17th June 2012

Dear Memory of an English Summer,

Thank you...

It's a drowsy summer afternoon in the orchard at Wollards Farm. I know to savour it. I'll stay outside until the sun has left nothing even faintly outlined with light.

I lay back.  The morning had slowly, sleepily disappeared over the top of my sun glasses and newspaper, but the tempo had picked up for the afternoon. There's an orchard brimming with fruit, bleeding its stickiness, begging to be picked and packed and slurped and sucked. The trees wilt in the sun with the heaviness of plump, ripe fruit; Pear trees, apple trees, plum trees and damsons, and bushes loaded with blackberries.

I climb the creaky old ladder and reach as high as I can. The last stubborn pear clings to the top of the tree, perfectly shaped, no blemishes, a model. I place it in my ready to eat now basket. All the other pears from that tree will be cooked in red wine or poached and served with ice cream.

Dad and I pick the the plums and damsons, sorting the ‘rotten’ from the ‘ripe and ready’ Their fate is JAM. They’ll be chopped and boiled and poured into pretty jars, to be licked off sticky fingers with scones and cream, to be shovelled into hungry, hurried mouths at tea time.

Rows of blackberry bushes are knitted into the hedge which borders the seven acre field. We set to work, picking the blackberries, just as the sun is warm enough to lightly bake our backs and shoulders. Also stitched into the hedge are smooth, shiny rose hips and holly bushes that spike us every so often.

We hover around the blackberry bushes for hours, as do the bees with their constant busy buzzing. As the sun continues to warm us, the buzzing falls sweetly into a summer symphony, in harmony with the cooing of the wild doves and the occasional “ouch” as the blackberry thorns nick at my fingers and scratch my wrists.  

Dad, on the ladder, leans so far into the hedge and I panic that he’ll topple and end up in a tangle amongst the prickles and brambles. I imagine having to pluck him from the bush as I had done to hundreds of ripe blackberries. The blackberries have stained my hands and fingernails. They smell sweet and warm. My tongue is stained too. Most of the berries are easily plucked from their stems, but some are stubborn and they burst between my thumb and finger...

jojobee