I found empty baskets, downed secateurs, and not another living soul
Illustration by Clara Dupré
Prologue: Let’s be clear. I am innocent. Yet I suffered, which is clearly unjust. A person should be able to pursue wholesome interests without repercussion. However, we all know how, these days, even a pure act can lead to disaster. I was trapped in a garden centre. And now I must bear witness.
In the wild: It was a balmy early-summer evening. I was walking home from the library when I spotted the very same garden centre I’d nipped into to buy tomato plants, only the other day. What could be the harm in running in? I admit I was listening to a podcast. But my earbuds are not remotely noise-cancelling; if anyone had bellowed “We are closing” as I entered the fragrant aisles of plants, I’d have heard. Speedily, I inspected the herbs, inhaled wisteria, maturely decided against lugging home a discounted Tuscan Azure Scallop Frostproof urn, grabbed a small geranium and, proud of my Cromwellian self-restraint, scampered towards the tills, where… oh.
The glass doors to the inside were shut.
Fine. I’d skirt back via the exit: also closed. I knocked, shyly, slowly realising that both the indoor area and the checkouts were unlit. I called “Hello!”, knocked more loudly, confident someone would emerge apologetically from an office. Hello? Hello? HELLO? But no one came. So I left my geranium huffily on a bistro table, turned to leave the way I’d entered.
The capture: It was blocked. Behind me a vast metal grille had materialised, through whose perforations I could see the car park: huge, sunlit, empty, with towering spiked gates at the other end. I banged on the metal and each glass door. I began to run up and down, past covetable perennials, yelling not only HELLO but now also HELP. Louder and louder, faster and faster, all the way down to Landscaping and Trellises. I found baskets abandoned; downed secateurs; not another living soul.
Panic, I admit, began to set in, particularly when the only contact number went unanswered. Sweatily I messaged my partner: “AM TREPED IN GARDENE CENTER!” “Ha!” she replied. I bashed in vain on the grille, then, hosannah! I remembered one more side exit, by the trolleys. It was blocked by a colossal spiked and padlocked gate. Silence. Sunlight. HELP.
In the wilderness: My phone battery was failing fast. There must have been sockets, among the rose-pink echinacea and bee-humming catmint, but I couldn’t find them. I was still running about bellowing, rattling desperately on the metal grille, but I knew I was lucky: there were hoses and seating. I had a cereal bar; access to redcurrants. Also, I am not frail, diabetic, needed by small children. And, thanks to those enormous spiked fences, I’ve never been safer. Plus, an after-dark bookshop supermarket sweep is my lifelong fantasy and a garden centre comes close. Except I couldn’t take anything. And I couldn’t get out.
Hope: Then, lo! Like an angel came a voice; a male voice, yes, but that works, calling: “ARE YOU… OK?” Far, far away, beyond the gates to the street, someone called Olly had stopped: the most handsome man I’ve ever seen through a grille across a large car park. He gave me his beautiful name, calmly assessed the facts of the case and managed, eventually, to contact the non-emergency police number, then the fire brigade. Another passerby, Anna, joined him; while we waited and I kept searching for a way out, I realised a baby was strapped to Olly’s chest. Time passed – weeks, possibly about 10 minutes – and then, as if in a dream, the Olly/Anna/baby blur vanished as a massive fire-engine, lights flashing, hurtled up to the gate.
Three firefighters, not audibly laughing, strolled across the car park
Rescue: Three firefighters, not audibly laughing, crawled beneath it, then strolled across the car park. Helpfully, almost professionally, I guided them to the side gate, recommended padlock-cutters, advised... “Leave it to us,” they said. There are no more soothing words.
Curiously immune to my suggestions, my saviours leant a ladder on their side of the gate, lowered another down my side and Dave, my muscular hero, began to climb. Realising I was incapable of manoeuvring over the spikes, he simply said, “Hold on to me.” My nonsensical wittering, my hilarious comment about not having bought him dinner, were batted aside like aphids. And then, like Sir Walter Raleigh, he laid his jacket over the spikes.
Aftermath: Incidentally, when I crawled under the outside gate or, as we in the fire trade call it, dropped-and-rolled, Dave said I’d done it perfectly. I think. I was too busy excitedly taking a selfie in his jacket, which he’d insisted I wore for protection. As I anticlimactically trudged home, only mildly trembly, I began to construct the email I’d send to the neglectful garden centre staff, pointing out how lucky, for us all, was my escape. And, if my own daughter was unsympathetic, diagnosing the cause as “you being you in a garden centre, stroking a leaf for three hours”, that’s simply the way the valiant are often greeted, with misunderstanding and ignorance. I rose above it. That night we watched Backdraft in honour of you, Dave, Olly and good Samaritans everywhere. Would you like to see my selfie?
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