in Kentish Town, ‘this is about why art matters. To remind us we’re alive.’