The Magic Apple Tree

by Susan Hill

But in winter, when we all scurry back into our individual burrows, and no one lingers, we need to be able to see each other’s houses and lights, for reassurance.

for one of the richest pleasures of domestic life is, and has always been, filling the house with the smells of food, of baking bread and cakes, bubbling casseroles and simmering soups, of vegetables fresh from the garden and quickly steamed, of the roasting of meat, of new-ground coffee and pounded spices and chopped herbs, of hot marmalade and jam and jelly.

Because the sight of so many foods is similarly attractive, I keep rows of glass jars full of dried beans and lentils and rice ranged on open wooden shelves; black-eyed and dark red kidney beans, orange and earthy brown lentils, lettuce-green flageolets and chick peas the colour of cornmeal; the jars have cork stoppers and are practical as well as pretty, because we have never altogether cured the damp in Moon Cottage, and the larder is not a good place for storing any dried goods in packets.

Walnut and apple tea-bread 2oz walnuts, chopped 1 large cooking apple 4oz soft margarine or butter 4oz raisins 4oz brown sugar 2 eggs 1 tablespoon honey 6oz S. R. flour 2oz wholemeal flour Pinch mixed spice if liked (I don’t) Pinch salt Use

Gardening writers, I have come to the conclusion, live in some other world, an ideal land in which the weather always behaves as it should and is entirely predictable, month by month, season by season.

Because there is always spinach in the kitchen garden, except in April, when the old plants have gone to seed and the new are not yet established, we often have eggs Florentine – poached eggs, or oeufs mollets, on a bed of spinach. I steam the spinach for a few minutes, chop it, reheat it with butter, salt and black pepper, put the eggs in hollows on the top, and pour a light cheese sauce (Cheddar or Gruyère) over the lot, and brown it under the grill.

Then, I tried steaming the stuff, and the result was perfection, chunks of rose-tinted, cooked but absolutely firm, shapely rhubarb. I have thrown out all the recipes for mush, for fools and jams and whips and sponge-toppings, and now we have the still-warm fruit, sprinkled with a lot of demerara sugar and covered in clotted cream. I also like it with thick, goat-milk yoghurt, which I get, until I can find a way of keeping two goats myself, from the Bruins at Scattercotes. It is also good flavoured with snippets of orange or lemon rind, and you can put a vanilla pod in the steamer, as well as in the jam.

Mr Elder, a good, old-fashioned country gardener, was in hospital last spring, for almost six weeks, and when he was fit enough to be out and doing again in his garden it was May. Even I had sown most things by then and they were coming on well enough, whilst his plot still looked bare and brown. In a couple of days, in his quiet, unhurried, steady way, born of seventy-odd years’ practice, he had accomplished more than takes me a couple of weeks, and by the end of June his crops were further forward than mine. My beans and peas had simply been sitting in the cold soil waiting to germinate when the sun eventually shone, his went straight into the nicely warmed-up ground and came through within days. After seeing that, I stopped fretting every March,

My list read, in no particular order, new potatoes, peas, mange-tout peas, broad beans, French beans, runner beans, courgettes, spinach, celeriac, leeks, sprouts, broccoli, very early turnips (Jersey navets), asparagus, globe artichokes, lettuce, shallots, Florence fennel.

A lot of people derided the Bruins when they arrived, and a lot of people would gloat if they threw in the sponge, but I should be sorry, and for the village, too, because they bring the right spirit to us, unacquisitive, loving, relaxed, the opposite of time-serving, and they have a contentment and a stillness, in spite of their troubles, which makes their company so refreshing.

Albertine, of course. If there were only one rose in the world I should want it to be Albertine, that glorious cascade of the pinkest pink.

There is a cottage further up the lane whose whole front beneath its thatch is covered on one side with the rose Albertine and on the other with a sweetly-scented honeysuckle, and the two meet in the middle, to entwine and entangle in each other’s arms over the front porch. To walk by on a warm June evening is to be transported.

There is a smell in the air, the smell of autumn, a yeasty, damp, fruity smell, carrying a hint of smoke and a hint, too, of decay. It fills me with nostalgia, but I do not know for what. It is a smell I love, for this is and has always been my favourite season.

But I have never been let down by autumn, to me it is always beautiful, always rich, it always gives in heaping measure, and sometimes it can stretch on into November, fading, but so gently, so slowly, like a very old person whose dying is protracted but peacefully, in calmness. And I love the wild days of autumn, the west winds that rock the apple tree and bring down the leaves and fruit and nuts in showers, and the rain after the days of summer dryness. I love the mists and the first frosts that make the ground crisp and whiten the foliage of the winter vegetables.

In summer in this wood every tree looks much like every other, though of course if you are close up, you can distinguish them by the shape of the leaves, and in the open, where they stand in ones and twos, by the shape of the whole body of the tree. Now though, in decay, the trees have become distinct, separate again, they take back their individual character, for no two species are the same in shading and depth of colour. I stand still and see sulphur-yellow and bright, bright gold, copper and tawny owl’s feather brown, sienna and umber and every kind of nut, and the whole pattern breaks like a child’s kaleidoscope as a sudden wind blows over the wood, becomes mottled, darker, and then lighter, as the leaves show their backs.

In the kitchen, autumn is my favourite season, too, because it is preserving time – jams and jellies, chutneys and pickles, fruit butters and cheeses, and the whole, glorious session rounded off with the making of the mincemeat, to be stored until Christmas.

Earlier in the month, I walked up to the village notice board and put up a card, begging for the loan or gift of glass jars, because however many I have, full, each year, the wheel only ever seems to come about half-circle again in the form of emptied and returned ones. People in Barley are very good indeed about responding to such notices: within a couple of days, I have been telephoned several times and gone off to collect bicycle baskets full of jars, and carrier bags and boxes of them have appeared anonymously on the doorstep.

I would be more than happy to buy Primrose’s plums but they come free, in exchange for a lot of runner beans that I brought up to her earlier, when mine throve abundantly and hers were late and scanty.

together we pick twelve pounds, which I take down the lane on the bicycle basket, followed by a long streamer of wasps.

Spiced plums Choose unblemished fruit, not over-ripe. Wash. Dry. Prick all over with a needle. Pack into bottling jars with wide necks, and, if you can, put a blackcurrant leaf between each layer. Add a few cloves and a cinnamon stick. Boil 1 pint pickling vinegar with 12oz sugar (demerara for preference) for 5 minutes, until syrupy. Pour over the plums. Cool. Cover tightly. Keep at least 2 months, preferably longer, before serving.

apple

Apple jelly recipe that is several pages!!

That was when I shared a communal garden in a town, with ten neighbours. Our houses had been built on the site of a much older house, and some of the original trees, including a crab apple, had been left intact. Week by week, I watched from my kitchen window as the fruit reddened and no one took any notice of it. When I went round the houses suggesting tentatively that I might pick it to make crab apple jelly, simply because I couldn’t bear to watch it all go to waste on the ground, not only did no one else claim the apples, or object, they came to help. Two young men next door stripped the tree for me from top (and it was high) to bottom, and everyone looked out jars. I made twenty-three pounds of crab apple jelly that year, and all the pulp of it went through that old pillow-case, and it took me a whole week. The neighbours were intrigued and delighted, they had a whip-round for the cost of all the sugar, in return for which I shared out the jelly. The following year, someone else gave me a hand with the chopping and cooking and so the whole thing went on, for seven years, until I moved away. But, by then, they didn’t need me, jelly-making was an established, annual neighbourly event.

Still, as Stanley says when confronted with the thornless, cultivated variety on sale at nursery gardens, ‘Brambles should be free – but not easy.’

At the end of this day, I am stung, scratched, sore and stained, and the kitchen smells marvellous. There are rows of glowing jars on the dresser shelves, like so many jewels, deep red, orange, burgundy, pale pink, pale green, purple-black.

The asparagus foliage is beautiful, graceful and delicate, and I can see why flower arrangers always want to steal it, but they are kept at bay. In November, it is beginning to go yellow and to shrivel and must be cut down, and the whole bed covered in soil and, if possible, some seaweed – failing that, well-rotted manure.

wanted to acquire a good. second-hand, old-fashioned wooden one, like the cucumber frame into which Bill the lizard fell in Alice in Wonderland, but

Colton is watching this exact scene as I am reading this!!

There are plant clumps which have been divided, too, alchemilla mollis, the flower arranger’s delight, which I cannot get rid of from the garden of Moon Cottage, so invasive is it, but which others prize and covet, for its beauty when covered with thousands of water-drops, from dew or rain, caught like diamonds on a pincushion.

I have put up three pounds of my dwarf burgundy French beans, and there they lie, purple as grapes. Everyone looks at them suspiciously.

The only W.I. branch I know is that in Barley. It is friendly, informal, not too high-powered, but by no means, therefore, frivolous in its activities. There are a lot of good talks, on travel, on country life and conservation, on crafts, on the local past. There is drinkable tea and excellent home-made refreshments, and conversation which is sometimes gossip, but not only gossip, and when it is, I have never noticed that it is backbiting or malicious.