Day 6 - Building a career

So, I get to my new job, and it feels like I've made it. Comes with a fine vernacular cottage attached to a disused walled kitchen garden, now being grazed by sheep. All four kids will go to the village school, a couple of hundred yards up the road past the church. 24 pupils in all, one in six will be mine. Nice little remnant of an estate, rescued from life as a sporting hotel, preparing for its next phase as a museum. Views onto big water, nature reserve. Like a pure injection of fresh air for this country boy who has been living in city exile for most of his life.

I'm replacing a supervisor who has done a lot of the rough clearance work, but his year in the Job Creation scheme is now up, so they have employed a qualified professional. That's me. Beats me how I manage to convince them of that. I have a couple of weeks overlap with my predecessor before taking over his team of government-created gardeners. The overlap is worthless. I wish he'd just bugger off so I can get started doing things my way. When he does go, I find he has had a good crack at sabotaging my reputation by telling the team that I'm 'just a grass-cutter from Liverpool'. Same mistake my previous gang made. Underestimation. I may not have much to give at this time, but when it comes to potential, the sky's the limit, and I'm a fast learner.

Turns out that, far from being a civilised idyll where I can parade around in beautiful surroundings like a Head Gardener of old, I am back to square one. I have a renegade gang of demoralised long-term unemployed, all of whom didn't like their previous supervisor, or the work. In addition, there is a separate similar squad of stonemasons, with their own supervisor, and various inter-gang rivalries and tensions. Gradually it becomes evident that there are a few good guys in the team who respond to being treated with respect, and I begin to build up a core of allies who are glad to be trusted with responsibilities. Nevertheless there are others who don't want to work, but spend all their time being disruptive. One such goes too far one day, upsetting other members of the team. He has turned in late for work after a night in the cells pursuant to a drunken pool-cue attack in a local bar, and has a pugnacious hangover. I know words won't do any good. He has already shown himself to be beyond reason on numerous occasions, so I have to humiliate him by overpowering him and wrestling him to the ground in front of his peers. I nearly lose my job over that, as in the genteel environment of Historic Houses, this kind of behaviour is felt to be inappropriate. More to the point, my polite managers have likely not seen such before, and are unaware that it happens in workplaces all over the land. I do know this. I have previous. I have encountered this behaviour repeatedly, and believe I know how to deal with it. Management, however, are at a loss as to how to cope.

It doesn't get any easier later, when we start using prisoners approaching their parole date for extra free labour. My two do great work, but again we have two teams, and they form factions. My two knife attackers against the forester's wife-murderer and armed robber. Did you think gardening was for quiet, contemplative, even reclusive, types? Think again. It's a tough world out there. A constant battle.

So, it is a continuing lesson in handling people. It is also where I encounter for the first time something which dogs me throughout my career. The tension between builders and gardeners. Generally builders don't get it when the gardener gets upset by damage. Standard practice is to go on site, trash the area in the construction process and leave the landscapers to sort it out after the real work is finished. Gardens can be repaired. That's what everyone thinks. And it's true. But, on the receiving end, we tend to think, 'why should we fix it?' We've only just made it beautiful, and some inconsiderate bastard drives all over it with his dumper truck, floods it, compacts it, dumps concrete rubble on it, and we have to start all over again.

So it is with the bloody stonemasons. I'm creating an ornamental walled garden for the grand opening, on an eight-month deadline, and they're wash-pointing the walls. This is a technique where the pointing consists of mortar made up with crushed sea-shells, and you have to trickle water over it with a hose afterwards before it sets, to bring the shells to the fore. There is no communication between the teams, and a largely absent supervising mason, so we have to guess. Where we think they have finished an area, we dig the borders beneath, then they come back, gouge it all out because they have done a bad job, trample our beds underfoot, and pour wet mortar all over our work. This goes a long way towards teaching me to work cleanly, because if there's one thing I hate, it's cleaning up afterwards. Lesson 1 in my rules for creating a work of art - clear up as you go, don't make a mess, take care, work gently on your ground. And keep away from builders.

Image - the legacy of building works:

Make a garden out of that.