The Magic Apple Tree

by Susan Hill

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.