Two Veg no Meat

For many years as a young gardener I had to work with and grow all the old standard gardeners delights….Chrysanthemums, Dahlias, Sweet Peas, Vegetables, Fruit, and cut flowers of various sorts. All for the house, all for the squire, but the best ones for the gardeners! It was a perk of the job when you worked for low wages. I had tied accommodation, milk from the farm, firewood from the woods, eggs and meat from the chickens, and all the flowers, fruit, and veg I could need as well as a huge garden of my own. Sound idyllic doesn’t it. It wasn’t, it never has been and never will be.

Security was never on offer, if you were not liked you lost your home, income and any chance of a reference. The wage was little more than pocket money and gardeners over the years have lived in hope rather than any genuine expectation of being looked after when they retire, there were a few who were but they have been the exception. Most were homeless and re-housed by the councils when there were council houses. The upper classes used them when they were fit and spat them out when they were old or plain knackered. That is the truth of it no matter what the romantic notions of quaint old retainers might be. Cheap labour and a raw deal is what was given and taken. There is less of it now because the pool of gardeners who are prepared to work under those terms has more or less dried up thankfully and it was a different time.

I hated it and got out of it into research after many years cow towing to the nobs and their generally hideous privately educated offspring. There were some good ones, honestly pleasant as opposed to patronisingly pleasant but they were few and far between, and the thought of this country being run by a group of Eton educated toffs fills me with dread and a nauseous emptiness. I can see no understanding of the working classes in any of them no matter how hard they pretend to understand or empathise, but then again I can see no working classes, only a nation of middle class people and a sub culture of non-working class chancers…..I can be a bit cynical though.

I have always been sympathetic to socialism, but I’ve not seen any real incarnation of that in my lifetime. It has gone for good I think so god knows what we get next, from what I see they all piss in the same pot, so for the one and only time of talking politics in this journal, I hope today’s image say’s it all……”B******s to the lot of ‘em”