I felt a little shaky and battered after reading Plot 29 by Allan Jenkins. I thought I was picking up a memoir about how gardening had helped Jenkins throughout his life but was entirely unprepared for the detective story that unfolded as Jenkins seeks to understand his childhood and the family he came from. At several points in the diary-style chronicle Jenkins stops himself, wondering what his story has become, slightly surprised by the darkness on each page:
It has been a year since I started this journal, my journey through my life and the life of my plot, my past unfurling like leaves. It was to be different: a story of a small boy and the man he became, wrapped in flowers and food. Other voices have drowned it out…
It begins as the story of Allan and his elder brother, Christopher, brought together ages five and six after spending their early years apart, in locations and circumstances Jenkins eventually, chillingly, begins to piece together. Bonded, they are sent to foster with an older couple – the Drabbles – in rural Devon. Stability never quite turns into family or full acceptance and the cycle of Allan and Christopher parting and living separate lives continues painfully. But it is with his foster family that Allan discovers the joy of growing things, the certainty and hope that seeds and plants hold, and finds a passion that will help center him throughout his life.
We learn of Christopher’s relatively early death early in the book. From there, we begin to learn more about their five other half-siblings by their damaged, dangerously unfit mother. As Allan talks to the siblings who remained to be raised by their mother, he sees the blessing of not having been in her care and the scars of horrific abuse his siblings carry. But he also tries to make sense of his abandonment when he was only a few months old and to solve other mysteries. Eventually he even uncovers the identity of his birth father, a mystery to be solved with DNA testing rather than trust in what his deeply untrustworthy mother had put on the birth certificate.
Throughout this year of revelations and unravellings, he tends a shared allotment, a place of peace and renewal, where order can be imposed in small yet meaningful ways, and sense of progress and certainty grasped when all else seems lost. He also has a holiday home in his wife’s native Denmark to retreat to, a place for family and more time in nature, for being himself. In a life where identity has not come easily, where his name has been changed repeatedly as pieces of his identity shifted, it is in these natural landscapes that he knows himself best.
I don’t know if I would have picked this up if I had known how dark it would become but I’m thankful to have read it. It is beautifully and powerfully told and makes me more thankful than ever for the luck of being born to a happy, loving, safe family.
I’m so glad you discovered this book, Claire. Allan Jenkins is an editor and regular columnist in my Sunday paper so I found out about his book that way. I thought it was extraordinary: the structure round the seasons on the allotment gives it that powerful, gentle framework of hope and steady activities with lovely outcomes, against that painful story.
There are several memoirs by contemporaries of Allan’s- I think changes in the law made them possible: Lemn Sissay, Jeanette Winterson, jackie Kay, and ‘on Chapel Sands.’ All fascinating unfolding….
I’ve loved reading Jenkins’ columns for a number of years but since they are so garden focused I’d missed this incredible backstory. I’m so glad to have read it now.