Some of the actors live in the new walled and gated estate of swish detached houses in Mossrow, but others have snapped up whatever has appeared on the market, from flats in the former Pharamonds Butterflake Biscuit factory, to old cottages and farms.
Did you go and see Ritch Rainford yesterday? I asked, suddenly remembering how excited Annie had been at getting a call from the singer-turned-actor who plays Seth Steele, the ruggedly handsome mill owner in Cotton Common. (All that alliteration must have been too much for the producers of the series to resist!)
Hes bought the old vicarage where Annies family used to live, a large and rambling Victorian building with a brick-walled garden, in severe need of TLC and loads of cash. (The new vicar is now housed in an unpretentious bungalow next to the church.)
Annies pleasantly homely face, framed in a glossy pudding-bowl bob of copper hair, took on an unusually rapt almost holy expression and her blue-grey eyes went misty. Oh, yes! Hes She stopped, apparently lost for superlatives.
Sexy as dark chocolate? I suggested. Toothsomely rum truffle?
Just wonderful, she said simply. He has such charisma, it was as though a a golden light was shining all around him.
Bloody hell! That sounds more like finding all the silver charms in your slice of Christmas pudding at once! I stared at her, but she was lost in a trance.
Lizzy, hes so kind, too! When I explained that I used to live at the vicarage, he took me around and showed me all the improvements hes made, and told me what else he was going to do. Then he just handed me a set of keys to the house so he could call me up any time to go and exercise or feed his dog.
Well, if your clients didnt do that, you wouldnt be able to get in, I said drily. What sort of dog does he have?
A white bull terrier bitch called Flo very good-natured, though I might have to be careful around other dogs.
And whats the new vicar like? I asked, but she hadnt noticed, being full of Ritch Rainford to the point where her bedazzled eyes couldnt really take in another man. However, a crush on a handsome actor was not likely to get her anywhere.
Annie was once engaged, but was jilted with her feet practically on the carpeted church aisle. Since then she had safely confined her affections to unsuitable and unattainable actors.
Ive heard hes single and has red hair, I said encouragingly since, despite her own copper locks, she has a weakness for redheaded men.
He hasnt got red hair, hes blond! she protested indignantly, and I saw that she was still thinking of Ritch Rainford. Perhaps I ought to watch Cotton Common to see what all the excitement was about.
Eventually Annie ran me home, since I wanted to be there when Jasper returned. I was by then attired in one of her voluminous cardigans a bilious green, with loosely attached knitted pink roses to hide the dried but dubious-looking stains on my T-shirt.
She said she was going to come in with me and give Tom a piece of her mind, which would not have gone down well, but luckily Tom, his van and some of his clothes had vanished. Hed also locked me out; but not only did Annie have our key on her ring, I kept one hidden under a flower pot, so that wasnt a problem.
Looks like hes gone away again, I said gratefully. Thank goodness for that.
Of course he hadnt thought to feed the hens, who had put themselves to bed in disgust, or the quail, so Annie helped me to shut everything up safely for the night.
As we walked back to the cottage Uncle Roly Pharamonds gamekeeper, Caz Naylor, sidled out of a small outbuilding and, with a brief salute, flitted away through the shadows towards the woods behind the cottage.
Hes a foxy-looking young man, with dark auburn hair, evasive amber eyes and a tendency to address me, on the rare occasions when he speaks, as our Lizzy, thus acknowledging a distant relationship that all the Naylors in the area seemed to know about from the minute I set foot in the place for the first time at the age of eleven.
Annie looked startled: Wasnt that Caz? Whats he doing here?
I let him have the use of the old chest freezer in there. Since I cut down on the amount of stuff I grow, I dont need it, I said, for Id been slowly running things down ready for the moment that I knew was fast approaching, when I must leave Perseverance Cottage. He comes and goes as he pleases.
She shook her head. All the Naylors are strange
But some are stranger than others? My mother was a Naylor too, dont forget! Descendant of some distant ancestor who made good in Liverpool, in the cargo shipping line which at least explains why Im such a daughter of the soil and feel so firmly rooted here.
She smiled. I expect Roly told him to keep an eye on things after that animal rights group started targeting you.
More likely hes keeping an eye on his freezer, I said, though it was true that the only evidence of ARG (as they are known locally) Id spotted around the place lately were the occasional bits of gaffer tape where a banner had been ripped off my car or the barn. Perhaps they just arent bothering with me that much. I mean, I can see why they might target Unks and Caz, especially since no one knows what Caz does with all those grey squirrels he traps, but why me? Im not battery farming anything.
All my fowl lived long, happy and mainly useless lives, except for an excess of male quail and the occasional unwanted cockerel, which Caz dispatched for me with expert efficiency.
I expect they just include you in with the Pharamond estate, since your cottage is part of it, she agreed. Its not personal.
We cleaned up the mess in the kitchen as well as we could and then Annie left, since it was clear enough that Tom wasnt coming back that night, at least and I thanked heaven for small mercies.
What happened to your face, Mum? Jasper asked, getting his first good look at me in the light of the kitchen, when a friend dropped him home later. That looks like a bruise coming up. And why are you wearing one of Auntie Annies horrible cardigans?
Your father dropped a plate and a piece hit me, I explained. Annie loaned me the cardigan to cover up the gravy stains on my T-shirt and I forgot to give it back when she went home.
He looked at the dent and new marks on the plastered kitchen wall and said, He dropped a plate horizontally? in that smart-lipped way teenage boys have.
Yes, he was practising discus throwing, I said, and he gave me a look but let the subject drop.
He didnt ask where his father was. But then, at that time, he never did.
Chapter 2: All Fudge
We are in the middle of a hot spell and the air is fragrant with sweet peas and roses and full of the dull, drowsy drone of bees drunk on nectar. Yesterday I divided up the bigger clumps of chives and began drying herbs for winter, crumbling them up as soon as they were cool and storing them in cork-topped containers, though the bay leaves have simply been left in bunches hanging from the wooden rack in the kitchen. But soon they, too, will be packed in jars and put away in the cupboard until needed.
As I used up the final jar of last years mincemeat for brownies, I wondered if mincemeat would also work as an ingredient in fudge maybe even in Spudge, the mashed potato fudge I invented while we were living in Cornwall
The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in RecipesTom had been gone a couple of days when Jasper pointedly enquired after dinner one night if there was anything I wanted to discuss, but I just said we would have a little chat before he went to university and he gave me one of his looks.
I knew he was now an adult, and at some point Id have to explain to him that I was going to leave his father and the cottage as soon as hed gone off to university, but at that moment he was so happy that hed got the exam grades he needed for his first choice, I didnt want to rain on his parade.
Next day, when I let out the hens, I found it was one of those delicious late summer mornings that reminded me of the early honeymoon weeks of our marriage in Cornwall: dreamy swirls of mist with the warm sun tinting the edges golden, like pale yellow candyfloss wisps. You could easily imagine King Arthur and Queen Guinevere riding out of it in glorious Technicolor, all jingling bridles and hooded hawks, though if they had they would probably have been surprised to find themselves transported from the land of legend into a Lancashire backwater like Middlemoss.
The last remaining acres of darkly watchful ancient woodland that crowded up to the back of Perseverance Cottage would have looked normal enough to them, I suppose apart from Caz Naylor, who as usual was camouflaged from headband to boots, Rambo-style. I spotted him flitting in and out of the trees only by the white glint of his eyeballs and the sweat glistening between the green and brown streaks on his naked chest. A blink and he was gone, back to wage war on the dangerous alien life form known to the uninitiated as the grey squirrel.
Still, even in Arthurian times they would probably have had some kind of shamanistic Green Man and so would be used to such goings-on, and the duckpond, chickens and vegetable patch out front would look reassuringly normal to them. But what would they have made of the huge, tumble-down old greenhouse, the remains of a previous tenants abortive attempt at market gardening? Or my battered, once-white Citroën 2CV? A 2CV that, I now noticed, had its hood down, so the seats would be soaked with dew and very likely lightly spattered with hen crap. Or even, which was much, much worse, duck gloop.
It was also listing drunkenly on one seriously flat tyre.
Tossing the last of the feed to the hens, I stuck my head inside the cottage door.
Jasper? I called loudly up the steep stairs, expecting him to be still asleep. By nature, teenagers are intended to be nocturnal, so it felt cruel to have to drag him out of his lair under the eaves each morning.
Instead, he loomed out of the doorway next to me, making me jump. Im here, Mum. Whats up?
Flat tyre. You have your breakfast and get ready while I change it. I hope its a mendable puncture the spares not that brilliant and if I have to buy a new one itll be worth more than the rest of the car put together.
One of the Leghorns had followed me into the flagged hallway (a Myrtle: all the white hens are called that; and the browns, Honey) and I shooed it out again. Theres something terribly cement-like about hen droppings when they set hard.