A thirty-year harvest

A generation has all but passed - literally - in the thirty years since I planted some seeds from the last apples gathered from my grandmother's house when it was sold after her death.  They germinated, and for the first few years, two tiny apple trees grew in pots on the kitchen window ledge of the Victorian villa I was living in at the time.

When we moved to a larger family home, my mother planted one tree in her garden, and the other was installed in mine. My mother's tree grew and grew, and when her house was sold last year, it was a fine tall tree I said goodbye to.

My tree failed to thrive, in sympathy, perhaps, with my marriage. It did blossom the final year I lived there, but the three apples it produced that autumn were tiny and no use for anything. 

I didn't want to leave it behind, though, so Dru parcelled it up in a wheelie bin, transported it to my new home on the roof rack of her Morris Traveller, and planted it in my new back garden.

At New Year I poured cider over its roots in an act of wassail, and mulched it with a thick layer of straw to protect against the frost. A few days later a pair of jays conferred their own benediction. 

Nearly six years have passed and suddenly it's clear my grandmother's tree has turned over a new leaf - thousands of them - and is finally in the right place.  It soars above me, and this year was laden with blossom, and then apples. 

And since they're cooking apples, what could be nicer to make with the first picking than a crumble with a little ginger and blackberries gathered in the lane that leads to the field, the wood and the common?

  

Leaving home

Emptying the parental home is a tough job. While my sister and her husband managed to pack up almost all the goods and chattels in a few days of Herculean effort, it seems to have taken me the entire summer to re-home the last few pieces of furniture. 

I'm quite pleased, though, that out of all the things in the house, only one settee too old to comply with current fire regulations and one elderly bed had to be broken up and taken to the tip.

(The wood will be recycled into a composting bin.)

My parents bought the house in 1965, when I was two and a half years old. I can remember the six months it was in their possession before we moved in quite clearly, as my sister and I were taken over there often while they worked in the garden. 

There's very little of the house from that time that remains unchanged. Two or three original windows ... 

... the tiles in the porch ...

... and the original bathroom tiles, here with later tiles below them and the early 60s lemon bathroom suite that was my mother's pride and joy. 

I remember my father sticking up the two diamond-shaped plastic hooks. My mother, in her ceaseless quest for cleanliness, wanted my sister and I to have a flannel each, which we were to hang on our own hook after every ablution. 

Needless to say, that never happened. 

Also, sitting on the 'dirty clothes bin' in the corner with my legs stretched out and my feet up on the airing cupboard door, reciting my 3 times table while my mother pushed back my cuticles with the rounded end of a nail file. (Ouch.) We hadn't been taught our 4 times table yet but I got as far as 4 x 4 by myself and felt very proud.

Here's something I don't remember. Under a piece of carpet in the cupboard under the stairs a piece of lino that is completely unfamiliar, and presumably an always hidden remnant from the house's pre-Harvey life. 

And something I'd completely forgotten ... through a gap in the late 60s, built-in Sindy furniture, the original wallpaper in my parents' bedroom, which provokes a jolt of memory. 

My boys, going on a final prowl with me, are on the look-out for forgotten treasure. This is as close as they will get. 

The hardest thing to say goodbye to, for me, are the trees. It doesn't help that the cooking apple tree, the survivor of two that flanked the middle section of the garden, is growing forget-me-nots at its roots.

Dear tree, who never provided the handholds and footholds necessary for me to climb it.

And the tree I grew from pips taken from my grandmother's garden in Bishopston after her death, the twin of which Dru transported from the garden of my previous house when we moved to our current home.  

And the tree my eldest grew from seed to achieve some Brownie badge or other.

I will always see you

The fruit on the third tree is still far too small, but I take a couple of apples from each of the other two trees to see if I can get some seedlings growing. 

My father's long neglected shed at the always neglected top of the garden provokes a smile. 

Quick, Mum, quick, there's a weed on the lawn!

Back in the house the clank of the front door bolts and the rattle of the security chain, as the last piece of furniture leaves the house to be upcycled by a friend of a friend in Portishead and my dead father locks up for the night. 

A funny thing happens as I walk through the empty house. I keep expecting to see brown hessian wallpaper on one wall of the front room, and the burnt orange carpet that was another source of great satisfaction for my mother, but they are long gone. 

Or the small, dark kitchen with its dark blue wallpaper, before my Uncle Gilbert knocked through the larder, coal house and porch to make a single-skinned 'extension', but there's just a glimpse behind the late 70s pine panelling.

And after the 1930s lilac floral wallpaper and the 1960s horsey wallpaper and the early 70s pastel floral wallpaper, a glimpse of my bedroom in its true colours, before my parents covered it with blown wallpaper and painted it Bluebell White from the Dulux range, following my relocation to Lancaster in 1980. 

Blue blue electric blue ... 

I must have had a premonition they were going to do that because here's what must be one of the first ever, pre-digital selfies, of me the summer before I left, committing a glimpse of its glory to the historical record.  

The last two things to leave are my father's razor blade that he always left on top of the electric shaving point he never used ... 

... and one forlorn peg left on the washing line. 

The names in concrete will stay until the new owners block pave the drive ...

... but it's all there in my head, from beginning to end. 

Blooming Metaphors

Dug up at the arse-end of autumn and transported from Grimauld Place to our new home in a wheelie bin strapped to the top of a Morris Traveller.  Rather ignominious treatment for a little apple tree.

Re-planted by a woman who knows what she's doing, however ... 

... and blessed by a wassailing ceremony and a visitation of jays ...

... and my grandmother's apple tree*, which never properly thrived in its former location, has not only survived the winter but is blossoming.  




And how happy am I that every happening in my life handily serves as a metaphor for something else.  


*grown from seed from the last apples gathered from my grandmother's garden,  a couple of months after her death in 1991

A Visit from Old Scritch

Having brought the little apple tree grown from seed from the last apples harvested from my grandmother's garden after her death almost 25 years ago with me when I moved house recently, I've been keeping a close eye on it in its new location to maximise its chance of survival.  

In this respect, the very mild weather we've been having this winter has been helpful. However, on New Year's Eve, my friends turned up to help me celebrate and reported that it was forecast to get very cold out, and a frost was already forming.  I immediately shuffled down the garden path to put a nice thick mulch of straw, bought for this very purpose, around the roots of my precious tree, but no sooner had I put one foot on the grass than I slipped and fell flat on my back.  

Sitting on the sodden lawn with wet mud seeping through my clothes, I decided I might as well spread the straw anyway before struggling to my feet and lumbering back into the house like the creature from the black lagoon.  It was hardly a propitious start to my celebrations or a good omen with regard to the tree's survival, and I hadn't drunk a drop at that point.  Plus, it didn't get any colder and there was no frost. Gah.

Today I glanced out of my bedroom window and caught a flash of buff, white and blue in garden. Horace's 'chattering jay, ill omen'd', one on the grass, one perched on my tree. Except I'm taking this wonderful visitation as the best of signs.  

Of Tennis Balls And Apple Trees

Four weeks in and still no internet at the new house - which might not be an entirely bad thing, as we've been able to settle in with minimal distraction. It already seems an age since these photos were taken, the morning after our arduous relocation.

In addition to this confrontation of boxes, there was also a damp garage, 4/5^ths full of boxes of books needing prompt evacuation.  (Oh, and the Ark of the Covenant in there somewhere too.)

How would we ever find anything ever again?

Enter Ted, who had watched our old home disappear into boxes and now explored these unfamiliar rooms, his head tilted upwards as he tried to make sense of this latest example of unfathomable behaviour on the part of the monkeys. 

Then, twenty-five seconds into this new existence, he leapt on one box amongst ten thousand and retrieved from its depths a tennis ball, thus restoring the balance of the entire Universe.  Well done, that dog. 

Later, Dru came by and kindly transported my grandmother’s apple tree*, dug up and lodging in my former neighbour’s back garden, to its new home, via in a wheelie bin on top of her Morris Traveller. And replanted it just before the single heavy frost of this winter so far.  Whereupon we repaired to Asda to buy some cider for wassailing, in the hope it will survive its transplanting. 

‘Here’s to thee, young apple tree,

That blooms well, bears well,

Hats full, caps full,

Three bushel bags full,

An’ all under one tree. Hurrah! Hurrah!’


*grown from seed from the last apples gathered from my grandmother's garden,  a couple of months after her death in 1991