Before posting this, I had to remind myself of this principle, first expressed when writing about Diana Athill, after her death.

. . . the principle of my blog is to talk about what concerns me at the moment of writing, or has interested or concerned me in the past.

Today’s post, about last week’s experience, ticks all the boxes. 

What the Managing Director of the company that laid my new artificial lawn failed to mention when he sent me these images, designed to impress upon me what a transformation his company had brought about in my garden, is that the one on the left was taken after two of his workmen had spent a couple of hours tearing up my original lawn, before one of them got bitten by an insect and they walked off the job.

I was cowering in a back room as the men went back and forth, unmasked, carrying bags of what had been my garden through the house, when suddenly the rhythm changed.  They stopped, tapped on the window and the one with more English, said: PROBLEM.    What the problem was he couldn’t or wouldn’t divulge.  They walked out of the house and joined the driver of the flatbed lorry that had just drawn up, leaving me and whatever had so frightened them behind.  

Frantic at being left with the garden in this state and imagining they must have raised a hornets’ nest or come across human remains,  I closed all the windows and rang friends for help.  I also pleaded with the men to stay until we got further word from Head Office.   So far, I had simply been e-mailed this photo and told:  ‘They believe this is a flea . . .  the message concluding:  All members of the team have been bitten . . . I am speaking with them now regarding a solution.

As for what had frightened them, there was no sign of anything when, a few minutes later, my friend Leo arrived and we went out to look.  No hornets.  No corpse.  No nothing.

What happened next was not the arrival of someone experienced in crisis management,  but another e-mail to say that the company would not return to finish the job until the garden had been thoroughly disinfected.  So,  here I was with a churned up garden and no alternative but to let Leo go off and buy a flask of some kind of poison with which he watered the innocent earth of the garden I have cherished for almost sixty years.*

Satisfied that their workmen would now be safe, if unaware of the neighbourhood’s amusement at this very public event, the day-after-next was set for the replay, along with the promise to send a different ‘team’. 

Different, but not different enough.  They, too, walked off the job, the taller of them, breathing down on me (again unmasked), tried to explain in his broken English that he was fearful for his baby’s health.

There followed a photograph of a black speck on his trouser leg.

Fast forward.  It is now late morning.  The MD and my friend Nicky, who has come to lend me support, are coming towards me.  I am sitting on a chair in the exact spot the men had indicated, trying to get bitten.  I have not succeeded.  Nor does the MD succeed in photographing any insects, although he does opine that I have an ‘excessive number’ in my garden.  We later conclude that the barely visible flying things are probably fruit flies, attracted by the compost heap at the end of the garden.  As for the putative flea, we do have a visiting fox . . .

In avuncular mode – possibly uneasy at hearing that I had a stress-induced heart attack a few years ago –  the MD now told us to have no further worries and congratulated me on having such a high degree of biodiversity in my garden. He would sort everything out, even if it meant that he and his brother had to come and do the job themselves. 

He was as good as his word. But it wasn’t the MD and his brother, it was the original team. They arrived on Good Friday, wearing gauntlets and armed with incense sticks.  

It was a very hot day. The smell of incense filled the air. They did not stop to eat. I began to worry.  They might be frightened of small insects (which made it unlikely they were Ukrainian), but they were somebody’s father, husband, son. I found a couple of Mars bars and bananas and fed the workforce. 

By mid-afternoon, the job was done, and done well.

The next day, having decided not to go legal but needing closure,  I sent a note to the MD (as the men had implored me to do) to confirm my satisfaction with that last day’s work, but adding  that I had not forgotten what had happened earlier. Apart from the stress, I had refused this lucrative job to a young man I know and like but who, working alone, had said that he could not get it done as quickly.

The MD’s friendly and jovial ‘all’s well-that-ends-well’ response, was to remind me that his firm does after-care and to send me those before and after photos.

*Memorialised by my husband in Eccentric Spaces, published in 1977.  To quote:

‘One small homemade garden that I disagreed with off and on for two years while living in it and being naturalized by it matters more to me than the others . . .   It was closed in and overgrown, a tunnel and not a tunnel where one felt overshadowed and impeded but more brushed and caressed by plants.  We need these two homes, a green one and a brown one, a grown one and a built one, two worlds in tension.‘

Robert harbison