Miss Hawkins had seen it all. At least she told people that she had seen it all. She told her few friends about her cabaret life when she had toured all Europe and was the toast of the richest man in Baghdad. According to herself she had had lovers of all nationalities, endless proposals of marriage, champagne in every known vessel, not forgetting the slipper. Yet Miss Hawkins had always had a soft spot for gardening and in Beirut she had planted roses, hers becoming the first English rose garden in the far-off spicy land. She told how she watered them at dawn as she returned accompanied, or unaccompanied, from one of her sallies.

But time passes and when Mrs Hawkins was fifty-five she was no longer in gold meshed suits dashing from one capital to the next. She taught private dancing to supplement her income and eventually she worked in a municipal garden. As time went by, the gardening was more dear to her than ever her cabaret had been. How she fretted over it, over the health of the soil, over the flowers and the plants, over the overall design and what the residents thought of it. Her success with it became more and more engrossing. She introduced things that had not been there before and her greatest pride was that the silly old black railing was now smothered with sweet-smelling honeysuckle and other climbing things.