The Shed With the Visitors Book

At the far end of the allotments on Cowper Lane there is a shed that belongs to nobody in particular. It leans slightly. It contains a kettle, a tin of teabags that is always somehow half full, three mismatched mugs, a folding chair with one repaired leg, and a notebook hanging from a nail by the door on a loop of green garden twine.

The notebook began as a practical thing. A woman with a plot near the gate used to water the communal tomatoes in dry weeks and wanted the next person to know she had already done it, so she wrote the date and the word tomatoes and left it hanging where anyone would see it. That would have been the end of it, except that the next person wrote underneath, thank you, and then added that the beans looked thirsty too.

That is how it goes now, and has gone for fourteen years. The entries are mostly weather and water. Some are notices: slugs are winning on plot nine, the gate hinge needs a screw, there is too much rhubarb again, please take some. Some are apologies, usually about a borrowed trowel. Somebody in 2017 drew a very good picture of a courgette that had got out of hand, and somebody else, two pages later, drew it larger.

Nobody wrote the rules down, but everyone follows them. The date goes first. You sign however you like, so the book is full of first names, plot numbers, initials and one person who has only ever been The Onions. Nothing is ever crossed out. When a book is full it goes into a biscuit tin under the bench and a new one goes on the nail, and there are now nine tins, stacked, with the years written on masking tape along the side.

The entry everyone mentions is from a girl who wrote, in careful pencil in the summer of 2011, that she was nine and this was her first tomato and it was not very big. Eight years later a young woman turned up, asked whether the old books were still there, found the page and read it standing in the doorway, then wrote in the current book that she was back, that the tomato had been small but she had gone on to do better, and that the shed smelled exactly the same.

Books like this turn up wherever people pass through a place one at a time. The bothies in the Scottish hills keep them, and walkers fill them with weather reports, bad poems and warnings about the stream crossing. Mountain summits have registers. Guest houses have visitors books, and so do village churches, lighthouses and long-distance footpaths. Every one of them is the same object: a record kept by strangers for strangers, with nobody in charge of it.

What makes them work is who they are written for. You are not writing to an audience you can see, and you will probably never meet the person who reads it, which takes the performance out of it entirely. People write more plainly and more kindly than they would anywhere else, because the only thing worth putting down is something that would genuinely help or cheer up whoever comes next. The kettle is what brings people into the shed. The notebook is the reason they stay ten minutes longer than they meant to, which is usually about as long as it takes for the kettle to boil twice.