Free Sadler's Birthday by Rose Tremain Page B

certainly were, Wren’s old hands. He and Wren selected a little plot, about the size of an allotment, on rough ground next to the orchard, ground that had been left to sprout its tangle of nettles and weeds because nobody had been able to decide whether to plant apple trees on it or level it off and grow flowers.
    â€˜This’ll do grand,’ Wren said, ‘there’s good soil under there. Needs clearing, that’s all.’
    They didn’t want to bother the gardeners. So busy they always were with their lawn mowers and their edgers and their little boxes of seedlings, and they never came into the house. It was as if, like certain species of birds, they were afraid to leave their camouflage.
    But in one season, it became Wren’s garden, not Sadler’s. The old man spent the whole of the war digging and planting there, kept repeating for some reason that, with times as they were, it was important to use soil wisely. Once or twice he whispered that ‘the day’, when it came, wouldn’t find him unprepared, referring obliquely to his neat rows of radishes and feathery parsley. But no one ever really knew what he meant, nor did ‘the day’ ever come, as far as anyone could tell. And then as Hiroshima burned, Wren died. It was as if the bomb had hit him.
    Sadler had always liked Wren. The old man had found Christian names very difficult, even his own. He preferred to call other people ‘Sir’ – an army legacy, of course – and he told Sadler one day that he thought of himself not as Harold, which was his name, but as 1797074, his army number. Sadler would have liked Wren to call him Jack. Their servant status was just about equal and they were friends, weren’t they? And no one called him Jack any more. But somehow Wren never managed it and so they always spoke to each other in this odd, formal way.
    Wren was born in Lancashire. Joined the army to escape his parents’ drab home. Always an unkempt little boy, once in the army he affected a smartness of appearance, a neatness immaculate enough to gladden the heart of the most meticulous drill sergeant. It was as if he spent the rest of his life making amends for his grubby beginnings. The role of batman to the Colonel was one Wren had loved and the Colonel grew attached to him. It seemed only right that Wren should be given a part in the Colonel’s retirement, and what could be a more fitting reward for all those years of buffing and polishing than a car, with its flashes of chromium to shine? The fact that Wren wasn’t a good driver (he’d learnt much too late) never bothered the Colonel or Madge either. They were getting on and they liked going slowly.
    Thinking about Wren, Sadler turned right at the east side of the house instead of coming round in front of it to go down the drive. The lawn (you couldn’t call it a lawn any more, though, it was just ‘the grass’ now) sloped upwards away from the house to a tattered beech hedge dividing it from the orchard and the piece of waste ground that had been Wren’s allotment. Sadler reached the hedge, puffing.
    â€˜I wouldn’t give you nowt for beech stuck in like that,’ Wren had criticized. ‘Too damned untidy, the way them leaves hang on.’ But the yews, the great dark shoulders, they gave him pleasure.
    There was a wooden gate set in the hedge. Sadler undid the latch and went through.
    â€˜Come on then!’ he called to the dog.
    Weeds and brambles had long since reclaimed the patch that Wren had tended. In the summer the nettles sprang up shoulder high. But whenever he stared at that bit of ground, Sadler always saw Wren with one muddy wellington pressing on his spade or squatting, hunched over, his careful fingers making little beds for his seedlings. Sadler had never done much in the way of work there, only one summer – at Tom’s request.
    â€˜Couldn’t you sow some flowers?’
    â€˜Well,