Anita Thursby had been dreading the gas engineer coming to service her boiler. They would have needed to enter her kitchen, where the window looked into the jungle of swirling, 2-metre-high brambles that made up her back garden, and her shame had spiralled. For the same reason, the 54-year-old had stopped inviting friends over to her house and had been living in fear of a complaint from her housing association.
Maintaining the garden had slipped from her grasp, becoming a source of constant worry, yet pride had stopped her asking for help – and tight finances from paying for it. Family barbecues had become a distant memory, even though she longed to have her 83-year-old mother round to sit in the sun; weeks ago, she bought a grill in Tesco with little hope of ever using it. Stephen Jalland nods as she explains all this.
Sweat, from the exertion of hacking through the weeds clawing at Thursby’s bungalow, is running down his face. His arms are crisscrossed with old scratches and the ruby-red blood of new ones, smearing into sticky blackberry-juice stains. Thursby describes Jalland as “family”, but in truth they met just days ago.
That was when he arrived to start clearing her garden for nothing – an act of generosity he has performed for about a dozen people with similarly overgrown outside spaces since launching a “free mows” service on Facebook in June. And it is that matter-of-factness for which she is most grateful. Jalland, 57, did not blink when he arrived.
More specifically, the realisation that there is too much of it in the world. It all started one afternoon in June when, finding himself with time on his hands as his new handyman business struggled to pick up work, he scrolled through a community Facebook group and noticed a post about an overgrown lawn. When he arrived and offered his help, the man thanked him, then began to explain why his garden was as it was.
When his mower broke, he couldn’t afford to replace it.” Jalland spent two hours cutting the overgrowth and removing rubbish. Meanwhile, the man made him a curry. Jalland returned the following week to do his back garden, too.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
