John Harris - Moon Gardening--Ancient and Natural Ways to Grow Healthier, Tastier Food

A POTTED HISTORY FROM BEGINNINGS TO NOW

M y lifelong fascination with the moon might never have started at all had my father not died when I was so young. I dont remember a great deal about him, but the fragments that remain have shaped much of the way I approach life and the way I think now.

By all accounts, Thomas Lewis Harris, known to everybody as Lou, was a kind and thoughtful man. He was a lay preacher, a Methodist to his marrow, well respected by the community, and a bookkeeper for the now defunct Newquay Urban District Council. But these are simple facts, information Ive been told at one remove. They fit with my own scant memories, but they dont really give a picture of what type of man he was, moment by moment. The things you see and hear for yourself are what really stay with you.

I was born in Newquay in 1941, and lived with my parents and two sisters in a small terraced house. As in most Cornish towns and villages during that era, everybody knew everybody, and everyone looked out for everyone. It wasnt because we were all especially kind or lived in a particularly nosey community. It was just the way things were done.

My father was a writer of beautiful letters, not just the sentences he created, but the art of the writing itself. He practised calligraphy when he had free time, putting everything to paper in longhand with a dip pen, in intricate, finely wrought and carefully planned copperplate.

Our house had a kitchen in the front, living room in the back. Father had a small desk beside the Cornish range, beside it a rack of pipes of all types: cherrywood, long clay things and ebony mouthpieces. He would place flecks of charcoal, one by one, into the pipe before he tamped in the tobacco from his favourite Africando mix. When he smoked, to the consternation of Mother it filled the kitchen with a beautiful, sweet, multilayered smell of manna-from-heaven food from exotic coastlines one that I could not equate with the astringent, bitter attack to the tongue I received the one time I nervously took a pipe from the rack and placed it in my mouth. (At fifteen, I was going to be a man and tried again with rolling papers. I nearly choked to death, chucked the pack away and never smoked again.)

In the way memory always simplifies events into neat slots, it seemed that every weekend the sun would stream in through the kitchen window, casting huge shadows on the walls, and Father would sit there in silhouette, bent over his desk, left arm flat on the wood, thumb keeping paper in place and right hand slowly working the letters. I used to sit in the kitchen sometimes just watching him dipping his pens into different-coloured inks, so quietly he would forget I was there. He always concentrated hard, forcing his focus to the task in hand. His desk was a special place for him I think it felt like a sanctuary from the memories that plagued him from the Great War and I liked just being there, to share that space with him. It was one of the rare times I could stay still. As a young child, I was forever needing to do things whether that was building dams in the brook nearby or climbing trees in the orchard, running errands for Mother or spearing flatfish with a bamboo and nail in the River Gannell.

My father wrote beautiful letters.

But in the kitchen with Father I could just be. There was an absorbing calmness in watching him work. The only things that ever distracted me in that room were the motes dancing in the sunlight. I often wondered if theyd ever settle on the ground.

Sometimes, Father would not look up from his letters for an hour or more. When he did, it would be to uncurl his spine and crick his neck back into place, then hed lean back over until the job was finished. That was the level of care he put into what for him was both a passion and a duty. For it was due to his mastery of a craft that he was asked to write numerous letters within our community: official letters, personal letters, letters of condolence and of reference. The end product was always a thing of assured beauty, always fitting to the subject matter, and it taught me, even at that young age, that enthusiasm coupled with serious engagement to something could create great things. Its an easy, pat phrase: If a things worth doing, its worth doing well. But, if you live by this, you get your rewards and so do the people around you.

For as long as I remember, Father suffered from ill health. It could have been shrapnel or shellshock, I never found out. All I know is it took its toll on him. Which may explain why he was a man of contradictions (maybe we all are): as a lay preacher he was a strict disciplinarian, yet would go out of his way to be kind and offer warm thoughts; he also seemed to be a reserved, removed man, yet he was known by everyone. In the end he was simply my father and I loved him unquestioningly as any young son would.