The Three Graces and I are all wedding junkies, lurking outside the church as the happy couples emerge, although this was a habit I had so far managed to keep from Ben, who was stubbornly anti-Establishment in the matter of legal wedlock. He hadnt always been so adamant about it; it sort of came over him by degrees while he was a student.
Ill try, but I have a wedding cake to ice and more green tomato chutney to make. Ill put some in your fruit and veg box later, shall I? And did you say you wanted some frozen blackberries? Ive got loads.
Lovely, she agreed, preparing to cycle off, yes, please. Dorrie Spottiswodes giving us some apples, so we can make apple and bramble pies. Pansys knitting her a tam in exchange, from some leftover mohair. We thought that was about equal value in Acorns.
Pansy isnt some kind of ingenious squirrelAcorns are simply a unit of currency I devised a few years ago, to help a little group of us to swap produce and services.
You can have the latest copy of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine too. Ive read it. And I must finish off the next instalment of Cakes and Ale and get it off to them, I added guiltily. My deadline was always the twentieth of the month, which wasnt that far away.
Righty-oh, see you later! Violet cried gaily, and then cycled off round the Green to Poona Place, leaning forward over her handlebars, earflaps flipped backwards like psychedelic spaniels ears, while I, suddenly shivering, went back inside.
In the kitchen, under a tea towel, Ben had arranged root vegetables and green tomatoes into a heart shape and added a carrot arrow.
It was a pity hed created this earthy symbol of our love on the immaculately clean marble surface dedicated to making my wedding cakes, but it still made me smile.
Later, sitting in our cosy living room overlooking the garden, logs burning in the stove and a glass of Violets non-alcoholic but fiery ginger cordial by my elbow (three Acorns per bottle), I was trying to wrap up the latest episode of my long-running Cakes and Ale column for the alternative womens magazine.
Id written the obligatory whats-happening-with-the-garden-and-the-hens bit, describing Septembers mad scramble to get all the fruit and vegetables harvested and stored, clamped, preserved or turned into alcohol, processes that were still ongoing, if not quite so frenetic. Some things, like the elderberries, were quite over and well on the way to being turned into ruby-red wine.
I do love the season of mellow fruitfulness, and theres nothing quite so blissful as having a larder full of pickles, chutneys and preserves, crocks of salted beans and sauerkraut, and wine fermenting gently by the stoveSo maybe I am the squirrel and thats why my subconscious decided we would call our barter currency Acorns!
Anyway, I finished that part of the article off with Ten Delicious Things to Do with a Plum Glut (crystallised plumsoh, be still, my beating heart!) and then, after an eye-watering gulp of ginger cordial, embarked on the philosophising section, my readers favourite:
If we are not quite living off the fat of the land, as self-sufficiency guru John Seymour once put it, we are at least utilising the cream clinging to the edges. And what cream, cheese and yoghurt there has been recently, provided by friends who keep goats, and a Dexter cow or two, at their smallholding on the outskirts of the village
Mark and Stella, our friends with the smallholding, are a much older hippie couple, and Ive often wondered whether Ben and I were behind the times or ahead of them when, as teenagers, we dreamed of one day being self-sufficient. Whichever, I was more than happy that the way we lived was suddenly very trendy and aspirational so that the magazine, and especially my column in it, had something of a cult following. I love to shareideas, inspiration, tips, food
Granny and Uncle Harry were a great early influence, managing to produce practically all their own fruit, vegetables and eggs, plus the occasional hen for the pot, just from their combined back gardens in Neatslake, which is quite a large and pretty village in Lancashire, not far from Ormskirk.
Ben and I had more of a country smallholding in mind, even if we were hazy about how we could ever afford itunless Bens paintings began to sell really well, of course. That was the dream: we would work our plot together, and he would paint while I baked and bottled and preserved. It sounded such bliss!
But just as Ben was finishing off the final year of his postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art in London, and I was living with him and helping make ends meet by working in a florists shop, Granny suddenly died and left me this cottage.
Since shed taken me in at thirteen when I was orphaned, and was my only remaining blood relative, I was absolutely devastated. It brought back lots of long-forgotten memories of my parents and how I felt after I lost themand I know all this orphan business sounds a bit Charles Dickens, but I cant help thatthats the way it was!
But I couldnt contemplate selling the cottage, which was my home as well as a link with Granny, and nor did I want to leave Harry, of whom I was very fond, to cope alone. But then, I didnt want to be parted from Ben either!
I expect I was a bit neurotic, needy and tiresome for a while, but Ben was always there for me, in his strong, silent way. And in the end he came up with the solution, suggesting that he go back and complete the last weeks of his course alone, and then wed settle down together in Neatslake.
Despite it being Bens idea, his parents never forgave me for dragging him back from what they were convinced would have been instant fame and fortune in London; but then, theyve never thought me good enough for him anyway. At one point they even threatened to cut off the small allowance they were making him, though they changed their mind. I thought he should tell them to stick the allowance where the sun dont shine as a matter of principle, but he wouldnt, so we had one of our rare arguments. Ive never used any of the moneyit goes straight into Bens account to pay for art materials and CDs and all those gadgets that mean so little to me and so much to him.
But his parents were wrong, because here we still were, living a version of our dream on a slightly smaller plane than wed envisaged, perhaps, but none the less very happy, for all that. Perhaps one or two things hadnt worked out how we plannedthough as Ben said, as long as we had each other, nothing else really mattered.
And luckily, it was all the compromise involved in trying to balance living a greenish life in the middle of a village, against earning enough to pay the inescapable bills, that interested the readership of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine enormously. While they didnt pay a lot for my articles, it formed a regular part of my income, and then the icing on the cake came, quite literally, from my hand-modelled wedding cake business, catering for the alternative marketsometimes very alternative:
JOSIE GRAYS WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WEDDING
CAKES
Do you want something different? Original? Personal? Truly unique?
Josie Gray will design the cake of your dreams!
Or at least it had formed the icing, until Ben had won a major art prize about eighteen months previously, and his work began to get the recognition it deserved at last and fetch much greater prices.
Or at least it had formed the icing, until Ben had won a major art prize about eighteen months previously, and his work began to get the recognition it deserved at last and fetch much greater prices.
Looking back now, I suddenly had an uneasy feeling that the equilibrium of our lives had subtly changed at that pointbut maybe I was being over-imaginative?
Ben bought me a shiny, expensive breadmaking machine to celebrate his win, which he said would take away all the endless kneading. Though, actually, I always rather enjoyed doing it, going off into a dreamy trance and forgetting time, which made for very light bread.
But that, and one or two other little gadgets hed brought back for me from London, seemed against our whole ethos, though it could be that I was unsettled by them because I simply didnt like change. It made me uneasy. I just wanted us to go quietly on as we always had, happy as pigs in clover.
The wood-burning stove crackled quietly and nearby a door slammed, waking me from my reverie. The top of Harrys felt hat appeared as he shuffled slowly down his garden, hidden by the dividing fence, to feed the hens.
There was an arched gateway between our two plots so we could both come and go freely, for though Harry was nominally in charge of the hens, we shared our gardens and what grew in them. But these last few months, as Harry had grown increasingly infirm after a fall, it seemed I was doing the lions share of the work.
Ben used to do most of the heavy digging, but lately hed either been shut up in the wooden studio at the end of the garden, built against the tall stone wall separating us from the grounds of Blessings, or he was in London.
Each time when he got home and enfolded me in a big, warm hug, swinging me off my feet and telling me he loved me, it almost made up for his absencebut not quite.
I looked down at the laptop and sighed heavily, having totally lost the thread of what I was going to say to finish off.
The little wicket gate between the two gardens squeaked open and Harry came through, followed by his sheepdog, Mac. Harry carried a hoe in one hand and a stout walking stick with a rams-horn handle in the other, and I had to give him full marks for effort even if I expected to find him lying full length among the brassicas one of these days. And there was the problem of his failing eyesight, so that half the time he was nurturing seedling weeds and tossing the veggies onto the compost heapStill, that wasnt too much of a problem in mid-October, and he was heading for the pea and bean beds, which needed clearing anyway.
Behind him, stepping delicately, followed the pale, speckled shape of Aggie, the escapologist hen. The others were all fat, cosy, brown creatures, whom I couldnt distinguish apartand didnt want to, since they were quite likely to end up on my plate. But Aggie, with her inquisitive nature and skill in escaping from enclosed places, was different, and Harry was forbidden from even thinking of culling her, whether she deigned to lay eggs or not.
Opening the door I called, Tea in twenty minutes, Harry? and he made a thumbs-up sign.
I went back in, took another look at my notes, and then rattled off the rest of my article, before changing all the names as usual. Even though I never tell anyones secrets, or gossip about local people, I wouldnt feel half as free to write what I wanted if everyone knew it was me, and where I lived!
Then, with a click of a button, I sent it on its way to the magazine.
It was then I suddenly remembered that in the summer, after one of my cakes had featured in the coverage of a terribly smart local wedding, Country at Heart magazine had contacted me. They were interested in the way I combined my wedding cake business with the self-sufficiency toobut, of course, they didnt know I was the author of Cakes and Ale in SONW magazine, and I didnt tell them!
They interviewed me by email and telephone, and then sent a photographer to take some pics, but I hadnt heard anything since, so perhaps theyd thought better of it, or found someone more interesting to feature.
Our Sadies been after me to up sticks and go and live in New Zealand with them again, Harry said, selecting a ginger biscuit from the tin after careful inspection, and then dunking it in his mug of tea. A bit crumbled and fell, but was neatly snapped up before it hit the floor by Mac, who lunged silently shark-like from under the table and then retreated again. Shes sent me a photograph of the extension theyre building onto the side of the house, like a little self-contained flat.
Granny annexe, they call them. Shes obviously very keen for you to go, Harry, I said brightly, trying to sound encouraging, even though I would miss him dreadfully if he did go.
She says I should want to live near my only daughter and grandchildren, but it was her chose to go and live on the other side of the world in the first place, not me! Theres no reason why I should have to end my days somewhere foreign.
Well, I suppose theyve made their life there now and the grandchildren are New Zealanders, and when Sadie sent you the plane tickets and you went out to visit, you had a great time.
Liking the place for a holiday isnt the same as wanting to live there, away from all my old friends.
I suppose not, I agreed, though since Harrys old friends were popping their clogs with monotonous regularity, a fact he pointed out with some relish from the obituary columns in the local paper, that wouldnt be an argument he would be able to use for very much longer. The group of cronies he met in the Griffin for a pint of Mossbrown ale most evenings had reduced to three, one of whom had to be helped up the steps to the entrance.
Harry seemed to realise this himself, for he added morosely, Not that they arent dropping like flies anyway. But Ill die here, in my own placeand when Ive gone, you make sure and give that tin box of papers and medals to Sadie, when she comes over for the funeral.
Of course I willbut I hope not for a long time yet, because whatever would I do without you?
Time catches us all in the end, lass. Youll find my will in the box too. Sadiell get most of what Ive got to leave, of course. Bloods thicker than water, and you cant get away from that, even if youve been more of a daughter to me than she has.
No, of course not. Im only distantly related to you through marriage, I agreed, because Granny and Harrys wife, Rosa, hadnt even been first cousins, so I hadnt been expecting him to do anything else. It was true that Id been spending more and more time looking after him, but then that was only fair, seeing how much help he gave me and Ben when we moved back here after Granny died. Anyway, I loved him, and he and Granny had been such good friends, widow and widower, understanding each other.
Harry was still wearing his battered felt hat, which I rarely saw him without, though in times when he was pondering some weighty matter he would run his earth-stained finger around the inside of the band, as now.
I saw a piece in a magazine at the doctors last week, he said. It said how I could claim a medal for the six months of minesweeping I did right after the war. There was an address to send toI ripped it out. The receptionist said I could.