The Allotment Secretary Read Out a Plot Number Retired Two Seasons Ago
"Plot twenty-six. Disqualified." Gerald Pink says it loud enough for the whole marquee, and then his hands go flat into Nell Attwell's shoulder.
Nell is sixty-one, silver-grey hair, a faded red-and-white stripe apron, and she has held plot 22 on that site for six years. One shove over a trestle table and a spilled crate of show onions, and she can lose the tenancy, her mother's plot, and the only Saturday of the year she stands in public.
The onions roll across the trodden grass. One crate corner gives with a soft wooden crack. Nell doesn't shout. She bends and starts picking them up, one at a time, into her apron, while the marquee claps for the man with the programme.
Three weeks earlier, that programme was printed with two names under the word "secretary." Dawn Pink sits behind the PA table logging entries on a clipboard, and her husband's name is on three separate plots. The visitors' book shows Gerald at plot 22 twice in one week with a clipboard in his hand.
Then the judges' sheets go round, and Nell's entry for the runners' beans class has been crossed out at the last minute. Not by a judge. Somebody at the PA table.
Miriam Salt, the judge in the black wide-brim hat, calls the class. Nell lifts her wicker basket instead of answering. There is a folded envelope on top, flat, green-ringed at the corner, and it has been sitting there since before the sun came over the caged tomatoes.
The judges hold the moment his own handwriting on the tenancy page finishes a sentence he has never finished for himself. The countersignature is wet-ink. The initials read G. Pink.
And underneath it lies a printed show handbook page — the rule about no single grower holding more than three plots — with two different initials in the margin in two different inks. One of them belongs to the man currently asking for quiet. The other belongs to a plot number the register retired two seasons ago — the same number he just read out as disqualified.
That is where the caption stops.
Whose signature is on plot 22, and what happens to the three plots quietly signed into his son's name? Part 2 reads the page out loud to the whole marquee, names the initials, and gives plot 22 back its bean row — the winner, the struck-off entry and the empty chair at the PA table, all in the link below.
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