By Eva Griffith (started 13th May, finished the 22nd)
The Tudor Seckford Estate in Clerkenwell had many gardens – some of them given over to fruit and produce.
I have recently been looking at a sixteenth-century book called The Gardeners Labyrinth (1577). It is quite likely that the gardens there were like that.
As I look out on our little bit of land ‘at home’ with a pond, roses, forget-me-nots and daisies, I can think about the crown jewels that our island possesses in its gardens.
Among the foliage and flowers of our one, loaned to us, as everything is loaned, in a Britain only benefiting from the soil we have, a tree grows which my husband cannot identify. Dear reader: this morning I saw the most beautiful bird alight among its leaves. Blue, brown, white and peach, I believe it may have been a Jay. Its warmth relieved and intrigued me all at once.
We are exhorted: ‘Plant a Tree for the Queen’s Jubilee!’ Why not? There isn’t room in our garden, but I’d like to see more trees, breathing in the CO2, breathing out much-needed oxygen, if we are able to water them in the dry times. It has been very dry this Spring. Madrid is suffering a heatwave; Pakistan is enduring temperatures of over 50 degrees.
In my previous article on this website, an allusion was made to a Mirror which encloses a text entitled ‘The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’, and, let’s say, it has inspired me to remember extracts from a book I have begun but not finished. It is called My Friend Eve, and it tells the story of a poor woman who, in the frazzle of getting older, senses the world around her has changed in a way she couldn’t have imagined before. It might have been changing for a longer time than she realised, she just hadn’t noticed. The book was started before the pandemic. It is a comedy which, like most comedies, depends on cruel things happening and nobody really caring. In the book this woman is abused by her husband and rejected by her family and friends, thrown out of houses, turned away by people in a song of not really caring. This happens after a parent dies. So many people do these hard things to her that she knows it just can’t be real, so, like a woman eccentrically wearing Wellington boots expecting rain, she waits until it’s over. She is told she is going crazy inside a scenario reminding one of the old play/film Gaslight. (Are your ribs hurting with laughter, yet?) As time goes by, she garners more and more knowledge of a society that just doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Walls and fences are broken down around and within a Garden (of England?) that is found wanting: political, personal – what was private is no more. It’s as if her life has been ransacked, taken apart bit by bit and held up for display. It’s so unkind, it just cannot be real. The experience, of course, changes her. And soon it is as if everything she said she ever wanted to do and be is offered to her if only she can change. So, change she does, as something is squeezed out from her like a cloth used to clean something very dusty and dirty. And then some good things start to emerge from what was once cold and rained on. Just like fruits growing from a tree in a garden. As if everything were waiting for the Spring and a better light to picture an issue.
I have written before, recorded on another website, of my understanding of a world which seemed to call out My Friend Eve’s name: that is: Crying about the Environment | Eva Griffith I recently noticed another programme using the ‘Eve’ name. It was called Hollington Drive, shown, as a repeat, late at night, originally aired in 2021. There was a little girl called ‘Eva’ in it, wrongly put in the frame for the death of a boy called Alex. ‘Crying about the Environment’, which includes observations on the recent use of my name, was originally written for a paper given in Belfast. It centred on the some aspects of climate change alongside extracts of my comedy filmscript about the Red Bull playhouse. I am gathering further material for it, even as I write this strange article. It will very much include ‘The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ I think, found in the documents of William Bowes’ of Clerkenwell – and his ‘Mirror of Repentance and Reformation’ to boot. What could ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ be in the context of a tree? Whatever it is, it could only invoke the older Eve’s story, taken from Genesis, of a woman who once lived in a beautiful garden where she made a horrible mistake, tricked, as some think, by a snake. Bowes wished that the members of the Goldsmiths’ company would read the Tree’s message every year and, no doubt, learn from it, before they ate their special annual lunch. A gentleman who presented as the current historian of the Goldsmiths confirmed to me, also over food, that such texts do exist among the company’s records, but he does not recognise the mirror covering, so perhaps Bowes’ device of instructions, within a reflective frame, was never made.
The story of ‘My friend’ Eve is a hard one, but if ever I finish it, you will laugh at it. The fruit in the tree could be Humanity, I guess, as well as a person in transition. From one state to another. From something not so bad to something better, from unhappiness in a place where we need a #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek because it’s a world that doesn’t think before it acts, to one which has to surrender to #Help. Eve is asked to believe that the whole thing was a joke. But say you don’t have that kind of sense of humour? Say you were never brought up to have one like that? Why should you find something horrible, funny (you should read my PhD thesis…)? And who is really laughing, or not doing anything, when the actions taken inspires domestic violence, as in the case of Eve? I have mentioned before about ‘The Twelve Steps’: a form of self-help which has literally saved millions of lives. We hardly ever talk about it because some its magic depends on anonymity. I never needed it for drinking too much or for taking drugs or for material addiction of any kind, neither did my parents, but I needed it for loving people who were addicted. Perhaps I was addicted to them. Either way, the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous invites one to give up one’s problems to something bigger than those problems. This is given the name of ‘Higher Power’ which, if one struggles with the thought of it, can be as simple as the kind power of the people who introduced you to it.
We could call this power many things. But sometimes the names we give it turn sour in our mouths like dark berries from a tree we cannot identify. No wonder that significant forms of faith advise us not to give it a name. Just to know it is on our side, and that it ushers us into a non-bullying world where we can relax and trust in it, rather than another human being or force.
Here is The Serenity Prayer that is known to 12-step groups:
God grant me the serenity: to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
In the meantime (the time between the acceptance and the wisdom), Eve can use her new-found knowledge of the world for something like a comedy screenplay. All about the laughter of other people. For example – Shakespearean actors. And perfect people. From London. And the World.