Attached to the outside wall is a boot scraper made from solid cast iron; a small arched frame resembling a miniature fireplace; an alcove, a recess, where mud and waste, dried leaves and soil, sand and shingle, shards of seashells, even excrement can be removed before entering the house. (Fall to the ground and some fat gull or overfed pigeon can find rich pickings, minerals enough to keep their gleaming beaks and feathers).

Beneath her arch a metal bar, an iron ledge sits, where boots and shoes clinging with mud have been pressed down hard, rubbed back and forth, sat upon. You might mistake her for a large horse shoe clod; but she is a small temple, an inner sanctum, an egress, an alcove where dust and mould and moss can gather and matter much less than on the inside. (Nothing should be trod on the inside and in that regard Pond Man is more like a housemaid: he likes a clean floor.)

Where spider’s webs, snail shells, mouse droppings or cat fur (following a late night fight), can be redressed, swept up, swept away — for Pond Man, whose wall this is is a tidy soul. And so she is polished; she gleams black and lustrous because Pond Man is house proud even before his house begins.

The French call her decrottoir, remover of excrement, of all things base picked up along the way. The dust and dirt of the whole town or just this narrow beach-front precinct. Iron cast to withstand the beating of the wind and the rain, the vicious salt nails, for it is the sea salt that grinds her down. Oxidisation, the slow cheapening of metal to desiccated rusty brown, although she is driven hard into the stone wall; but over the years her hoop has degraded and her ledge lowered by the weight of male thighs pressing down; and so now her metal lip has started to sag.

Still, she has served the company of his boots well, and occasionally the boots of Laurence Gallows whose house sits next door: Gallows who sometimes comes calling with a sharp ratty-t-tat.

Pond Man’s neighbour, Pond Man’s nemesis, because the waters running between them are unclear ever since Pond Man gave himself in neutral service to Gallow’s petty schemes.

Schemes and scheming, that is Gallow’s lot, for he believes in maintaining a lordly sense of order, tight limits to his land; if land is what you call a scrubby rock garden at the front and a boggy piece of pasture behind where Gallows inadvertently keeps a skinny billy goat. For what? For milk he thinks. No, for a sense of land and petty jurisdiction.

An estate, which is egging himself on too much, far too grand, as though he were the Duke of Norfolk himself pulling a scraggy billy goat on a piece of twine down the twitten; which is what Pond Man sees from the corner of his eye as he lowers his boot towards that thin metal ledge wedged between granite waiting for Laurence to greet or upbraid him. But Gallows lifts his cap and carries on and the goat bleats feebly.

Undernourished thinks his more practical neighbour, a cruel ostentation, a rural device out of keeping. Pond Man tolerates his neighbour but Gallows is a fool, a soft fool, a man who inherited money and hasn’t been able to do anything sensible. He has no idea what they need, animals and trees, not even the weeds. What’s ‘e feeding that poor creature? Pond Man shakes his head. Soft fellow, soft in the head, too many ideas or no ideas at all.

‘Mornin’ Laurence.’

But the bleating of the goat drowned out his greeting and Laurence Gallows turned out of sight onto the blowy seafront so determined was he to take his scraggy creature to the lighthouse, the place Laurence hankers after more than any other. An outpost, a tower, the site of ancient fortification; Gallows dreamed of occupying this flint covered conical tower to make it his own. The tower on the site of the old Cudlow Mill now housing a large lamp 40 feet up; for it is up Laurence wishes to go, up and up and up to look out as the Harbour Master looks out upon the stormy seas hoping for a misadventure, a reason to intervene, although he would never admit to such schadenfreude.(German for “I’m glad you are experiencing some difficulties in your life that might prevent you from achieving your dreams).

And Gallows dreams of a telescope; he dreams of flashing lights and the signals of distressed seamen, a clarion call he can never answer, for Laurence is not the sort of man who can think clearly — and Pond Man nods his head and continues to scrape off his boots thinking of his neighbour tripping along the pier with his rope and his tawdry beast.

For Pond Man has been out hoeing; separating clod from clod of stubborn mud, forcing apart physical particles of chalk and clay and sand. And so now it is time to speak of the modest hoe, the most ancient of agricultural implements.

The Hoe

A rectangular paddle set at a right angle; a square leaning slightly into a curve on one side - the bottom - where you’ll find it attached to a handle leaving space in the middle for the earth to pass through. Crumbly soil. Clods of mud. Pebbles and snails and sticky worms. Rotting rose petals and chrysanthemum blooms — cherry pink silk and browning white ruffles — for petals resemble cloth if you look closely.

Think how they fall in drawing rooms when the breeze runs through; gather and collect into silken pools until the breeze lifts them and they fall to the floor; and so the life of the crying flower comes to an end for those are her tears you walk over.

Flowers shed tears and Pond Man listens; holds up their floppy heads when the wind bashes too hard; gently stirs the soil with the hoe but never to disturb them only to distribute tenderness - the hoe, the gentle hoe, she must not penetrate too far — and now this is her restless, hovering, rescuing history, for the hoe has spared us all from starvation and even extinction with her modest repetitive movements.

A blade set at a right angle; a blade attached to a wooden handle designed to cultivate plants and undo the pernicious plans of weeds. Because the metal hoe is the frontiersman pushing back against wild encroachment. Dandelions, groundsel, bind weed, ivy, nettles, and virginia creeper from the side of the house — the Manor — we will go there later. There there is a lady in charge, Dorothy is her name, and she comes from another place and time, a brief liaison almost forgotten now because no one can quite locate her; Dorothy is the stuff of dreams and she has floated away like willow pollen on the breeze.

While Pond Man keeps hoeing; his square blade touching the damp ground as he pushes back invaders.

Himalayan balsam, the worst; she engulfs the side of the river banks, anywhere she can find water, damp ground, a finger of moist earth.

Pond Man has cleared many grounds public and private; he has cleared out the alley that divides his house from Laurence Gallow’s, although Laurence will never acknowledge it. Laurence is not a man to acknowledge service of any kind; that would take piety, humility, some seeing of what is in front of you, the man himself, the man with his metal hoe, his blade, the shape of things, a right angle; a rhomboid attached to a wooden handle sifting the soil; breaking down the leaves and the twigs, the dried grass, the bird’s nest fallen to the ground last Sunday on the high wind. La Nino. Blame her.

The coast guard does, and the harbour master — and Laurence Gallows too who raises his fist to the luminous sky and wonders whether he can dismantle the lamp 40 feet high in his coveted tower - take possession.

The Salt Mill

Why does one man covet the life of another? Laurence Gallows has been dreaming his whole life of castles in the air. In the white pyramidical tower and the green cupola roof of the lighthouse he sees white and green dominion. Kingdoms in the sun. A local temple. A white salt mill. A crusader’s Jerusalem and Laurence himself the foolish knight and his squire; although not quite, for that is not how Laurence views himself; not as Sancho Panza and his donkey. No, Laurence is more of a Don to himself than a donkey. The knight errant who goes ahead of his squire pursuing his dribbling, drooling dream.

For Laurence’s pockets metaphorically speaking are stuffed with gold compared to most in this small town; and he is intent on spending it foolishly. The goat is his petty experiment but his pasture land has been foreshortened for next door is Pond Man, and on the other side the Harbour Master, and neither will indulge his whim of extending his estate. Estate, in any case, is mightily extravagant for what is up for grabs: an alleyway, and two narrow ribs of garden lawn on either side of a dusty twitten. The Harbour Master’s house — T.H.M. or James Crow as some remember him by — but to most in the town he is simply The Harbour Master and like all three men under discussion there are no women. No wives. No female harvest.

Pond Man is a celibate and so doomed to become a source of romantic projection. The widowed Harbour Master lost his wife Peggy so many years ago she has turned into a ghost; he sees her sometimes at the foot of his dusty staircase on summer nights when he feels just a hint of lonesomeness.

And Laurence? Laurence has been forsaken by his own dreams for he is the sort of man to cross town with a beatific smile stuck on like the tail on the donkey. In the length of that grin there is no one else who can possibly enter in — only property, the sacred cow of men who lack substance; who cannot find a way of travelling quickly through the earth. Because Laurence has no real idea what ground he stands upon and so everything he lusts after leers up towards the sky: that white salt mill on the East pier built like a miniature Byzantine temple, a rather plain one.