A Victory Garden for Trying Times Read online

  I had been slowly bringing the hill back to life after the former homeowner’s neglect. Neighbours told us the woman had come from the West and had cut down all the trees to make the hill look like a prairie. Weeds and junk trees had taken over the empty land. I planted pachysandra and ivy on the slopes, cedars and pine trees on level ground reinforced with walls of timber. By the fifth year of our ownership, I had one large swath of weeds and eroding soil left to contend with; its enhancement was going to be my summer project. But in the days between my mother’s death and her funeral, I disappeared into the patch, pulled out every weed, reshaped the space with rocks and timbers. Prepared it for new plantings. And I came to remember how solitude and silence had always been balms to me. In those few days on my hill, I felt that solitude, silence, and a scrap of land to whip into shape were nothing short of heaven. Now, I wondered if I could find that peace again out in my Victory Garden in the months ahead.

  Chapter Three

  IT WAS HARD TO KEEP HOPE ALIVE or imagine any kind of victory in the early winter that year. Through the month of December and into January, Peter had his daily radiation treatments to shrink the tumour in his esophagus to a size that could be cut out. In the best-case scenario, the radiation would necrotize the tumour and destroy the cancerous cells that had reached beyond the esophagus. That’s what I wanted. To see the invaders dead. Our days were built around the drive to Hamilton. On radiation days, I barely had time to park before Peter would text me to come back and pick him up.

  The team of doctors at the Juravinski Cancer Centre had given us two options for Peter’s treatment. One involved twenty-five rounds of targeted radiation along with five chemotherapy sessions to support the radiation’s work so surgery would be possible. The other involved months of chemotherapy. Peter and I both agreed with the doctors’ assessment that, because of Peter’s history of blood problems, the first option would be the best. And we both wanted the cancer out of his body as fast as possible.

  Reading the literature about treatments was a depressing affair. The list of side effects Peter could experience from chemotherapy alone — nausea, anemia, hair loss, memory changes, swelling that could send him to the emergency room — was frightening. And I couldn’t help wondering what lasting damage those drugs would do to Peter’s body once the cancer was gone. But, as in any war, you fight the enemy by the means you have and think about the consequences later.

  There was one warning, though, that forced me to realize just how poisonous the drugs being pumped into Peter’s body were. The nurses told Peter that whenever he went to the bathroom in the days following chemo, he was to sit on the toilet even if he was just urinating so that no spray could escape into the air. Then, he had to flush the toilet twice with the lid down so that no traces of the drugs could irritate his skin or cause harm to any other person. And that fluid was coursing through his body.

  Peter suffered few of the outward signs of chemotherapy damage, but his oncologist did have to cancel treatments twice because Peter’s white blood count was too low. Despite our awareness of the toxicity of the chemo drugs, we both felt cheated, fearful three treatments wouldn’t be enough to give the radiation the boost it needed, even though the oncologist didn’t seem worried. We wanted all the treatments the doctors had first suggested. We wanted every fighting chance we could get. Driving back home, without our time in the chemo suite, we tried to make light of our worries by recalling a scene from Seinfeld when the “Soup Nazi” decides who he’ll serve. “No soup for you,” he’d yell at an annoying customer.

  “No soup for you today,” Peter and I both said aloud in the car on the way home.

  As the radiation continued, the doses got stronger. By the end of the twenty-five sessions, Peter had had as much radiation as a body could take. But even so, he didn’t experience the extreme fatigue so many others do. One day at the Juravinski he got on the elevator on the ground floor to go down one flight to the radiation suite. A young woman got on with him and fell asleep standing in the elevator between floors. Peter had to wake her up when the doors opened. For him, a rest in bed after we drove home seemed to be all he needed. The lack of any harsh side effects gave us the feeling — perhaps the illusion — that the treatments were working, that Peter wasn’t that ill. For logical people like us, it was fanciful thinking, but sometimes that’s what you need to get through the day.

  Peter never liked obituaries about people who had “lost their battle with cancer” or “fought bravely against cancer.” He didn’t see the disease in military terms, never thought of himself as heroic. During his treatments, he preferred to say he was having “an argument with cancer,” as if he could talk it down. With his skills of memory and his ability to organize his thoughts, thanks to a lawyer’s training, he rarely lost an argument with anyone, including me. But I suppose he knew that cancer was the one final argument he could lose. We never talked about it, though. I understood him well enough to know that by not talking about death he was keeping it at bay. At least in his mind if not in his body. To keep on going, he had to believe he would recover.

  I could never see cancer in debating terms. I saw cancer as a terrorist fighting a dirty war, with rogue cells attacking the good cells in Peter’s body, determined to destroy them and kill him. Medical treatments, good nutrition, and rest were the only weapons in the arsenal of our defence. And optimism that Peter would win this argument/war.

  For me, more and more, the Victory Garden I was envisioning became my weapon of that optimism. I had to stop reading the cancer literature and warnings, which did little but scare me once I knew what danger signs to watch for. I needed to read about Victory Gardens to find out how to grow an abundance of nutritious, beautiful food. And I wanted to find some characters from the past who would inspire me to not lose hope.

  I found the first reference to Victory Gardens in readings about Great Britain and the First World War. My image of a country of rolling green lands and productive farms took a hit as I discovered that Great Britain was importing more than half of its food when it entered the war in 1914. A year later, when Kaiser Wilhelm II threatened to destroy all ships headed to British shores in retaliation for a British naval blockade of Germany, the spectre of food shortages and the fear of starvation became very real. Compensating for the lack of imported food became a matter of patriotism. A government campaign urged gardeners to grow their own vegetables and fruits to beat the U-boats.

  Already, I knew the garden taking shape in my mind had only a thin connection to the wartime Victory Gardens, even if I thought of cancer in battle terms. I lived in a region where I could get a basket of peach “seconds” for a toonie and buy any fresh vegetables I wanted all year round. There were no shortages, no threats to my county’s sovereignty. But the Victory Gardens of the war years were also about staring down uncertainty and finding nurture in the rhythm of digging, sowing, harvesting, and preserving, ideas I could hold on to like a lamppost in a storm.

  I once stood in a perfectly manicured, colourful garden in Maryland on a June day, after the wedding of friends of ours. On one side of the backyard, beds were filled with beautiful flowers in full bloom. That was the wife’s side of the house. The husband took Peter and me around to the other side of the house, away from the patio furniture and the cocktails, and showed us where his vegetable garden was laid out. “My wife doesn’t want to have anything in the garden you can eat,” he said. “I don’t want to grow anything you can’t.”

  That story came back to me when I read about the challenge the British government faced in the First World War to turn landowners’ notion of a garden upside down. Just say the words English garden and you evoke an image of scented roses, colourful lilies, and blue delphiniums; of wide lawns and clipped hedges; and for some, a Jane Austen heroine with her flower-picking basket, oblivious to where the food on her table comes from. The flower garden had long been a symbol of English gentility, a sought-after sign of wealth and leisure, something that Maryland wife wo
uld have agreed with. And her husband and my father would greatly dispute.

  Vegetables were rarely grown by the British middle or upper classes; instead, they came from the rough farms managed by lower-class workers in their drab clothes and muddy boots. Or they came packed on ships from distant lands along with exotic spices and fruit.

  But that had to change if people wanted to eat. The government urged homeowners to replace their flower beds and even their lawns with vegetable gardens. It was nothing short of their duty. The government also converted land lying idle across the nation, so-called slacker land, into a million allotment or community gardens for those without property. Vegetables, not roses, would preserve the British way of life.

  The message sunk in slowly. It’s hard, it seems, to turn a rose cultivator into a turnip grower. By 1917, the British hadn’t produced enough food for the last year of the war. They had to turn to the United States with a request for millions of bushels of wheat to keep their nation fed.

  Before the Americans entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson sagely recognized the danger of food shortages in Great Britain and Europe. On the continent, young men had been pulled away from farms to join armies, and farmland lay in ruin from chemicals and shelling.

  Wilson recognized that food was key not just to winning the war but to maintaining the peace that would inevitably come to Europe. He saw that if food shortages persisted on the other side of the Atlantic, world chaos would ensue. I couldn’t help admiring his foresight and his commitment to making sure that didn’t happen. He urged the passing of the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act, created the United States Food Administration, and appointed a retired engineer, a future president, Herbert Hoover, to encourage Americans to conserve food so the country would be able to feed the hungry of Europe.

  In this new role, Hoover called on Americans to cut back their diets. Eating less became popularly known as Hooverizin’. Hoover pushed recipes with just a few ingredients, including one for Victory Bread, made without flour. He reached into American kitchens with cookbooks, a regime of Meatless Tuesdays and Wheatless Wednesdays, and a list of rules: “Food. 1 — buy it with thought. 2 — cook it with care. 3 — serve just enough. 4 — save what will keep. 5 — eat what would spoil. 6 — home-grown is best.”

  I’ve never identified with American presidents, but I did find some inspiration in a timberman named Charles Lathrop Pack, who joined the campaign to find better ways to save food, although he, too, was entitled. He was one of America’s wealthiest men, but he took on his assignment in those war years with such gusto, it was hard not to admire his creative energy. He was the man who ran with Hoover’s rule number 6: “home-grown is best.” Perhaps I admired him most of the cadre of men involved in food projects because he wanted to see Americans in their yards, growing vegetables.

  To get Americans out in their gardens, he organized the National War Garden Commission and kick-started a vigorous campaign to promote vegetable gardens by distributing free gardening books and appealing to the press and community groups across the country. After the war, he wrote a book about the Victory Garden movement in America. “Before the people would spring to the hoe, as they instinctively sprang to the rifle,” he wrote, “they had to be shown, and shown conclusively, that the bearing of one implement was as patriotic a duty as the carrying of the other. Only persistent publicity, only continual preachment, could convince the public of that.”

  The preaching came in the form of posters with cartoon-like vegetables as heroes and slogans like “The Seeds of Victory Insure the Fruits of Peace.” In one poster, grunting vegetables climb over a wall accompanied by the words “War Gardens Over the Top.” In another, carrots, potatoes, and tomatoes hold high an American flag and march behind a boy with a hoe slung over his shoulder. “War Gardens Victorious,” screams the poster. I loved those feisty vegetables. I loved how they were fighting.

  To remind civilians, or “soldiers of the soil” as Pack called them, why their gardens mattered, one poster showed the kaiser squished into a canning bottle, which stood between a bottle of tomatoes and a bottle of peas: “Can Vegetables, Fruit, And the Kaiser too.”

  But perhaps the most blatant appeal to patriotism was a poster of a tall woman resembling Lady Liberty. Dressed in a full-length gown made of the American flag, she sowed seeds in a wide field, her bare alabaster arms untouched by either sun or dirt. I had to laugh at the purity of the image. Whenever I garden, my hands, my face, and especially the knees of my jeans end up covered in dirt. And I love it. I already knew my Victory Garden would be a gloriously messy affair.

  That image of the palest of women no doubt targeted the people Pack wanted in the garden: white Americans with farms or suburban houses of their own. While I identified more with the chubby, happy vegetables than with the elegant female gardener, I felt a moment of gratitude for my own privilege of having a big enough yard to grow food that would nurture both Peter and me.

  Even though the American Victory Garden campaign started later, its propaganda campaign fired the public imagination and in the end proved more effective than the British one. Pack’s campaign inspired songs with corny titles like “Keep the Home Soil Turning,” as well as hackneyed poetry: “We’ve got to dig in our back yards for carrots, beans, and ’taters; we’ve got to dig both long and hard as garden cultivators. So take your trusty hoe and spade and start your spring-time sowing. Just dig and get a garden made and set the foodstuff growing.” Cities around the country responded with War Garden Days and parades of marching students followed by floats filled with vegetables. And backyard gardens everywhere.

  By 1918, according to Pack, Americans had dug up more than five million war gardens, on both private and public lands. After the war, Pack tried to keep gardeners digging to support the continued needs of Europe. “The War Garden of 1918,” he wrote, “must become the Victory Garden of 1919.” But without a war as incentive, without fear, many simply hung up their hoes.

  The same thing happened in Great Britain. In the years between the great wars, the island became even more dependent on imports. On the eve of the Second World War, about 70 percent of its food came from elsewhere. Most of the onions Brits ate came from Europe, their fruit came from Australia and South Africa, wheat from North America, tomatoes from the Netherlands, and apples from France.

  In retrospect, it was stupid to stop campaigns after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles that were making a difference in how people saw food. But that’s human nature, it seems. We forget lessons when we don’t need them, once we can live our lives with our old complacency. I understood. I longed for the days when I wouldn’t have to visit cancer centres or read about survival statistics. When I could be blasé about the threat to the plans we had for our life together.

  As I buoyed myself reading about how people fought an enemy with food, Peter distracted himself with dark mystery novels by the likes of Jo Nesbo and Ian Rankin and the darkest dramas he could find on Netflix. That was one of the differences between us. When things got dark, Peter liked to go darker. I needed light to stave off depression. So, as the treatments ended and we entered the period of waiting before Peter could have the scan that would reveal if surgery was possible, I kept reading about Victory Gardens, looking for the seeds of our own victory, looking for a role model.

  The next chapter of the Victory Garden came in the Second World War. With another war and new threats of blockades, British bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture dusted off the old campaigns, pumped them up, and came up with a catchy slogan: “Dig for Victory.”

  “All the potatoes, all the cabbages, and all the other vegetables we can produce may be needed,” the minister said. “That is why I appeal to you, lovers of this great country of ours, to dig, to cultivate, to sow, and to plant.”

  In a series of Dig for Victory leaflets, the government gave advice on, well, how to dig, but also how to sow, handle pests, and choose the right vegetables for winter storage. The British would
need parsnips, carrots, potatoes, kale, cabbage, and leeks to get them through the cold months of bombardments. The government added more allotment gardens for urban dwellers. And after German bombing raids scarred the country, creating extra slacker land, boys’ clubs took up the job of clearing away rubble to grow more vegetables. One photograph from the war epitomizes that British carry-on sentiment; it shows a London couple cultivating their round lush garden planted in a bomb crater. I never found out who they were, but I wanted their determination.

  In Canada, at the beginning of the war, the government actively discouraged amateur gardeners; it feared they would waste valuable resources like garden tools, fertilizers, and sprays needed in the military’s war effort. But as more food was sought for Great Britain and troops abroad and the effects of rationing began to be felt at home, those amateur gardeners took to their gardens anyway, calling them Victory Gardens even if the government wouldn’t. In 1942, a group in Victoria that called itself the Victory Garden Brigade petitioned the Minister of Agriculture to give his support to Victory Gardeners. By then, clothing stores were already offering summery fashions for the Victory Gardeners and Toronto’s Eaton’s department store was selling rakes, hoes, and plant food in its Garden Grove shop for Victory Garden needs. In June of 1942, the Globe and Mail reported that the most popular book in Toronto libraries was called 25 Vegetables and How to Grow Them. “This rather startling piece of information,” the article continued somewhat breathlessly, “was furnished by Miss Anne Wright, head of the circulation department of the Toronto Public Libraries. It seems Toronto citizens like the Victory Garden idea and are storming the libraries to learn how to make drills and keep the cut-worms away from tomatoes, and the cabbage-butterflies off the cabbages.”