Soul Sanctuary Hub

The key had lived on the hook by the back door for thirty-one years, and for seven months Edie Rowcroft had not touched it.

It hung between the torch and the calendar from the Chinese takeaway. A Yale key and a smaller brass one for the padlock, threaded on a loop of garden twine that had gone grey and furred with handling. Frank’s handling. She had dusted round it. Once, in June, she had taken the calendar down to turn the page and her sleeve had caught the twine and set the keys swinging, and she had stood with her hand flat against the wall until they were still.

On the first Tuesday in October she took it down. She told herself it was practical. The allotment association sent out renewal letters in the autumn, and there would be a waiting list. There was always a waiting list. Young families from the new estate wanting somewhere to grow courgettes and let the children dig. It wasn’t right to sit on a plot you had no use for. Frank would have said so himself. He’d been on the committee for nine years and he had strong opinions about people who took a plot and let it go to bindweed.

So she put on her good coat, the camel one, which was wrong for an allotment and she knew it, and she walked the half mile down Moss Lane with the key in her pocket, meaning to hand it to Maureen Pollard and have done.