Most people in the UK can remember the great storm of 1987. We’ve all laughed about the BBC weatherman, Michael Fish, who got the forecast so spectacularly wrong and never lived it down. There’s a fantastic clip of what he said that day: ‘Apparently a lady rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, don’t worry, if you’re watching, there isn’t.’ But he was wrong. There was. That October, a hurricane devastated huge parts of the country, and Seaglass nearly disappeared beneath the waves for good. Dad had been on the way to join us to celebrate Nana’s latest children’s book when his car was hit by a falling tree. His visit was meant to be a surprise, but the storm had a bigger one in store.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ Nancy said when the hospital called. Love always trumps hate when you fear you might lose someone for good. She and Nana left immediately, the book launch was cancelled, and Mr Kennedy came to look after me and my sisters for the night, along with Conor.
One night turned into several. Mr Kennedy soon ran out of things to do with a house full of children – even though one of them was his own – so when the weather allowed, he encouraged us to spend as much time as possible outside. He taught us about the flowers and plants he and my mother had introduced to Seaglass – the magnolia tree wasn’t much taller than him back then – but our interest and concentration soon started to fade.
‘Gardening is boring,’ declared Lily, who never liked Conor’s dad. She called him ‘the narrow man’ because he was tall and had grown thin. In some ways I agreed with her assessment. He did look as though life had squeezed him into wearing only narrow thoughts, jumpers and jeans, almost all of which had pockets and holes in. His words were coated in cynicism, even the kind ones, so I could sort of understand why Lily wanted to stay inside and play on her computer.
‘Gardening isn’t boring,’ said Mr Kennedy with a strange smile. ‘One day you might regret spending your life staring at a screen instead of seeing the real world.’ Then he told us a story that was unlike anything I’d heard before. ‘Did you know that spies use plants?’
‘Like James Bond?’ Conor asked.
His father nodded. ‘Yes, but in real life. You were all probably too young to remember, but in 1978, a BBC journalist was killed by a poisoned umbrella.’
There was a brief silence while we processed his unfamiliar words.
‘An umbrella isn’t a plant,’ said Lily.
‘Did he open the umbrella indoors?’ I asked. ‘Nana says it’s very bad luck to do that.’
‘No, Daisy,’ Mr Kennedy replied. ‘Someone walked up to him on Waterloo Bridge, pointed the umbrella at his leg, and then the journalist felt a sharp pain.’
‘Why did someone want to hurt him?’ asked Rose.
‘Because he defected to the West.’
‘What does defected mean?’ Lily asked.
‘Cornwall is in the west . . .’ I started to say.
Mr Kennedy shook his head. ‘It means that he . . . decided to change sides.’
‘Like when people get divorced?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I suppose defecting is a bit like divorce, but even more deadly. The journalist became very ill, very quickly. He was taken to hospital but he died. The point of this story is what was on the tip of that umbrella?’
We all stared at him, feeling a little clueless, but then Rose’s hand shot up as though she were in class. ‘Poison.’
‘Yes, but where did the poison come from?’ None of us knew the answer to that one. ‘The poison on the tip of that umbrella was called ricin, and it came from the seeds of a castor bean plant. The castor bean plant isn’t a rare species, or terribly difficult to grow or find. In fact, it can sometimes be found in gardens. Just like this one.’
Mr Kennedy pointed at the red and green plant in my mother’s garden, and there was a collective – and rather dramatic – intake of breath.
‘So I hope we can all agree that gardening is not boring,’ he said, looking at Lily. ‘Plants can be the perfect partners in crime. Do you know why?’ We all shook our heads again. ‘Because they’ll never grass. Get it?’ His dad jokes were even worse than our father’s. ‘Don’t forget to wipe your feet and take your shoes off before going inside the house. You know how much your mother hates muddy footprints.’
Later, when we were all back indoors, Mr Kennedy made himself busy in the kitchen, trying to cook us some sort of dinner. We ate a lot of fish fingers, chips and beans when he was left in charge. As he rummaged about in Nana’s freezer, I heard Rose and Conor whispering about him.