The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 31

I saw him more clearly when he worked in the garden at the front (or back) of his cottage, and most clearly of all when he worked in his wire-fenced bedding-out plot, turning over the soft, dark, much-sifted earth below the old hawthorn tree. That brought back very old memories to me, of Trinidad, of a small house my father had once built on a hill and a garden he had tried to get started in a patch of cleared bush; old memories of dark, wet, warm earth and green things growing, old instincts, old delights. And I had an immense feeling for Jack, for the strength and curious delicacy of his forking-and-sifting gesture, the harmony of hand and foot. I saw too, as the months went by, his especial, exaggerated style with clothes: bare-backed in summer at the first hint of sun, muffled up as soon as the season turned. I grew to see his clothes as emblematic of the particular season: like something from a modern Book of Hours.