The Garden and the Laocoon

    Sitting in the Physic Garden in Faversham. It is a beautiful summer day: the birds and bees are in full swing and the flowers are in full bloom. A very tall man wearing a white vest and brown trousers attends to the garden as his children play nearby: a young boy with a tearaway's face and a gangly nine-year-old girl who insists on doing cartwheels around the tables so that everyone sitting having their tea and cake can admire her knickers, presumably. I had taken an instant dislike to her earlier on, when she had arrogantly corrected an old biddy volunteer, who was telling us that a large tract of the garden had been there since Medieval times.
   "You mean Mega evil, actually!" she insisted, with a toss of her smug little head.
    At one stage the young boy ran along the stone pathway and out of sight behind some flowering bushes. His flapping footsteps resounded through the idyllic setting, then they abruptly stopped as he fell over. We all heard the thud and crack as his head hit the stone path, then his keening wail as he began crying. An elderly woman, one of the volunteers at the garden, rushed over to where he lay on the ground, still out of sight. Immediately his father barked, "Leave 'im! ... Jus' leave 'im!" He strode over to the boy, shouting, "Geh up, Mike! Jus' geh up!"
    "Oh, but he's such a little mite", offered the old lady, "It seems a pity not to go to him".
    "'E's orright. Jus' leave 'im. 'E's gotta be tough." He then started to walk away from the boy, back to where he had been digging in a nearby patch of dirt. The boy got to his feet and trotted after him, still crying, although less so now; obviously well-used to the cold shoulder. 
    The father scrabbled his hands about in the dirt for a minute and rose to his feet holding four enormous, fat earthworms. They wriggled manically between his large fingers. 
"Oi, look woh I got ... Shall we go and feed the bird?" He gestured to a small bird house situated on a wall above my head, which I had not previously noticed. I now saw that a tiny chaffinch was peeping out of the circular opening. He strode over to it, worms aloft, the boy trotting behind. He raised his huge hand up to the little house. The bird, terrified, flew away across the trees. 
    "Let's give it some dinner". He poked the four enormous worms one at a time through the little window. They didn't want to go in and they each began writhing frantically as they   disappeared down into the darkness within. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the natural food of the tiny chaffinch is seeds and very small insects. And I didn't like to think of the horrendous nightmare awaiting the little bird when it returned to its house to find the equivalent of four furious anacondas thrashing about in the darkness, and no possible way of removing them.

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