‘DIG For Victory!” the British people were urged in World War II and, nearly 70 years on, there are many Brits still at it. They cultivate vegetable patches in small garden plots or bigger ones in some of our grander gardens. Many who have no gardens at all work on allotments, that special collection of plots in which gardeners good or bad are still growing veg when not drinking cups of tea in sheds. It is a very special world which has been lovingly recreated in a new Liverpool-made movie, Grow Your Own, co-scripted by Liverpool writer Frank Cottrell Boyce. Boyce has written a bewildering selection of film scripts, from Hilary and Jackie and Welcome to Sarajevo to the children’s fantasy Millions. You never know what he is going to come up with next. Grow Your Own is one of those delightful British comedies with an occasional hard edge, the edge provided by the arrival at an allotment site of various asylum seekers. In some ways, it is almost a potted image of British society today as the asylum seekers are first met with distrust by the regular allotment holders and downright aggression. By the end of the film, most – but not all – have blended in. Boyce’s co-writer on the film was former member of the band, The Farm, and documentary film-maker Carl Hunter, a friend of Boyce. Hunter had made a short fundraising film for the Family Refugee Support Project, based in Liverpool, which had the bright idea of providing allotment sites for traumatised refugees, the theory being that growing things is actually therapeutic. It is run by Swiss-born Margrit Ruegg, who is still struggling to get funds for the idea. Hunter later made three very short, space-filling, documentaries for Channel Four and the idea began for something more substantial. “Carl and I meet every week for a pint and I knew from the beginning what was going on and kept pushing him to make a feature length documentary,” Boyce explains. It sounded a good idea but the asylum-seekers were not keen to appear on film for obvious reasons. “They got worried and nervous about making a film and basically Carl thought it would only make things more stressful for them. | 
