It never occurred to me when I was little that gardens were anything less than wonderful places. Granddad's garden was on the bank of a river and sloped gently down towards the water. You couldn't reach the river but you could hear the sound of the water and the birds that sang in the trees above.
At home, his son, my father, could be quiet and withdrawn. I wouldn't want to make him sound humorless. He wasn't. Silly things would amuse him. I realize that, deep down, he was probably disappointed that he hadn't made more of his life. He left school without qualifications and became a beginner to a plumber(水管工). Plumbing was not something he was passionate about. It was just what he did. He was never particularly ambitious, though there was a moment when he and Mum thought of emigrating to Canada, but it came to nothing. Where he came into his own was around the house. He had an "eye for the job." Be it bookshelves or a cupboard—what he could achieve was astonishing.
Of the three options, moors (荒野), woods or river—the river was the one that usually got my vote. On a stretch of the river I was allowed to disappear with my imagination into another world. With a fishing net over my shoulder I could set off in shoes that were last year's model. I'd walk along the river bank looking for a suitable spot where I could take off the painful shoes and leave them with my picnic while I adventured out, peering through the water for any fish that I could scoop up with the net and take home.
I wanted to leave school as soon as possible but that seemed an unlikely prospect until one day my father announced, "They've got a post for an gardener in the Parks Department. I thought you might be interested." He might still have preferred it if I became a carpenter. But I like to feel that somewhere inside him was a feeling that things might just turn out for the best. Maybe I'm cheating myself, but I prefer to believe that in his heart, although he hated gardening himself, he'd watched me doing it for long enough and noticed my unfailing passion for all things that grew and flowered and fruited.