Morgan Ratcliffe locked the car door, opened the allotment gate wearily, and crept like a snail on Mogadon up the rise. Long Covid wasn’t going to beat him.
Alice Rees had lent him a small part of her allotment plot to assist his recovery. She’d also lent her neighbour – he lived several doors down from her – a few long-handled tools. Ratcliffe came daily in all weathers, scratched at weeds with a rake, turned a few inches of earth with a hoe, and half an hour later limped back to his car. Occasionally Alice discreetly removed clumps of weeds and sowed a few seeds on the strip. Otherwise Ratcliffe’s labours would’ve been wholly in vain.
Three months after starting, Ratcliffe’s health was unchanged. His walk was still laboured, his actions and thought as if made in slow motion. ‘I do what I can,’ he muttered. He was a tall, elderly man, his rugged features putting Alice in mind of a rocky steep. His cheekbones were hollowed out, his shoulders sunken, his expression as bleak as hard snow in the Brecon Beacons.
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