Short Story
[Uploaded 12/05]
Say It With Flowers (2003)
The press never found out any answers to the questions raised, so I am writing the story for you to read. Maybe you can fathom out some of the answers, or maybe work out which questions should have been asked.
Hi, I’m Rodger. I worked for the council at the time that it all happened. I knew all the people involved some, I must stress, better than others. The council involved was Westbury Town Council, you may have heard of it, although its only claim to fame was winning the ‘Britain In Bloom’ competition eleven years running. It was all because of George. The man had the greenest fingers of any person who ever lived. He could make anything grow anywhere and they were always the best specimens. Each individual plant was a winner in its own right. But this story starts elsewhere.
The council had had a run of bad luck and poor financial control towards the end of the seventies and through the early eighties. The upshot was that the townspeople voted in a hung council in 1984. There was no coalition to gain overall control, but the liberals had the largest number of seats.
The financial department was broken up and although most of them kept a job of sorts, they were all moved away from areas that controlled money.
In order to put the council back on an even keel; one Mr. Ian Peterson was put in charge of accounting and went about recruiting his own team.
Councilors' expenses were the first things to be decimated by Peterson’s eagle eye, closely followed by new initiatives that basically involved the farming out of services on a tender basis. Services such as refuse collection, school dinners and road sweeping all went. Everyone involved in these services was forced to reapply for their own jobs for less money.
How could this young (he was in his early forties) upstart come in from nowhere and destroy so many lives without so much as a ‘by your leave’. Peterson had spent four years at Oxford, a further two at Harvard and then learned his trade as an accountant in the City. His reasons for coming to this job have been described as “suspect” more than once, but it was mostly thought that he had political aspirations.
There was uproar amongst the staff involved in the cuts, who only seemed to be upset because they would be expected to work for a living. Some didn’t reapply for their jobs as some sort of protest at the injustice served; they even picketed the council offices for a while. Their only problem was that there was no support from the community. Services had gotten gradually worse at the same time as rates were going up. The changes were generally seen as positive.
Anyway that’s what had come before, now it was our turn. We were ‘Parks and Gardens’ and we were very proud of the fact. We were champions, what would they want to do to us?
On the second Tuesday of February, we found out.
We were to be put out to tender. For the first time since the start of the cuts, the town was up in arms. They were very proud of their parks and gardens; it was the one thing that set them apart from the rest of the world. We didn’t have any grand properties, we didn’t have any old follies built by Royal lunatics in the nineteenth century and we didn’t even have any famous dead people. We just had our community and the most remarkable parks and gardens.
For a while there it looked as if there would be full-scale riots, with the army called in to fight back protesters on the council steps. The Falklands would have seemed a small skirmish in comparison, but it never came. By the Thursday, the council had backed down and decided to just make some financial cuts instead. Oh to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting.
We braced ourselves and waited for any news. Some of what follows is hearsay, but I believe is close to what happened next.
Mr. Peterson went through all the books and financial reports pertaining to our department. It is said that he spent three days at it. There were reports and costings sent into him for every aspect of our jobs including laundry, plant maintenance, fuel, lubricants, soil transportation and fertilizers. He even had gardening books sent in, followed by price lists of seeds and plants. We were led to believe that he had even calculated the costs of growing from seed versus buying seedlings that needed merely planting. The hardest part of it for us; was the inventory. He required a full inventory of all items we had in use and in stores. This was not only spades and shears and the like, but also involved gloves, refuse sacks, plant pots and plant labels.
We were given twenty-four hours to complete it, so we did what we could. Suffice to say that we made a lot of it up and he must have known, because a team of auditors landed on the following Thursday morning to redo the job. Theirs wasn’t going to be accurate either, but it ended up a damn sight closer than ours. We were worth nearly seven million in bits and bobs and second-hand vehicles.
George hated every moment of it. He just couldn’t see the point, “Why fix it, when it ain’t broke”, was a phrase he had used many times in the past, but sounded continuously whilst the auditors were in. George was simple, and no I don’t mean in the backward sense, he merely lived a simple life and did his gardening the old fashioned way. He talked to and nourished each seed and plant as if they were the only one he had. The nearest they got to fertiliser was a little horse manure in the spring. He was a genius, but never acknowledged it. He just wanted to be left alone to love his plants, and love them he did. Love was the key with George. We never even made the finals while he was still on the payroll. But the moment he ‘retired’ and was just doing it for the passion, we won everything.
He was retired from the payroll, but insisted on staying in the job as chief gardener as it was all he had left since Mrs. Stevens passed. The only cost to the council was personal liability insurance and if you weighed that up against the money he saved, the man was a bargain.
Mr. Peterson saw things a little differently.
“Why are we paying insurance on an old man, who we don’t even employ?”
“He’s the chief gardener, Mr. Peterson.”
“I don’t see his name on the payroll for Parks and Gardens.”
“We don’t actually pay him sir, he’s retired.”
“Then why exactly are we insuring him?”
“Because he’s chief gardener and we don’t want a lawsuit if he’s involved in an accident.”
“You’re not making any sense, Dobson. I’ll sort this out myself.”
“He won’t like that, sir.” Dobson remarked to his boss’ departing back.
It was lunchtime, so Peterson headed for the Long Park and the Horticulture buildings by the boathouse. On arrival at the sheds he was shown through to George in a back office. George just sat and looked at him, didn’t rise, doff his cap or even acknowledge the man with a smile. Peterson didn’t know what to expect, but this just got him riled.
“George, isn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“You do realise that you are out of a job, due to your age and infirmity.”
“I ain’t infirm.”
“That doesn’t change a thing, you are retired.”
“I’m a good gardener.”
“If you’re such a good gardener, what’s that patch of soil meant to be, opposite Town Hall?”
“That’s a seeded bed.”
“No change, you must remove yourself from council property forthwith. You are not employed by us.”
George stood before Peterson and walked at him. Peterson stepped left, knocking over some pots in the process. George spoke over his shoulder as he departed.
“I knows about you, Peterson.”
Peterson followed out of the sheds and watched as George carefully crossed a lawn to the busy main road. He stood on the curb, looked back and stepped in front of an articulated lorry. There wasn’t much for the ambulance crew to take away, but he did close the road for three hours. Peterson considered this an inconvenience.
The really strange bit happened six weeks later.
Outside the council offices, the seedbed was turfed over just a week after the ‘accident’. Five weeks after that the plants came through anyway.
A twelve-foot portrait of George’s smiling face and an inscription laid out in the most vivid colours.
“I knows about you Mr. Peterson.”
“Selling council property and keeping £2.5m fer yerself.”
Below this was a list of Peterson’s account numbers with dates and amounts. Like I said, the man was a genius when it came to plants. All this was strange enough in itself, but there was more. On the day that this happened, all the flowerbeds on the town's roundabouts sprouted this message:
“Stuff yer job!”
So what do you think? Any answers?
Oh, before I forget, Peterson is still on sedatives and a date is yet to be set for the trial.
