The sun’s already up and the camomile edging the path is covered in dew. Droplets trickle down the reddening apples on our young tree, “Winston”, self-fertile and a good doer for the north. It’s a bountiful year in our valley, thanks to the cold, late spring and a lack of frost at blossom time. Thrushes scrabble, frantic among bird cherry branches, these wild fruit trees laden with little black berries. Pears ripen on the tree by the house wall and wasps cluster on eaten-out plums.
Apple trees have good and bad years. I take down the Orchard Book from my childhood garden; its records go back to the 1950s. There’s the smell of old paper and its cover is mould-speckled and torn. A fabric-covered ring binder costing 3 shillings and 9 pence, loose threads dangle along its cracked spine. The early entries are in the erratic lettering of an old typewriter, then in my mother’s blue ink, and lastly some in my teenage handwriting.
Fluctuating between “poor crop” and “too many to pick”, the yield was measured in bushels. We filled large crates and lined the wooden racks in the cold cellar where, spaced apart, they would last a winter. I relished their names: “Peasgood Nonsuch”, “Worcester Pearmain”, “Laxton’s Superb”, “King Pippin”, “Winter Greening”. The earliest of all, “Beauty of Bath”, a pink-flushed apple I delighted in eating straight from the tree. “Charles Ross”, particularly productive, grew next to the seep of the septic tank.
Problems are noted in the book: “sawfly”, “codlin” and “rot”. Some fruit was bought by the grocer: “Sold to Mr Dearlove at a shilling a pound.” Each tree listed in the book was identified by a white number painted on its bark. If one fell in a gale or was cut down because of canker, a line was drawn across the page.
Lichened trees, nobbly from pruning, I would climb their rough branches to hide among the leaves. My favourite was “Baumann’s Reinette”, an ancient espalier said to be 150 years old when I was a child. My mother’s comment in the book in those waste-not years – “a very good apple, in perfect condition for eating at Christmas”.
