Alf's garden were slightly uneven, slightly tiered

From early February’s putting on of scattered beauty –

Snowdrops and crocuses, daffodils and hyacinth –

Through a cascade of shade and colour

His garden bloomed throughout the growing year.

So-many-forget-me-nots:

Wild primroses, crocus and aubrietia

Then larkspur, delphinium and the beautiful bluebells

Carnations, cornflower and iris.

Tier after tier of the rarest blue cultivated by a hidden gardener.

Until one early summer morning, right early,

I saw Alf padding about.

He was doing little but looking, dressed in carpet slippers, dressing gown

With the high colouring of a boozer or of hypertension or both.

I muttered a quick 'Hello’ and walked by.

Over our many, but too few by far, early morning chats after that

I discovered Alf – the more than occasional gardener –

Knew that the word ‘bungalow’ came from the Hindi

Word baṅglā meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’

He’d been in India during the long withdrawing roar

Of empire. All he’d wanted was to get back home after

Four years fighting the Japanese all over the Far East:

‘I dunno why’d we bother?’ he’d said, ‘All them young lads, dead.”

“Fer wot? Nowt. That's wot.”

“Aye, well must get on.”

That was the last thing he said to me.

Looking at me as if he couldn’t believe the man he’d been…

Alf died last year and, as he’d foretold, all his spring bulbs are, like him, dead.

Buried beneath a thick wad of concrete.

“For parking'” his grandson had curtly said..