The Tufty Club and other stories

Today I contacted the Armagh City Library to ask if they could accommodate me for a book signing when I go home at Easter. The manager was terrific and immediately agreed. I was delighted because the Armagh City Library holds a special place in my heart - I used to live in the same street as it.

Market street, 2014 - Our house on the right and the Library is house in the building on the left.

So when I hung up the phone, it was no surprise that my mind-Tardis dumped me back in Market Street, Armagh, circa 1973, where I'd lived from the ages of 4 until 9.

It's not many kids who can say that they had a library in their front yard, but I did. In fact we shared Market Street with a library, a Cathedral, and a cinema - the Ritz. People from Armagh used to call any cinema a "Ritz" in the same way "Sellotape" or "Scotch tape" became a generic name for sticky tape. I was an adult before I realized that the Ritz Carlton wasn't a movie house! 

The cinema was so close to our house that when my sister and I fell asleep at the movies, my Dad would carry one of us home and then go back for the other one! I remember going to see Jaws there. My best friend, Lucia and I went together to see Grease - both of us too young and innocent to actually get the sexual innuendo in the jokes. By that stage we had moved out of Market Street, so I must have been 11 when we saw Grease.

Often the Ritz would be evacuated because of bomb scares, and if anyone we knew was at the movies they'd come over to our house. If we didn't need to evacuate ourselves, they'd be welcomed in. I have a vague memory of us all lying on the living room floor because snipers were taking pot-shots at the army and the police outside. Dad would pass out beers for the grown-ups from the fridge, and we'd wait it out on the swirly orange and brown carpet. After all it was the 1970s in the North of Ireland - we were inured to the Troubles, not to mention the decor!

We didn't frequent the Cathedral on our street very often. It's not that we were heathens and didn't pray. Armagh has two Cathedrals, a Catholic one and a Protestant one - this one was the Protestant one and while, from time to time, our parents would take us up for a walk around the grounds, being Catholic we worshiped at the other one. I don't really remember being told not to go and play up there on our own, but on the occasions I did, I had this mixture of thrill and unease that I might be breaking someone's rules.

Church of Ireland Cathedral

Our house's front door opened directly onto the street. No paths, no gardens, no fences for us. The British Soldiers used to hunker on our doorstep, hoping to to shelter from rain and sniper bullets in the alcove created by the slightly recessed front door.

Dad used to tell the story of how one evening after dinner (except back then it was called teatime because we weren't posh enough to call it dinner) he was helping Mum clear up. He was planning on staying in for the evening and had already put on his slippers. He went to put the empty milk bottles out for the milkman to collect the next morning - this was back before recycling was invented, so we had to reuse instead!

Dad open the door and a soldier who was leaning against the door fell into the front hall on top of him. Both were understandably startled, but in a "surprise!" competition the guy with the gun is going to win. Embarrassed and pissed off, the soldier arrested my Dad on the spot. He didn't let him go back into the house to tell my Mum where he was going. He just bundled Dad into the landrover and took him to the barracks, in his slippers and still carrying the milk bottles! They held him for a few hours and then released him. No explaination, no apologies - though my Dad always did point out that he'd been lucky that the soldier's gun hadn't gone off when he'd opened the door or it would have been a much shorter story.

Anyways, poor Daddy, still in his slippers had to walk home a couple of miles through the town from the barracks. When he arrived home he got no sympathy! Mum was mad at him. She thought he'd sneaked off to The Foresters's Club a few doors down from the house. Eventually, she believed him because he was still in his slippers, and Dad would never go to the pub in his slippers!

The Troubles played a big part in all our lives back then. One day my sister and I were playing in Market Street, and we found a parcel wrapped in brown paper. We'd been told in no uncertain terms that unattended packages were dangerous. So we went straight to our parents and told them what we'd found. It was right in the middle of the street - a huge tarmacadamed expanse, not the beautifully landscaped area it is today. The entire street was taped off, and the homes evacuated, and we all stood (as we often did during evacuations) along the top of the hill looking down Market Street. Dozens of police and soldiers milled around and then the parcel disappeared. They found a guy calmly walking away with it. Someone had been loading/unloading a van with innocent parcels and had left one out. When he noticed it missing he'd come back for it, and had just walked over and picked it up!

"Better safe than sorry," my Dad said to us later.

But getting back to the Library...

The Library is a beautiful limestone building that had once been a technical college. I remember it as always being a warm, calm place with the wonderful smell of books, a smell that very writer and avid reader mentions. I know I risk being cliche when I say that that smell still gives me a sense of anticipation - something good or interesting about to happen.

Even when I was a kid (yes, way way back then!) our library had excellent programs for children. I was in the Tufty Club. Tufty was a human sized squirrel - perish the thought! Imagine what that could do to a garden. Tufty, along with his other woodland friends taught road safety, a strange choice of character judging by the number of squirrels that get mashed on our roads in San Jose and whose remains are feasted upon by other squirrels (I kid you not!)

As well as the regular story time and Tufty club meetings, we had a quiz team. I was on the team that made it to some finals or other...a big enough deal for it to attract the local press. My sister and her favorite teddy, Jumbo, came to watch our team compete. I can't remember if we won. Obviously that wasn't foremost in the newspaper photographer's mind either, because the picture that appeared that week in the paper was not your's truly and her quiz team, but instead, my sister and her teddy. Over the years I've tried to hold her stealing the limelight against her, but it's been hard - she is such a great sister. And who could blame the photographer? She was so adorable!

This picture was in the Armagh Observer sometime around 1976

I wonder will she bring Jumbo to see me when I do my book signing in the Library in April? I've a feeling a certain little nephew will, and I wouldn't be surprised if history repeats itself!

Nevertheless, it will be a nostalgic and poignant moment to see my book on the shelves of the peaceful haven that existed in a crazy time and place, where I first fell in love with books!

Byddi Lee

Wonders never cease.

When your major competitor is a slug, it makes you wonder at your status in the universe!  Such is my obsession with the slugs in my garden that my friend, Haile, from Ireland sent me a book “50 Ways to Kill a Slug”!  The book has some great suggestions – Haile book-marked her favorite – hanging them on the clothes line to dry!  She so gets it – as a fellow gardener, she too hates the wee monsters.

Another friend, who does not garden, innocently asked me the other day “Just how much damage can they do?”  She figures they are small and slow, so what’s the big deal.  When she looks outside and sees a yard full of green plants, she thinks there’s plenty to go around.  The thing is, these creatures target the fresh, newly germinated seedlings – I’ve lost two entire crops of peas to these slimy creeps.  Remember my pictures celebrating the onset of spring, Springtime – a Myriad of Miracles?  Two days later, my newly germinated peas – all gone!  Enough to bring a grown woman to tears, I decided not just to get mad – I got even.  I declared full on war and brought in the Sluggo, recommended by Master Gardeners as an organic means of slug control.  They were using up too much beer (the slugs, not the Master Gardeners) and this was more deadly. 

By California standards, it’s been a wet spring, ideal for slugs.  Even with regular use of Sluggo there are still innocent casualties – My new lettuce patch took a direct hit.

Then, I decided to try to start some peas indoors.  I called in to have a look at a new Lowes hardware store opened nearby and discovered that they had super cheap potting soil – 2 cubic feet for $5.  I bought two bags and went home and planted up a set of seeds, peas , beans, bok choi and, turnip to name a few.  Three weeks later the pots smelt funny, nothing had germinated and I discovered that the seeds had all rotted.  I had ignored the first lesson on my gardening course – if you have $1 to spend on your garden use 90cents of it on your soil – or something to that effect.  This soil was so bad that the only thing that did grow out of it was mushrooms!  I was able to use it to pot up some tomato seedling which, in my great enthusiasm, I started in January.  They are growing well in my sun room that is fast becoming a greenhouse.  You can see the stem behind the mushrooms.

Once I switched to Sluggo, I felt more confident about direct planting my peas and beans.  The peas are going strong and the first bean poked its head up this morning!  Unfortunately, the weeds are more in focus than the bean!

In fact, I’d been all set to write a piece about gardening disasters.  With the cooler temperatures this week, the garden had slowed up.  When I did my morning walk about – I love that first walk in the garden each morning to see what the new day brings – I was surprised to see a few new things up.  It washed away my gardening blues, and I realized that, really, I had only three ‘disasters” and none of them that much to write home about:-

1) The slugs eating ALL my new peas before I introduced Sluggo.  I felt let down by the beer!  A new experience for an Irish girl.

2) The cheap soil rotting all my seeds – all my own penny pinching fault!

3) Something digging up my newly planted sunflower seeds!  I can’t blame the slugs this time – they have no arms for digging.  My guess is either a bird, which technically doesn’t have arms either, but boy can they scrape with their feet, or a squirrel that seems to be stalking me in the garden.  It’s very bizarre, but he will sit only feet away from me watching me, probably waiting for me to plant more seeds for him to feast on.  Each time I stand up he runs to the relative safety of the fence and sits peeking over it at me. 

Perhaps he recognizes me as a former member if the Tufty Club. Though I'm not sure they let grey squirrels join.  Mind you, I can't see why not as they did let Willy Weasel join!  I wondered was that still going these days - a road safety campaign aimed at children in Britain and Ireland- and of course, why wonder when you have a choice of search engines? Some of the sites are hilarious - if you were also a member of the Tufty club please leave me a comment!
 

I planted a row of sunflowers, about thirty seeds in total, along the back fence.  I am just imagining a wall of giant flowers come summer.  A beautiful wall of flowers – with a gap now!  To remedy this I planted more seeds in pots to fill in the gaps.  

So far only three seeds outside have germinated – my “wall” is starting to materialize as a mere bunch!   Can you spot the Sluggo?

It has been unseasonably cool here, so there is still time for the other seeds to come up.  Hopefully, I will have enough indoor started seedlings to fill in any other gaps.  I hope it works – It should look fabulous. 

Sunflowers were the last thing I bought my father before he died.  I sent him a bunch when he went into the hospice for the last time.  I thought they engendered hope, and it being the start of April a look forward to summer.  We thought we’d have him for the summer at least, but we didn’t.  He kept the sunflowers in a vase on the window sill of his hospice room and you could see them from the car park when you arrived in to visit.  It was if he were smiling out a welcome.  His second anniversary was on April 10^th.  I miss him. 

The sunflowers weren’t the only things to germinate over night.  We now have watermelon, zucchini and eggplant!  I love how the Americans call this "eggplant "– so much easier to spell than "aubergine".  Though I do wonder, do they describe the color aubergine as “egg plant”?

I love the way potatoes first come up – they are like little velvety green roses nestled in the soil.

And to totally evaporate the disappointment of my three minor disasters, one of my plants came back from the dead!  Last October, I bought two gogi berry plants.  One died pretty much straight away, and the other one ‘died’ at the end of November.  Or at least I thought it had died, but hurray - it came back, re-clothed in fresh green leaves, despite the fact that an iris is growing practically on top of it.

So minor hiccups apart, all's well in the garden, contentment blooms!

Byddi Lee