Free A House in Order by Nigel Dennis

lot of my old imaginary fears had begun to come back, and each time I imagined myself travelling off to my new government work, I invented pictures of the Commandant sending his men to take me off the train, or managing to intervene with the authorities to hold up my going, or even get me into his camp with the others. I began to hope so terribly that I would be sent away soon that I thought of all the signs that suggested I wouldn’t be – like the cutting I was taking, which couldn’t hope to be well-rooted for some months, and the uniform and boots I’d been given, which no part of an army is going to do if it expects you to be sent to another part. Luckily, I felt steadier whenever I looked round me and saw how well my work was going, and it pleased me to notice that when the guard who had threatened to cut my throat was on duty, he lingered and looked attentively at my way of working, as if he almost respected me now. When things are going badly in a greenhouse, one is very ashamed of it, but when things really go as they should, it is a great tonic and one is tempted to show off, like the gardeners on television, a breed I have always despised for pretending so hard to look and talk like ‘real’ gardeners, as if this excused their ignorance of grammar. But in wartime, one’s worse characteristics are brought out, and I remember how I held up my pots to the light when that wretched guard was looking, and even moved to and fro with the sort of slow walk and expression that are meant to suggest a cunning gardener: it was a long time since anyone had respected me.
    I worked happily enough in the garden for a couple of days on my hours out, but always with the fork, because everything was very neglected. On the third day, I reached for the rake. to tidy what I had done, and saw awedge of paper where the shaft went into the head. On it was written:
    BRAVO!! 800 STRONG BEHIND YOU, COCKY.
STAND BY FOR ORDERS. MACKENZIE.
    I went on raking, holding this bit of paper against the shaft with my fingers. It broke off in my trembling and was caught by the wind and carried into the suckers of a big lilac, but I only looked after it in a dull way and kept on working the rake. The guard came up later and tapped his wrist with a frown, as if he was puzzled at my not knowing that my hour was up, and I went back into my house while he laid the tools under the verandah.
    For the first time since I had been a prisoner, nothing I looked at in the house seemed to have a meaning any more: I might have been outside, seeing everything through panes of glass. It was the same with the bits of thoughts that came and went in my mind: they just came in a dull way and left without touching me. I didn’t even know how ill I felt until my food came and made me too sick to eat it. Then, just as it was getting dark and the guard had been changed, I saw everything in the house all at once, as one does in gardens in the evening light – my old paper pots, the smart new ones, the leaf cuttings, the yellow soap-bars, all my neat arrangements and the practical way I had placed everything – and I burst into tears, because there was no rhyme or reason in anything at all, and nothing to do and nowhere to go. As soon as it was really dark, I got into my shed and lay down on my blankets, where it was a relief just to lie and shake, knowing that nobody could see me or ask a question that I would have to answer. Only one strong feeling kept trying to come through to me, and I tried not to let it because I felt itwas too strong for me to face – this was the feeling of a wicked wrong being done to me, something evil in the way it meant to ruin me. I never thought to wonder who MACKENZIE was: just the name as I had seen it, in horrible black letters, was enough to plague my mind and make the whole of that night a misery of fright and indignation. Only just as it was getting light and I was thinking of getting up did I have another thought that was just as