1970s Urban Eco-Warriors

Watching Felicity Kendall on a chat show recently prompted me to recall my family's own version of The Good Life. As readers of a certain vintage will remember, The Good Life was a 1970s sitcom starring Felicity Kendall, amongst others, as one half of a middle class couple in suburbia who grew their own vegetables and kept pigs etc. As a child watching this I never fully appreciated the humour as, although we lived in the inner city, we also had vegetable patches in our back garden and ate our own produce so, as we were confirmed working class, I didn't fully understand the suburban joke.

I was the only one of my 7 siblings to be born in this house (the rest were born either in hospital or in a previous house) so I always had a special attachment to this home. The property also included both front and back gardens and it was in the back garden that my Dad and my Uncles created the vegetable patches complete with our own compost heap. To my knowledge, none of our immediate neighbours had anything like this but, as I grew up with it, it all just seemed perfectly normal to me.

In the patches we grew potatoes; carrots; lettuce; radish; swedes and many other seasonal produce. My siblings and I would help with the digging, sowing seeds etc and really enjoyed it. I only really knew vegetables to taste like they did from our garden and it was only in later life that I realised how much of mass produced supermarket food is bland and tasteless

Every year, in September, we would also go blackberry picking led by my mother.  We would fill up baskets of berries to be taken home and frozen, then over the winter months she would make delicious blackberry and apple pies and crumbles. Even typing this now is making my mouth water. In many ways we were very self-sufficient and maybe in modern terms we would have been seen as inner city Eco-warriors.
As I grew older and my interest in playing football increased, my love of our home grown vegetable patches started to wane as I would, along with others, also use the back garden as a football pitch but was told in no uncertain terms to keep my ball out of the vegetable patches. As I was honing my close control ball skills, I used to think to myself  "I bet Colin Bell never used to have to keep his ball out of a stupid vegetable patch".

By 1986 my Uncle had passed away, my Dad was no longer as mobile as he used to be and many of my siblings had left home. My interests had since turned to more rapscallion behaviour so the patches became disused. However, the halcyon days of playing the role of urban Eco-warriors remain very special to me and the smell of decomposing compost is still very dear in my heart, so much so that I recently asked the makers of Lynx deodorant sprays if they could bring out a "Rotting Vegetable" range.  I am still awaiting a reply so maybe they already produce this under another name.