The Naked Gardening Day Box Set is out on 5th November!
Remember the five gay romance stories we released back in May to celebrate World Naked Gardening Day? Well we have gathered them together in a box set. We had a bit of to-and-fro-ing about what to use for the cover, but eventually we all agreed this was a superb image–radishes and forearms! What more could you want!
They are all MM romance novellas featuring being naked in a garden somehow, somewhere, to mark World Naked Gardening Day on 7th May 2022.
Back when they came out, we did some visiting of each other’s blogs to chat about our stories. You can find everyone’s guest posts here on the blog with a little bit about each story and an excerpt.
Today is release day today for Warning! Deep Water, my World Naked Gardening Day story! The World Naked Gardening Day authors are Holly Day, Nell Iris, K. L. Noone, Amy Spector and I. We have all written gay romance novella’s based around World Naked Gardening Day, which happens on the first Saturday in May. Which is today! They are all releasing today with JMS Books and you can read about each of them here.
Warning! Deep Water is a 16,300 word gay romance set in the UK in 1947. George and Peter are two shy, quiet men I really enjoyed writing. They have a supporting cast of characters I would have liked to have had more space to flesh out; but sixteen thousand words is sixteen thousand words, so I was only able to give glimpses of them.
What I was also able to give glimpses of was the story setting.
My story is set on a horticultural nursery inspired very strongly by the place I grew up. I think will come as no surprise to anyone who actually reads the story that I do think of it as a character in its own right.
I think that’s less to do with my writing craft than a huge glob of self-insertion. Is it self-insertion if you put a place in? It feels like it might be, in this case anyway!
Growing up, the nursery always felt like a living being, with its own heartbeat. It needed taking care of—our days were structured around its needs. Literally the same as a person…it needed warming or cooling, water and food.
We had stoke-holes and boilers that blew warm air into the greenhouses to heat them. In the summer we had to open and shut the roof-vents and the doors for optimal air-flow to stop plants dying of heat. We’d have to remember to put newspaper over the buckets of flowers waiting to be bunched and sold in the WW2-era Nissen Hut we used as a packing shed if it was particularly cold at night to avoid them being frosted. The big bore-hole pumped water up from deep underground through hundreds of feet of pipe. Sometimes that was applied directly to the plants with the big hosepipes. Sometimes it first went in to the tank, where plant food could be added before the little pump moved it on out to where it needed to be. We got regular donations of manure from local farmers that were spread on the fallow ground between crops and then rotovated or trodden in.
We could never go and do anything as a family without taking in to account what the nursery would need whilst we were away. Our family holidays were in the autumn because in the high summer everything in the three acres under glass needed watering every other day. If we went out on a day-trip, we’d have to be home at dusk to shut up the hens.
Did I resent the hell out of it as a child?
Yeah. I did. I really, really did.
But looking back as an adult, it really was a semi-idyllic childhood; and I hope that comes across in this story. I know we often look back at where and how we grew up and we forget things—either the bad things or the good things, I guess, depending on how we feel overall about our experience. I’ve pretty much let the resentment go (really, despite the preceding paragraphs!). I feel I was able to take the good things I remember; the smell of the fine red soil in the dry greenhouses; the rich, deep greens the water tank; the sense of nurturing and growth and seasonal renewal that were always there in the background and make them a part of who I am and how I approach my life.
So…yes. In this story, the setting is definitely another character. Perhaps the most important one. Certainly the one I feel closest to, however much I love Peter and George.
Warning! Deep Water
It’s 1947. George is going through the motions, sowing seeds and tending plants and harvesting crops. The nursery went on without him perfectly well during the war and he spends a lot of time during the working day hiding from people and working on his own. In the evening he prowls round the place looking for odd jobs to do.
It’s been a long, cold winter and Peter doesn’t think he’ll ever get properly warm or clean again. Finding a place with heated greenhouses and plenty of nooks and crannies to kip in while he’s recovering from nasty flu was an enormous stroke of luck. He’s been here a few days now. The weather is beginning to warm up and he’s just realised there’s a huge reservoir of water in one of the greenhouses they use to water the plants. He’s become obsessed with getting in and having an all-over wash.
What will George do when he finds a scraggy ex-soldier bathing in his reservoir? What will Peter do? Is it time for them to both stop running from the past and settle down?
A Naked Gardening Day short story of 16,300 words.
“You didn’t say you liked music,” Peter said, as they were sitting across the table from each other over a cup of tea, once he’d finally pulled himself away from the instrument and reverentially closed the keyboard.
“Well,” said Peter. “It didn’t come up, did it?” He paused. “Mother used to play a bit,” he said, eventually. “Not like that, though. Hymns, mostly. She was big on chapel.”
There was clearly a story there.
“It’s nice to hear it played,” George went on. “Instruments should be used, not just sat there as part of the furniture. And…,” he paused again and blushed, “And you play very well.”
“Well,” said Peter shuffling with embarrassment. “I learned as a nipper and just carried on with it. Dad wanted me to go and study somewhere, but I wanted to get out and earn. It would have taken the joy out of it if I’d had to pass exams and such.”
George nodded. “I can see that. And you’re good with your hands.” He blushed again and became very absorbed with mashing the tiny amount of butter left from the ration into his baked potato.
Peter coughed. “Well yes,” he said. He couldn’t help smiling a little at George, although he didn’t let him see. He forged on. He really didn’t want him to be uncomfortable. “I think mathematics and music sort of go together, you know? And I was always good with numbers as well…it’s a good trait in a joiner.”
George nodded, clearly feeling they were on less dangerous territory. “Yes,” he said. “There’s all sorts of things you can use maths for; but music is pretty rarefied, isn’t it?”
Peter nodded. “This way I get to keep the music and earn a living. There’s always work for a carpenter, like you said the other day.”
He gradually became less self-conscious about playing when George and Mrs Leland were in the house over the next few weeks. It made him feel like another piece of what made him a person was coming back to life.
****
What it didn’t do was make him any less confused about what was happening between him and George. Half the time he thought George was completely uninterested. But then something would happen that would make him reconsider. The comment about being good with his hands was a case in point. It was a perfectly commonplace thing to say and George shouldn’t have been embarrassed. But he had been. Which meant he’d thought of it in a context that might cause embarrassment.
Peter spent several very enjoyable hours spread over several evenings working through different variations of what the other man might have been thinking.
George was nobody’s Bogart. But he was decent-looking. Nice face, especially when he smiled. A bit soft round the middle, but otherwise hard muscled from the physical work he did day in, day out. Clever…did his own accounts. Liked music. Made Peter laugh with his dry commentary on things in the paper or local gossip and the social pickles the girls reported on in the break room.
Peter liked him a lot. And fancied him. After the third night of considering at length how he could demonstrate how good with his hands he actually was, he gave up pretending. He fancied George a lot.
The Naked Gardening Day stories are a collaboration between Holly Day, Nell Iris, A. L. Lester, K. L. Noone and Amy Spector. They comprise five MM romance novellas featuring being naked in a garden somehow, somewhere, to mark World Naked Gardening Day on 7th May 2022.
For #SampleSunday this week, I have the first bit of Warning! Deep Water for you in a blatant attempt to tempt you into a pre-order now it’s up on Amazon :). Meet George and Peter, finding their feet again after the second world war.
Chapter 1 – The Stranger – George
George wrote the final cheque, put it in its envelope and wrote the address on it, threw it in the stack to be posted, and pushed the pile of paperwork away with a sigh. There, that was it. The month’s bills paid. And a bit left in the bank. A good month, then, especially after such a long, hard, winter.
He rubbed his hands up over his face and into his hair, easing the tension out of his forehead by pulling at it. It needed cutting. He’d ask Mrs Leland to do it for him when she came back in the morning. For now though, he’d been inside all day…it was time for a walk round the place, check that the vents and doors on the greenhouses were closed, and stretch his legs.
“Come on Polly,” he said to the dog stretched out in front of the Rayburn as he stood up. “On your feet!”
She raised her head and looked at him enquiringly, not sure whether he was really going out and not just moving round the kitchen to put the kettle on.
“Walk time,” he told her. “I’ll put my boots on and we can go. I want to see how they’ve got on with planting the Christmas chrysants.” It seemed like it had been lettuces and tomatoes for interminable years now—they’d started growing them at the beginning of the war to feed the troops stationed locally and had only been allowed to keep a minimal amount of flowers planted every year to keep their stocks fresh. This was the first year he’d been able to plan for a Christmas flower crop since 1939.
Once Polly could see he wasn’t kidding her, she got to her feet and stretched as George collected the heavy ring of keys from the hook beside the door and got his boots out of the boot cupboard. She was an old dog now, going on twelve…he should probably think about getting a pup, but he was comfortable as he was and didn’t want the bother of training one. Just as well, for over the past winter they’d spent most of the time hunkered down by the fire when they weren’t trying to clear the snow off the glasshouse roofs to avoid collapse. Perhaps later in the year, if things continued to look up, he’d think about it more seriously.
He took his slippers off and slid his feet into his wellingtons. He didn’t bother with his jacket, it was quite warm for the front end of May, even though it was late in the evening, just getting dark. Polly snaked around his legs and out of the door, waiting for him on the path. “Come on then, girl,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
They wound their way idly down past the break room toward the packing shed first, enjoying the mild evening and the dimpsy light. The lettuces they’d picked today were stacked in crates, ready to take down to the wholesaler in the morning. He shut the door, with the little lift needed to ease it onto the threshold and get it to latch. Locked it with the big, bent key. Made sure the tool shed was padlocked. Shut up the hens.
He looked into the big boiler house they used to heat the houses they were using for tomatoes and threw a bit more coal in. It had been a clear day, warm for the time of year, but he didn’t want to let the boilers out quite yet, it was still chilly at night.
Shutting the doors and releasing the levers to lower the ceiling vents in each of the long glasshouses, he made his way around the looping path until it turned and he began to make his way back toward the house.
Polly ran on ahead as usual, her initial stiffness worked out of her joints by this point in their evening perambulation. As she got to the top of the path by the smaller glasshouse where they grew on the young plants, she began to bark.
It wasn’t her rabbit-bark or her squirrel-bark. It was her here’s something odd bark.
George lengthened his stride to catch up with her.
“What’s up, girly?” he asked. “Fox?” It wasn’t her fox-bark, either.
As he drew level with her and turned the corner, he saw what she was barking at. There was someone in the pump house with the big water tank, at the end of one of the houses of young tomatoes. He could see them moving through the glass walls.
“Oi!” he shouted, as he began to run toward them, wellies slopping as he ran. “Oi! What’s going on?” The figure inside, who hadn’t seemed disturbed by the dog, moved sharply, clearly swinging round to face him.
He reached the door and pulled it open. It was a man. He had just climbed out of the mossy, green depths of the ten-thousand gallon tank. He was dripping wet, and completely naked.
George slammed to a halt as if he’d hit a brick wall, staring open mouthed.
The Naked Gardening Day stories are a collaboration between Holly Day, Nell Iris, A. L. Lester, K. L. Noone and Amy Spector. They comprise five MM romance novellas featuring being naked in a garden somehow, somewhere, to mark World Naked Gardening Day on 7th May 2022.
