The Allotment

The letter from the council arrived on a Tuesday, fixed to the gate of the Moss Lane allotments with a cable tie. It announced, in the kind of language that makes ordinary people feel faintly guilty for reading it, "the proposed discontinuation of the site's current use, pending the outcome of a viability assessment." Frank Holloway read it three times before he understood that they wanted to sell the land.

Frank had driven the number 86 bus through south Manchester for thirty-one years, and since retiring he had spent most mornings on plot fourteen, coaxing leeks and potatoes out of stubborn northern soil. On the plot next to his, a sixteen-year-old called Daniela Mejia grew chiles, tomatillos and a row of beans from seeds her grandmother had mailed from Tegucigalpa. She had moved to Manchester with her mother three years earlier, and the allotment was, she said, the only place in the city that smelled like home.

"They can't just shut it," Daniela said, holding the letter as if it might bite. "Can they?" "They can if nobody argues," said Frank. "Councils are like buses, love. If nobody waves, they don't stop." The council, it turned out, would consider written objections until the end of the month. What it wanted was a proposal: evidence, figures, a case.

Neither of them had ever written anything of the kind. Frank's first draft began, "We have been here for donkey's years and we are not going anywhere," which Daniela said was lovely but probably not what a planning committee wanted to hear. She had been studying formal writing at college, and she knew the trick. "You don't say people are lonely," she explained. "You talk about the reduction of social isolation. You don't say kids learn stuff here. You say the site makes a significant contribution to the education of local young people."

Frank frowned. "So you turn all the verbs into nouns and make it sound like nobody's actually doing anything." "Exactly," said Daniela. "It sounds more serious that way." "It sounds like the council's letter," said Frank. Daniela grinned. "That's the whole point. We answer them in their own language."

For two weeks they worked at Frank's kitchen table. Daniela turned his stories into sentences such as "The continued operation of the site ensures the provision of affordable fresh produce to over forty households." Frank, in turn, went door to door collecting the figures to back it up: how many families took vegetables home, how many pensioners came every day, how many schoolchildren had planted their first seed on plot nine. Mrs. Patel from plot three contributed a jar of lime pickle and a remarkably detailed spreadsheet.

The hearing took place in a drafty room at the town hall. Daniela read the proposal aloud in a steady voice, and the committee nodded at all the right nouns. Then one councilor, who had plainly stopped listening some time before, asked whether the land might not be "better utilized" for housing. Before Daniela could answer, Frank was on his feet.

"I'll tell you what it's used for," he said. "Last winter, a widower on plot seven didn't speak to a living soul except at that allotment. This girl's grandmother has never set foot in England, but her beans are growing in Moss Lane. That's what you'd be selling." The room went quiet. Daniela, who had spent two weeks removing exactly that kind of sentence from the proposal, found that she did not mind in the least.

Six weeks later, a second letter appeared, fixed to the gate with another cable tie. It confirmed "the retention of the site for community horticultural purposes for the foreseeable future." Frank read it once and understood it straight away. "Right," he said. "Now pass me that spade."