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As the three gardeners made their way over to the ivy, they passed by the river that they should have been working on yesterday afternoon and Ray read the lads’ minds.
‘River work can wait. It’s the ivy that needs doing,’ he said, walking on without looking anywhere special.
Rob opened the gates up to the Garden That Flows and there it was, the ivy, half-cut and looking like a fat, barelegged man in a t-shirt.
‘It’ll take us all day to get that lot down, so don’t get ahead of yourselves.’
That was an order and the lads understood.
Rob locked up the garden and followed the others towards the wall.
It was decided that, starting from the far right hand side of the wall, Ray would take one ladder and chainsaw almost all the way through the ivy at sections, stopping short so that he could go back and finish the job of hacking with both of the lads catching underneath him.
Soon after starting, he found the reason why the plaster had blown inside the gift shop at the top right hand side.
The massive knuckle revealed to him yesterday could by then be seen to have somehow eaten and bullied its way through the bricks and the plaster to the point of almost taking down that side of the wall. How it had not pushed the wall through years ago was a mystery to Ray, although he knew from his years of experience with such beasts that ivy was capable of concealing its destruction in many ways. Somehow, it could push the brick out from the inside and continue burrowing.
Ray sawed at different angles and the knuckle spat its thick, slimy mess all over his smock until the bulk of it was cut to good measure and could be eased out with the help of one of the lads and a large drill bit to ease it out from the wall by hand.
That would be the tricky part of the whole operation, unless other unforeseen problems presented themselves elsewhere.
After an hour or so, Ray decided that it would be quicker if he threw down the debris across the flowerbed so that the lads could start from the left together.
Rob and Terry began to cut and catch from left to right in the hope that everyone would meet around about the middle of the wall, where the large drainpipe was being held prisoner by the ivy.
Rob found another big knuckle after half an hour and reported it to Ray, who went over to have a look.
‘Well I never,’ said Ray. ‘So that’s why the plumbing’s never been put right. The upstairs toilet’s on the other side. Be careful not to take too much out of it. We’ll pull it out with a drill bit once it’s been cut to size, OK?’
Rob and Terry understood what needed doing, so Ray went back to his section and carried on.
Teatime approached and the sun went in again. A few spots of rain joined them on their way back to the shed for tea and sandwiches.
They each took turns washing their faces and hands at the sink and drying themselves off with towels.
The stickiness of the ivy was spattered all over their smocks so Ray advised the lads to put old newspaper over them to soak up some of the pong.
As they did so, the newspaper darkened into a black mass and sat stuck tight to the fronts of the smocks.
They’d be only good for the bin by the end of the day.
Once back at the garden, the gates were opened and there it was, the remains of the ivy.
The two bored-out knuckles looked like the eyes of a dead elephant, one to the right and one to the left of the wall. The lonely drainpipe in the middle of this horrific sight was its trunk.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Terry. ‘This job’s getting weirder and weirder.’
They all stood by the gates and looked at their work.
‘It’s just a bunch of ivy, lads,’ said Ray. ‘That’s all it is.’
Rob locked up and they set to task immediately.
Each hoped that it would be done by lunchtime, but knew that there was a lot more to this job than they’d previously thought.
Extra care had to be taken around the gutters so as not to break them any more than they already may be, and the drainpipe looked as if it needed a lot of attention.
There would surely be conflict with the ivy at the drainpipe in the middle.
By lunchtime, Rob and Terry had cut through and taken away just over half of the ivy on their side, drilled a bit into their knuckle and sawn it close, while Ray had cut the bulk of his side, leaving the hundreds of branch strands that had eaten into the brick and mortar for chiselling and hacking.
Lunch was taken quickly and Ray told the lads that they could finish up the moment the ivy was down in an attempt to encourage them to get the job done in as little time as was absolutely necessary.
If truth was told, Ray had started to feel light-headed since sitting down for lunch and so did Rob.
The work was intense. The saw and the sap of the ivy dulled the senses.
Terry was unaffected by these feelings of drowsiness, but there was definitely something going on in his stomach. He put it down to his sandwiches and lit a roll-up to accompany the last of his tea.