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The Former despite the taunt of being labelled scabs were tempting because of their high iron content and electromagnetic properties feared by copper hating slugs. They were summarily dismissed on a seasonal basis because of their tendency of climbing up to the top of the trench mid-March and coming back down to earth up again. For the uninitiated, planting potatoes in shallow trenches will ensure that the potatoes, shielded from bright sunlight, will be tender, sweet and white, just like the non-Shakespearean Richard.
For the initiated, no need to relay my Richard the Thirds unlike my second earlies as being blemish free within my soil as the trench was topped with the previous year's organic sunny and cherlocked compost used only for my record breaking eggs Benedict cucumber batch, rhubarb crowns and gooseberry April fool.
If you wish to view my In-laws' film of hot potato growing techniques go to MeTube 'The Out-law Jersey Royals'. I say this of course at an election approaching time of big talk worth much less than 'diddlysquat laced with feather moss and mustard root', which we have learned to take with a pinch of salt or 10lb of beef jerky.
For the inebriated reading this content on a need to forget basis in the wake of the lost March hour I need to reiterate that the only reason that I have not as yet owned up to my recent discovery in my Gravesend garden is that I had to wait until Richard III was safely reinterred with a fitting, dignified and memorable ceremony before I could announce, as they say at election time that I have found Princess Pocahontas.
Pocahontas then will be next in line to the right royal succession of copycat finds anticipated. One hundred years behind Richard III in real time, will the two years of deathly hallows time be enough for the great British public to cope with another BBC repeat of graves not really ending?
It was bad enough for their reporter we heard doing a Jeremy Clarkson without the physical to his producer on the phone when he was stuck in the Three Daws public house having not eaten only to be rescued by the dying whale, ironically a Bottlenose not a Humpback, who gave up the ghost at Gravesend to put him in the limelight in 2006.
Pocahontas reappeared adjacent to the plot, now a raised bed where I have exhumed my legumes over the years. Like the Old Dartfordians who kept their eyes peeled for subsequent sightings of Whale pods I expected her, being from Virginia, to emerge from the potato patch. But of course like The Princess and the Pea she too had not lain undisturbed in the raised bed.
I have a qualification in Science and lots of plasticine left over from when the kids were small. Using the average contents of a box of matches it was easy to reconstruct her face. It was like two peas in a pod. The face was staring me in the face. Like one of the matches it was striking. It was uncanny - it didn't look like what it said on the tin.
The memories came flooding back. Sort of. I could see it now from the set of cigarette cards I once owned viz. ' Famous Beauties of 1937'. I didn't buy them, I found them on a bus. There she was in blue, purple and grey transfixed in my two mucky hands. I stuck a magpie feather in the back of her head. It was her, definitely - an exact match - Pocahontas!
Or was it Helen of Troy, The Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Messalina, Queen Guinevere, Dantes Beatrice, Joan of Arc, Lucrezia Borgia, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Isabella de Bourbon, Lady Castlemaine, Louise de la Valliere, Nell Gwyn, Diana Vernon, Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, Catherine the Great, Madame du Barry, Marie Antoinette, Mrs Fitzherbert or Georgina Duchess of Devonshire?
