Blood Sweat & Toil

Going bananas

Potting banana plants is one of the bizarrer entries in the catalogue of random jobs I had to take to keep myself rolling through higher education, in pursuit of knowledge and a good time. The green-fingered gig came about during my firstlong summer break from the demands of an English degree, when I had ended up back at home in the Welsh Borders. As that lost area is not renowned for any industry that does not look for wellington boots and a couple of generations of in-breeding on your CV, I was finding it no easier to find a job than I was to figure out how I had coped with spending most of my life there before escaping to the bright lights and cheap pints of the student union.

My parents gave me some work to do around the house and garden, but after 10 days every hedge was trimmed, every windowsill repainted, every flowerbed weeded and every wall repointed, and I still had two months to kill. My father made the bold suggestion that I broaden my job-hunt to include the world outside our house, and directed me towards one of his cronies. That was where the trouble started. This particular crony was a one-armed exotic plants expert with a Dickensian cackle and criminally outdated ideas about rates of pay. (That is all true, I swear, and some of his company policies were even more unbelievable.) The most galling thing about the whole experience was that I worked hard to get the job.

When I first contacted this Napoleon of the flowerbed, he said he did not have much work on then, but he would have a think about what he could find to occupy me. Persistence was the key, advised my old man, and demonstration of a genuine desire to work. Apparently this meant phoning the plant man at eight o'clock every morning, an unthinkable task for a student used to late nights and lazy mornings. But every day I dragged my protesting body out of bed to hassle my quarry before he had finished his breakfast. Eventually, he acquiesced. I felt as pleased as a freshly-watered pot plant, for about as long as it takes a leaf to drip-dry. Our first mission was a trip to Kew Gardens to pick up two six-foot bamboo plants. Having dragged them to my employer's estate car and installed them longways, we set off for home, spiky leaves shaking around my head and brushing my face.

The journey went well for the plants and people alike until we hit Gloucestershire, where we stopped for a pub dinner. The plant man started fondly reminiscing about the time he had spent in the army when he was my age, and he began to drink heavily, the bitter apparently lubricating his memory.

We must have stopped at every pub in that county. As we staggered out of another establishment with a name like The Huntsman's Lodge or The Bloody Fox, I remember thinking that most of his stories were amusing, if slightly implausible, but staying awake was nonetheless proving more challenging with every ale. I somehow made it to bed in the plant man's spare room, and he woke me early the next morning, bringing me round to the inevitable headache and the equally unwelcome sight of a half-drunk bottle of his home-made damson gin sitting on the bedside table.

However, there was no time to groan and roll over, for Mrs. Plant man was serving breakfast and there was work to be done. A short time later, with cholesterol and coffee swirling unpleasantly around my gut, I entered the greenhouse. A hot, humid place, where plants towered to the dripping roof, the insects seemed twice as big as normal and my skin sweated and itched. My home for the next few weeks. Repot these 100 banana plants, I would be told, and then you can repot the next 100. I also carried out other tasks, like pruning, cutting, tying back, watering, digging and spreading, but the banana plants are the most enduring memory.

At the end of each day, the plant man would give me a lift to a local pub where my father would pick me up, and as we waited with our pints my eccentric employer would often tell me about his first job. As I pretended not to have heard the story the night before, he would tell me how his first gaffer had been his father, for whom he would slave all week as a builder's labourer, only to be paid his weekly wages in the pub and be forced to spend them all on a round of drinks. My generous boss obviously decided it would be character building for me or at least amusing for him to apply something of his Dad's behaviour to our working relationship.

I always joke that he used to tell me he would pay me £20 per 200 banana plants repotted, give me 199 to work on and refuse to pay up because I had fallen short of the set target, and that is not too far from the truth. Ultimately, he was as bonkers as a Venus FlyTrap, and I was completely out of my depth. Every Friday evening, we went through the same pathetic ritual. He would hand me a crumpled twenty note or so for my week's slog in the sweaty greenhouse, I would ask him whether he had a personal grudge or he just enjoyed taking the piss, and he simply wink and give out one of his sinister Dickensian cackles.

We would always be firmly locked into a stand-off by the time my lift arrived. My old man would roar with laughter, exclaim, "Come on you two" and order more drinks, as if he was trying to humour a pair of sulking children. Later on in the car, he would assure me I may not have been earning much but the experience was priceless, and would greatly amuse me in years to come. And in a way, he was right, and so was the plant man.

I now work on a magazine based in Croydon, and as I sit on the 8:54 out of Clapham Junction and stare at the uniform commuters with their tedious air of professionalism and efficiency, I wish there were more plant men around. The world would be a dull place indeed without such infuriating, unreasonable and hilarious characters. Mind you, I never want to see another banana plant as long as I live.

James Bainbridge