The Gift of a Garden by Alice Taylor

Author:Alice Taylor [Alice Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847176158
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The toilet in the back corridor always gave the first signal that trouble was brewing. When it backed up and refused to function as it should, it sent out red-alert warnings, emitting the language and aromas of the underworld: all was not well in the underbelly of the backyard. Down there were bedded ancient clay sewerage pipes that were well past their sell-by date, and in recent years only kept doing what they were supposed to do by constant monitoring and a gruelling colonoscopy – sticking strong, plastic piping down their throats to free their clogged innards. This was a backbreaking, disgusting job, and when I sensed that it was on the agenda my blood pressure went up by several degrees. With years of practice I had become an expert on U-bends and water force, but sometimes it took hours of huffing and puffing from the upright, to the kneeling, to the prone position, to finally achieve the ideal angle to make these ancient pipes clear their clogged bowels. Afterwards, there could be a free run for many years before another blockage would occur, and I would be lulled into a false sense of security that all was well in the lower regions of my backyard.

But then the problem would again rear its ugly head. Sometimes, if the downstairs toilet failed to ring the alarm bell, it fell to a shore in the backyard to send out the distress signals. By then the problem was much worse, and the pipes far more congested. An able-bodied son had to be summoned to lift off the ancient, solid iron manhole cover that weighed a tonne. And if no son was available, the son of a good neighbour would be kidnapped off the street! It is one of the perks of village living that help is never too far away.

A blocked sewer in summer is an unwelcome visitor, but in winter it is a nightmare, leading to hours of cold torture. After one of these episodes, opinions were voiced: something will have to be done about those sewerage pipes in the backyard. These statements were always accompanied by an accusatory look in my direction. I was the stumbling block to that ‘something’ being done, because, as one non-gardening son acidly proclaimed: ‘We don’t have a backyard out there, we have a jungle.’ Therein lay the problem. How could I clear out my over-planted backyard so that the whole place could be dug up and re-piped? Impossible! For years I had dodged the issue, but deep in my own body system I knew that sooner or later the day of reckoning would come. And come it did. What accelerated its progress was the arrival into the backyard of a heavy machine to assist in the re-roofing of the house. This machine was a step too weighty for my archaic sewerage pipes, and they finally decided to collapse beneath it and die. They sent out the usual distress signals and I assembled my tools of counter-attack, but I discovered I was fighting a losing battle.

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