An innocent rhubarb growing competition between a couple of best friends escalates into full scale growing combat and violence in Part I of this tragi-comic satire. Part 2 later this week.
by Chris Harris
Illustration by Louise Turner
Big Dave and CJ were the best of friends. They spent the first twenty years of their adult lives drinking, partying, going to gigs, clubbing, football matches, and debauched holidaying—a gloriously hellraising existence.
They then spent the next twenty years sitting in the pub, whenever they met, reminiscing about the antics of the first twenty years as age crept up on them.
Of course, it would be crass to compare the Rhubarb War and its origins to those of the First World War. It was merely the same gradual chain of small, incremental events, things so harmless and innocuous at the time, that nobody involved could possibly have imagined how unexpectedly serious the consequences would eventually become.
In 2015, CJ bought a house in Lewes. In the garden stood a huge, well-established rhubarb plant. CJ loved that rhubarb plant, but by the time he decided to move to nearby Denham, he had exhausted his repertoire of ideas for rhubarb-related dishes, and subsequently, his appetite for the fruit had diminished. Truthfully, by then, he was thoroughly sick of it.
No sooner had he moved in than he began to grieve for his plant; he had previously bombarded it with love and attention, and somehow his life was just not the same without it.
But he began to spend time in the Denham pubs, The Red Lion and The George and Dragon, and gradually he felt less bereft as he met new people and other interests began to supersede the delights of the plant.
When Big Dave used to pop up for a visit, he couldn’t help but fall in love with the little village.
Dave had been living in Torquay for the last decade, running a nightclub, ‘Club Daytona.’ But it had ceased being fun, and CJ had suggested a house in the village was coming up for auction. Soon, Dave was ensconced in a nice little pile on the outskirts of the village, on the road adjacent to CJ’s.
Now, nearly sixty, they assumed they had both retired from their previous lifestyles and drifted to the safer fringes of older middle age and with it the heightened concerns of their own mortality. They were both expecting a long retirement with the proverbial pipe and slippers to soothe the path to their respective graves.
But it turns out, there was a reasonable amount of life left in their tanks.
Against all reasonable medical advice, they had somehow managed to revert back to the drinking habits of their youth, admittedly with less gusto now, owing to the undeniable realities of sixty-year-old bodies.
Friday nights were usually spent in The Red Lion or The George and Dragon. Saturdays involved a slow crawl around the pubs of Lewes, always ending at The King’s Head, where the pair used to make a general nuisance of themselves decades ago.
Most of the old regulars had gone. They had died, stopped drinking or simply moved away. Once the life and soul of these places, now they sat at the bar reliving past glories, often to intrigued new visitors and tourists who found the pair sweetly quaint, short balding CJ and his customary pork pie hat, and the intimidating skin headed 6 ft 6 Dave, covered in tattoos, normally wearing a Motorhead T-shirt and a long ZZ Top beard.
One evening, a new beverage appeared on the counter at The Red Lion.
Rhubarb cider. ‘My God,’ Dave said eventually after downing it in one. ‘I bloody love rhubarb.’
At last, a fresh interest for the pair, looking forward, not backwards, had emerged to tickle their fancy, as CJ began recounting his own history with rhubarb. Dave’s interest had been sparked by a short romance with the rep from West and Lakes, a West Country drinks supplier, who was partial to the stuff.
‘Come on, CJ, let’s see who can grow the best plant in a tub.’ Whilst acknowledging the tragedy of their life trajectory and interests devolving from their old hedonism to growing rhubarb, they both saw the funny side of it.
The next morning, CJ texted Dave to say he had found a rhubarb plant, which he was going to call ‘Custard’, on Facebook Marketplace for eight pounds. He drove to the allotment on Earwig Corner just outside Lewes and picked it up. The seller, Harriet, was a wily old gardener who wrote down instructions and tips on planting and maintaining. By late afternoon, he had sent Dave a photo with the message, ‘Let the battle commence!’
Both men had relatively sizeable gardens. CJ liked to refer to his as a cottage garden, although this was an exaggeration, as he wasn’t actually very good at gardening, but liked the idea of it. Dave had a neat and tidy garden as he paid a gardener to come in two hours a week to keep it spick and span. CJ had always joked it looked like a twee old lady’s garden.
Dave had done rather well from Club Daytona. The nightclub years had left him flush, just as well, as he loved his ‘toys’: a flash car, expensive hi-fi, anything that involved technology, Dave had to have the best. Whereas CJ was perpetually skint, always pleading poverty, although it was estimated he still managed to spend £5,000 a year in the local pubs.
Dave had already spent the morning sinking his teeth into Artificial Intelligence to find the best and most productive plant for the area. He researched the optimum-sized planter, the exact place to put it in the garden, weather-defined watering schedules, nutrients, feeds, and—crikey—even the best trowel! He hot-footed it to Caterham, home to a specialist rhubarb purveyor, and bought an imposing—dare one say, aggressive-looking—Victoria variety. The plant oozed an intense aura of productivity, which, at £75, it bloody well needed to. Dave knew absolutely nothing about gardening, operating purely on the principle that the heaviest price tag guaranteed the finest specimen.
Over the course of Sunday, Dave launched into a rearguard action, bombarding CJ with photographs of all his new accumulated horticultural accoutrements. By late afternoon, Dave triumphantly announced the next-day delivery of an enormous terracotta pot intended to house his plant. ‘Has to be a 24-inch diameter, CJ,’ he texted.
CJ, increasingly irritated by all this, returned to Facebook Marketplace and bought an old galvanised zinc bin for a tenner. He dug some soil to mix in with the remnants of his compost bags and sent Dave a picture of his puny plant, which already looked withered because of the transplant, along with his spade and empty compost bags. He included the tagline ‘Car boot rhubarb!’ hoping the irony wouldn’t be lost on Dave—which it was.‘The problem with metal is that it dries the soil in the heat,’ Dave replied annoyingly.
In all the years they had known each other, there had never once been tension between Dave and CJ. They were both fundamentally happy-go-lucky men. They had always looked out for each other, always allowed the other to make his own mistakes without interference. Their friendship had survived nightclub fights, failed businesses, ex-girlfriends, terrible hangovers, and several incidents that were still technically inadvisable to discuss publicly.
But that Sunday night, after hours of being bombarded with Dave’s increasingly elaborate updates, CJ found himself slightly miffed.
Lying in bed, he kicked himself for not establishing better parameters from the outset, whilst baffled as to how an exercise in exploration ended up being a competition. There should have been rules. Dave had apparently decided to spend something approaching two hundred and fifty pounds on his side of the battle, whereas CJ’s own budget remained somewhere around fifteen quid for a plant and an old dustbin. It was a shame, but hey ho, just go along with it, after all, it was funny watching Dave get so serious over something. Anyway, why did he even care? Couldn’t he just laugh it off and tell Dave his plant was attacked by slugs and retire from the competition?
Big Dave was fundamentally bored. Going from running a busy nightclub to living in a village with only his ailing cat for company, Dave only really had weekends with CJ to look forward to as he sought new interests to fill his retirement. CJ was pleased that he had found a hobby, although tending a rhubarb plant was not that ambitious, but a start, so he felt obliged to go along with it.
The next morning, he picked up his phone to discover another message from Dave.
‘I’m gonna love my rhubarb so much,’ it read. ‘Last night I sang to it.’
CJ snorted to himself. It was funny, but it angered him. Yet, as he sat there staring at the message, his faint irritation deepened into something else entirely. Because a small part of him began to suspect this wasn’t just banter but had a whiff of yah boo sucks, to it.
A message from Dave the next week irked CJ. It showed off a new garden screen designed to regulate the plant’s sunlight. A further message at the end of the week included a photo of Dave with a tape measure, displaying the impressive—CJ had to painfully admit—growth of ‘Crumble’.’Very original!’ came the peevish response from CJ, quickly followed by, ‘Amazing what you can do when you throw money at it, Dave!!!!!!’
CJ hated himself for getting so wound up, was it an age thing? He began to examine why he was so irrationally hacked off with Dave being Dave but found no answers. CJ had named his plant, so why did Dave coming up with a name for his matter?
While they were still best buddies and still met for a couple of drinks at the start of the evening, they no longer spent entire nights together. More often than not, they’d drift off and talk to other people. Nobody really noticed, or at least nobody commented on it. But both Dave and CJ knew the cracks had started to appear, and both realised it was time to reel themselves back in. Things had gone too far. Once something like that takes hold, pulling it back is easier said than done. Dave knew he had taken the competition too seriously and CJ knew he had taken Dave’s competitive streak too seriously. But neither of them ever mentioned the touchy subject in the pub. Dave tactfully stopped the email exchanges about the plants and gradually they started going to separate pubs. It wasn’t a deliberate ploy from either of them, just a realisation they needed a break from each other, both too emotionally undeveloped to speak openly about the situation, hoping it would sort itself out.
To be continued. Concluding episode later this week.
