A simple story of Yorkshire country life
The nursery had been in Alice's family for generations. It lay close to the market town, so close that she could see in through the open windows of her friend Clair's house that stood there on the low cliffs that rose out of the river that separated them. If she walked down the footpath and over the massive stepping stones her grandfather had placed in the narrows of the river she was there in a jiffy. However, driving her produce to the market, something she had done this and every Friday for the last 20 odd years and where she now sat at her stall, entailed a ten-minute car journey. The river, with its meandering had defined almost exactly the boundaries of her thirty-acre property as a perfect circle. With the river on all sides and with just a narrow neck of land with a gravel track leading to the main road she felt often as if she lived on an island.
She had reflected many times on her situation; reflected on her relationship to the town, to her few friends and to some men and had realised that the geography of her land resembled her social situation; an outsider, so close yet quite far away, defined, put in her place and held there by the river and by the vindictiveness of one man.
As was so often the case in the valley she had known her former husband all her life. They had gone to school together, been childhood sweethearts and they had married in the usual course of things. They had married and moved to the nursery when her father died; as an only child she had always known it would be that way. Three years at horticultural collage stimulated her conviction that she could make a business of it and her husband was happy that there was an inheritance and no need for a mortgage.
"Slack Alice."
She was torn abruptly from her ponderings and she wondered if she had heard correctly, but oh dear, yes she had and the voice boomed out over the market stalls yet again.
"She's a bloody slack Alice."
She checked the change she was giving a customer and then looked nervously around the market place to find him. Yes, there he was, there he stood by the entrance to the Farmers Arms Hotel. Already unstable, his tongue and his inhibitions loosened by the drink; it was her father in law.
She corrected herself; it was her ex father in law. He was a stupid man who felt cheated by her divorce from his son and by her insistence that she and she alone had inherited the nursery. Her father had after all died before she married and she was an only child. Her ex father in law maintained that his son had been cheated and that he got not a penny for all the work he had put in around the nursery, he was cheated of that which should rightfully have been his.
He had been drinking steadily since opening time and she could hear his vindictive chuntering.
"She gave birth to a freak, not a child! That's because she's not right in the head. My son tried to cope but she ruined it. Bloody Slack Alice."
She blushed painfully and served another customer. Would there be no end to his vindictiveness? The stupidity about her inheritance was one thing and nobody supported his unreasonable claims, but surely her ex-husband drew the line at his own father's broadcasting of her intimate secrets, surely he wouldn't allow his father to tell all and sundry about "Slack Alice?"
She had always been a big girl. Standing a head higher than her husband and his friends, at least until they caught up in their late teens, she was well built and shapely; Some would call her voluptuous, and she had grown used to men's attention. Her husband had been her first lover though even her virginity and her morality had been cast in doubt by her father in law after the divorce was final. There was no end to the dirty rumours he'd spread and now 17 years after the divorce the old bastard of an ex father in law had begun spreading rumours about the size of her vagina.
Her husband was quite normal "down there"; he was adequate, he had the wedding tackle and liked to use it and she was happy with him and he with her at first. But, for him at least, there was something not quite right. Her classmates married one after the other and as a girls do they discussed sex and married life and their complaints about their husband's staying power, or lack of it, were something that came up frequently.
But lack of staying power was not a problem for her husband. Indeed, he had once, in the days when they were still in love, hinted that she was "roomy" down there, that she didn't grip him so hard as a virgin should and that he needed a lot of thrusting before he could reach an orgasm. Later, when the love between them was gone he had, in a moment of exasperation, shouted angrily,
"You're a fucking Slack Alice! Fucking you is like fucking fresh air; there's nothing in you to rub me up! I could be waving my cock out of the window for all the good I get out of you."
And now her ex father in law felt the need to make it public knowledge that she was big down there, that she was indeed a "Slack Alice".
She wondered if she should retaliate, if she should put him in his place, wondered if she should shame him publically and if she should let him and the whole town know how his son had solved the problem of her roomy vagina by using her other entrance, the back one and that over time he'd become an enthusiastic arse bandit, a bum fucker?
She ignored him; she served several customers and checked her watch; her son would be on his way by now and she felt a flush of pride. She had kept herself going for his sake these last eighteen years. She was a peaceful soul and had kept herself and her boy away from the rumours, the prejudice and the vindictiveness of her ex-husband and his family and she was satisfied with their life together.
She had learnt to cope alone. After the birth she had brought the baby home and her husband moved out. She had named the boy Hyacinth. Why was that she asked herself? Was it a mistake brought on by the desperation and shock of giving birth to a freak or just, as her husband maintained, her stubborn desire to have her own way?
Her husband had wanted the child put away; The boy was after all "physically deprived", "disadvantaged", "of lesser stature". Good god! How many polite words could one use to conceal the fact that the baby was a freak, a dwarf with a stunted right arm? And yet she chose to name the freak after a Greek god thus confirming his view that she was insane.
Her love wouldn't permit the rejection of her child and her husband left before she was signed out of the maternity home. She returned to the nursery and its plants, to an empty house and for the next years remained married to her sorrow but somehow secure in her belief that they would manage.
And manage she did! She hadn't spoilt the boy; she had realised early on in their life together that he was going to have to grow up tough. Yes, Hyacinth needed more frequent health checks, yes, he was a small person and his right arm was much reduced in size but otherwise, he'd have to manage. But how could she and the district nurse monitor his development, how could they check his progress and measure his arm without making him self-conscious or even worse; self-pitying?
At first, while he was young she'd managed to measure his deformed arm as a natural part of knitting jumpers and buying clothes and the measurements, which she passed on for the district nurse to monitor, seemed for him to be a normal part of things and their life together remained quiet and harmonic. But as he grew she had to find other ways of measuring his growth and so it was she discovered the Hyacinth phallus's.
Hyacinth was a willing and conscientious gardener. He had after all grown up in the nursery surrounded by plants and the passing of the seasons provided an ever changing array of jobs in the greenhouses and flower beds where he worked after school. Already at age 11 he could manage the delicate work of grafting fruit trees or the hard labour of harvesting potatoes. Indeed, Alice insisted he did his share and spared him from nothing.
It was in fact Hyacinth who devised the potting of the Christmas Hyacinths. Alice had no idea where he'd got the idea from though she was surprised how well they sold during the last weeks before the Christmas holiday. After her initial scepticism she had seen the value of this extra income and together they had begun a routine of searching the charity shops and farm sales to buy used refrigerators and they soon had many standing in the biggest of the greenhouses. Potted into pots and enveloped in stout brown paper bags in late September and isolated in the chilly darkness of the refrigerators for three months the bulbs grew quickly like a waxy and erect penis and later blossomed brightly when take forth in the weeks prior to Christmas.
The potting of the Hyacinth bulbs became an annual ritual and the inspection of the newly emerged Christmas Hyacinths a tradition they shared gladly and it was there she solved the problem of measuring the growth of his stunted arm.
She noticed his habit of planting the elbow of his stunted arm firmly on table beside the largest of the year's plants while working; it seemed to her as if he was preparing to arm wrestle with the strutting penis-like shoots. Later, when work was done she could sneak back to the greenhouse and measure the height of the Hyacinth most like his stunted arm.
As the years passed he had realised why she measured the bulbs and fell into the habit of teasing her. Settling his elbow beside a suitable sprouting bulb and positioning his arm he could imitate the pale and waxy sprouting hyacinths he would ask her if it were not unlike a phallus. Of course he teased her mercilessly innocuously referring again and again to the "Phallus" he was imitating, his forearm the stem and his hand the head, both now slightly longer and more robust and phallus-like than the shoot before her.
"Phallus this and Phallus that"; how else could a boy say "cock" or "prick" or "penis" to his mother? And so the boy had maintained the name and the tradition of forcing bulbs, of comparing his arm to the pale strutting phalluses on the packing table and teasing his mother for her embarrassment.
On one occasion while they had laughingly repeated their teasing they'd seen an earwig crawl over the phalluses and the flower head imitation of his fist had sprouted fingers,
"Wiggly, wiggly, wiggle," he'd said as he imitated the insects many legs before his fingers gathered again mimicking the sleeping bud.
