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Chapter One Cakes and Ale

The Artist has gone off to London again, for the opening night of an exhibition that includes his work. The source of his inspiration may come from the countryside, but these increasingly frequent trips to the metropolis are yet another necessary compromise to our way of life.

We aim to be as self-sufficient as possible—and still the twenty-first century constantly intrudes. Realistically, we’re doing well if we can strike an eighty/twenty balance! Even this diary is now written directly onto a laptop and emailed straight off to the editor of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine, just one example of the constant contradictions involved. And, of course, many of you now subscribe to the online version.

But it has to be admitted that the Artist has a weakness for all kinds of gadgets and bits of technological wizardry that I don’t share even when, with the best of intentions, he presents me with something like a breadmaking machine, which he is sure will make my life easier…

‘Cakes and Ale: the musings of a backyard good-lifer’

The sun was making a brave attempt to warm a dank and fuzzy mid-October morning when Ben, looking as big, tousled and wholesomely delectable as always, turned on the doorstep to say goodbye.

‘Oh, I wish you didn’t have to go,’ I said, putting my arms around his neck to pull him down to kissing level. Honestly, you’d think he was going on some exotic foreign trek into uncharted territory, rather than to stay with old friends in London for a couple of days. I really must get a grip! But these moments do sweep over me occasionally, because when you’ve been orphaned as a child and then lost the grandmother who brought you up, it’s hard not to be afraid that fate might also decide to snatch away the person you love most in the whole wide world.

‘You know I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to, darling.’ Ben enfolded me in a reassuring if asphyxiating hug, like a good-natured grizzly bear.

‘Liar, liar, your bum’s on fire!’ I chanted rudely. ‘You’re loving your bit of fame, admit it. These days there’s a glint in your eye and a spring in your step every time you set off for London.’

He grinned, though guiltily, his fair skin flushing slightly. ‘Perhaps—but aren’t I always more than happy to be back home again, with you?’

‘Maybe,’ I conceded, because it was true that he always came back exhausted and more than ready to slip back into the old, familiar rut as if he’d never been away—until the next time. ‘But then, maybe you’re just missing your home comforts?’

‘You’re one of my home comforts,’ he said, squeezing me again and then letting me go. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get to Russell and Mary’s flat—promise.’

‘That’s OK, I don’t really think anything awful will happen to you between here and Camden, unless things have changed radically since I last came with you.’ I paused reflectively, trying to remember when that was, and then added in surprise, ‘Do you know, that must be more than a year ago!’

‘Is it?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem like that long.’

‘No, the time has just flown. I feel I’m losing touch with Mary too, and we used to be such friends, but now if I phone she’s always about to go out and never rings me back like she says she will. I really must find someone who would look in on Uncle Harry and walk the dog, so I could start coming with you again.’

‘You know Harry’s too independent to let anyone else keep an eye on him and too frail to leave on his own,’ Ben pointed out patiently. ‘Anyway, you’ll be much happier here, doing something with all those baskets of apples and pears Dorrie keeps giving you.’

‘Actually, I always enjoyed my trips to London, catching up with everyone and visiting my favourite places,’ I protested, which was true, especially when Libby was in town so we could meet up. ‘But you’re right, there’s a huge amount to do here at the moment. I’m appled out and I still need to get the last of the marrows in, make green tomato chutney and start pickling beetroot—plus I have a really tricky wedding cake to finish icing. It’s just that I do miss you when you’re away.’

‘And I miss you too, darling,’ he said, but absently, looking at his watch. ‘I’d better go—speak to you later!’

He gave me a kiss and then off he strode across the Green towards the High Street and the bus to the station, swinging his overnight bag, while I mopped a weak and pathetic tear from my eye with the belt of my blue towelling robe and summoned up a bright smile in case he turned round to wave.

He didn’t, but that was probably because Miss Violet Grace whipped around the corner on her tricycle just as he reached it and he had to take sudden evasive action.

A collision was averted and Ben vanished from sight. Spotting me, Violet veered rapidly in my direction, the bobbles of her gaily coloured Peruvian-style knitted helmet flying in the breeze.

‘Isn’t Ben an early bird?’ she called, coming to a sudden halt in front of me, so that her hat fell forward over her eyes. She pushed it back and peered upwards, and what with her mauve lipstick, pale complexion and fringe of silvery hair, she would have looked quite other-worldly had it not been for the faint flush on her cheeks engendered by pedalling hard. ‘Off to London again, is he?’

‘Yes, and I would have driven him to the station in the van, but he insisted on catching the bus. At least, I hope he’s caught it, because I held him up a bit,’ I said guiltily.

Violet had been to fetch the newspaper from Neville’s Village Stores. However hard she and her two elder sisters might find it to make ends meet on their pensions, their father, General Grace, had always had The Times, so it was unthinkable to them that they could possibly start the day without it.

‘Ben is a brilliant artist—The Times said so.’ She looked doubtful, though willing to believe anything written in that august organ. ‘I thought I would just pop across to remind you that there is a wedding at St Cuthbert’s today—ten thirty. Will you be there, dear?’

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 hadn’t always been so adamant about it; it sort of came over him by degrees while he was a student.

‘I’ll try, but I have a wedding cake to ice and more green tomato chutney to make. I’ll put some in your fruit and veg box later, shall I? And did you say you wanted some frozen blackberries? I’ve got loads.’

‘Lovely,’ she agreed, preparing to cycle off, ‘yes, please. Dorrie Spottiswode’s giving us some apples, so we can make apple and bramble pies. Pansy’s knitting her a tam in exchange, from some leftover mohair. We thought that was about equal value in Acorns.’

Pansy isn’t some kind of ingenious squirrel—Acorns 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. I’ve 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 wasn’t 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 spaniel’s 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 he’d 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 Violet’s 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 women’s magazine.

I’d written the obligatory ‘what’s-happening-with-the-garden-and-the-hens’ bit, describing September’s 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 there’s 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 stove…So maybe I am the squirrel and that’s 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 plums—oh, 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 I’ve 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 share—ideas, 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 it—unless Ben’s 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 florist’s shop, Granny suddenly died and left me this cottage.

Since she’d 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 them…and I know all this orphan business sounds a bit Charles Dickens, but I can’t help that—that’s the way it was!

But I couldn’t 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 didn’t 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 we’d settle down together in Neatslake.

Despite it being Ben’s 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, they’ve 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 don’t shine as a matter of principle, but he wouldn’t, so we had one of our rare arguments. I’ve never used any of the money—it goes straight into Ben’s 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 we’d envisaged, perhaps, but none the less very happy, for all that. Perhaps one or two things hadn’t worked out how we planned…though 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 didn’t 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 market—sometimes very alternative:

JOSIE GRAY’S 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.

Looking back now, I suddenly had an uneasy feeling that the equilibrium of our lives had subtly changed at that point…but 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 he’d brought back for me from London, seemed against our whole ethos, though it could be that I was unsettled by them because I simply didn’t 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 Harry’s 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 lion’s share of the work.

Ben used to do most of the heavy digging, but lately he’d 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 absence…but 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 ram’s-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 heap…Still, that wasn’t 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 couldn’t distinguish apart—and didn’t 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 anyone’s secrets, or gossip about local people, I wouldn’t 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 too—but, of course, they didn’t know I was the author of ‘Cakes and Ale’ in SONW magazine, and I didn’t tell them!

They interviewed me by email and telephone, and then sent a photographer to take some pics, but I hadn’t heard anything since, so perhaps they’d thought better of it, or found someone more interesting to feature.

Our Sadie’s 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. ‘She’s sent me a photograph of the extension they’re building onto the side of the house, like a little self-contained flat.’

‘Granny annexe, they call them. She’s 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! There’s no reason why I should have to end my days somewhere foreign.’

‘Well, I suppose they’ve 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 isn’t the same as wanting to live there, away from all my old friends.’

‘I suppose not,’ I agreed, though since Harry’s 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 wouldn’t 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 aren’t dropping like flies anyway. But I’ll die here, in my own place—and when I’ve 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 will—but I hope not for a long time yet, because whatever would I do without you?’

‘Time catches us all in the end, lass. You’ll find my will in the box too. Sadie’ll get most of what I’ve got to leave, of course. Blood’s thicker than water, and you can’t get away from that, even if you’ve been more of a daughter to me than she has.’

‘No, of course not. I’m only distantly related to you through marriage,’ I agreed, because Granny and Harry’s wife, Rosa, hadn’t even been first cousins, so I hadn’t been expecting him to do anything else. It was true that I’d 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 doctor’s 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 to—I ripped it out. The receptionist said I could.’

He produced a much-folded piece of thin paper from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘What do you think of that?’

I read it carefully. ‘Yes, why not? You’re entitled to it, aren’t you? It did seem so unfair to me, that after being in the navy in the Far East and fighting on for longer than lots of other people, they made you go and do something even more dangerous for six months before they let you demob!’

It was only in the last couple of years that Harry had started to talk about his war service in the navy. A quiet, sensitive man, what he had seen and experienced had harrowed him and driven him into himself, especially after he lost his wife.

‘There was never anything fair about the armed forces, Josie. You did what you were told, or else! But having to go minesweeping when I wanted to get home to Rosa—well, that was a bit of a blow. And it was dangerous work. You never knew when a mine was going to go up and take you with it, and in those little wooden boats we wouldn’t have had a chance, we all knew that.’

‘It sounds dreadful, and you’ve certainly earned your medal!’

‘So you really think I should apply for it, then?’

‘Definitely—another one for the grandchildren. Do you want me to write the letter for you?’

‘No, that’s all right, I’ll do that, but you could take it to the post office later.’ He began the painful task of hauling himself to his feet, but I knew better than to offer him any help.

‘I’ve left you the hens and the piano,’ he said abruptly, once he was upright. ‘The piano was my mother’s and Sadie won’t want to ship it out there.’

‘Thank you—how lovely,’ I said, touched but not at all sure how I would fit the piano into my small house, or the hens and their coop and run into the vegetable garden. The thought of Harry gone and a stranger one day living next door was very disturbing…

‘Well, there’s no need to cry over it, you daft lump,’ he said bracingly. ‘You’re too soft for your own good, you are. Cry if a hen dies, cry over a dead hedgehog, cry every blessed time that Ben of yours goes off to London!’

A peacock distantly wailed from the grounds of Blessings, as if in agreement, even though I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration. I’m not that soft.

I dabbed my eyes with the edge of my sweatshirt. ‘Of course I’m not crying, it’s wood smoke. That last lot I put in the stove must have been damp. And there’s no reason for me to get upset, because you’ve got lots of good years left in you, Harry,’ I said, more positively than I felt, because look what happened to Granny, who was several years younger. And now I had only Harry and Ben—and my friend Libby, of course. But not only did she live far away, she was also rather like a cat in that, though fond of me, she had her own agenda and came and went as she pleased.

‘I’ve got thick vegetable soup on the stove—I’ll bring you some and fresh bread rolls later, when I take Mac out for a walk,’ I said. Harry is fiercely independent, but I fill his little freezer with single portions of soup, casseroles and all kinds of things, with the heating instructions written on the lids. And I make sure he has fresh bread and biscuits—whatever I’ve been cooking.

‘I like that minestrone best,’ he said ungratefully, pausing with Mac on the threshold and letting gusts of October air, redolent with autumnal garden bonfires, into the room. ‘Got a bit of news, I nearly forgot to tell you. Mr Rowland-Knowles has put Blessings on the market.’

I stared at him. ‘But he’s only just moved back in!’

‘Yes, but he found that stepmother of his had run the place into the ground. She only used the modern wing and let the rest go hang, and you need to keep on top of these Elizabethan houses or they quickly start to go downhill.’ He shook his head at the waste of it all. ‘He came round yesterday afternoon and asked me to look over some rotting woodwork and tell him what I thought.’

Harry, who’d been an expert carpenter in his time, had done work in most of the old houses in the area, so that made sense.

‘It was in a right state—windows blown in and the rain’s made a mess of the floor in one bedchamber, not to mention the woodworm taking hold and the roof needing repairing. The poor man’s desperate not to part with it, but he can’t afford to put it to rights.’

‘That’s such a shame!’

‘Vindictive. His stepmother had the right to live there unless she remarried, but now she finally has, it’s a mixed Blessing!’ He grinned, happy with his little joke.

‘But what will happen to Dorrie’s home if Blessings is sold?’ I asked, for Miss Doreen Spottiswode was Tim’s aunt, his mother’s eldest sister, who now lived in a dilapidated cottage in the grounds and, together with an ancient gardener, did her best to stop the place running completely wild.

‘I don’t think they can get her out. She’ll be like a sitting tenant, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Mrs Rowland-Knowles never managed it, try though she might, for Miss Dorrie had just as much right to see out her days there as she had to live in Blessings. But Miss Dorrie’s looked after that garden since she came here to live with her sister, just after she married. She loves it, and it will hit her hard if strangers take it over.’ He shook his head sadly.

‘I suppose Tim Rowland-Knowles thought about all that before he came to his decision, and there mustn’t have been any option, Harry.’ I didn’t know Tim well, because he hadn’t been near Neatslake since his father died, and not often before that, since he and his stepmother hadn’t got on.

But I suddenly remembered the summer when we were fifteen and Libby’s game plan (which involved acquiring the skills she thought would be necessary in order to become a rich man’s wife) had led her to wangle invites for us to tennis parties at the vicarage. Tim was often there, because the vicar’s drippy seventeen-year-old daughter, Miriam, had a crush on him. He’s tall and thin, with a shock of untidy white-blond hair and vague blue eyes, and you couldn’t imagine him being terribly successful as a solicitor.

At the time Libby was convinced she resembled Debbie Harry, which she didn’t, and her efforts to make her cheekbones stand out meant she constantly appeared to be sucking a lemon. As for me, all I wanted was to look just like one of the black-clad female guitarists in the Robert Palmer ‘Addicted to Love’ video. We were both totally deluded and neither look really went well with tennis clothes, so it says much for Tim’s good nature that he directed the occasional kind smile in our direction.

When Harry had hobbled back into the garden I emailed Libby, though I had no idea whether she was in her pretty London mews house or in Pisa, where she had a rather palatial flat complete with a roof terrace covered with lemon and olive trees in huge terracotta pots. Ben and I had been out there a couple of times, for holidays—she’s always been terribly generous and her second husband, Joe Cazzini, who died last year, had been a lovely man.

‘You remember when we were at school and were taken round Blessings in the fifth year?’ I wrote. ‘You said you wanted to live there, and one day you’d have a house just like it. Well, here’s your chance, because Tim Rowland-Knowles (do you remember we used to play tennis with him at the vicarage?) has had to put it up for sale…’

Of course, I didn’t seriously think she’d want to buy it! Libby’s plans had always involved shaking the dust of Neatslake off her dainty feet for ever, and her visits here since her first marriage had been mere flying ones, in and out, to catch up with me. No, I was just using the news as something exciting that might break the monotony of my emails to her, because she’s not that interested in making jam and mixed pickles.

Her emails were always much livelier than mine and I always enjoyed reading them, though I wasn’t jealous of her lifestyle at all. I much preferred my rooted and settled existence to her butterfly one.

But as I pressed ‘send’, I realised that my roots were feeling frail and threatened, as if they had been undermined by a stealthy mole and were dangling in the air. I supposed all Harry’s talk about dying had unsettled me.

I wished Ben—big, solid and as familiar to me as myself—was home right this second to give me a reassuring hug. He was my rock—and I knew that was a trite and overused phrase, but in my case it was true. But then, our life here kept his flighty artistic soul anchored to reality too, and that couldn’t be a bad thing.