English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

home, Grandma scurried around adding this and that, and stirring, keeping a watchful eye on the thermometer, until it became a thick, puckering lava in her brass jam pans, and the house was heady with the smell of bubbling fruit. She had already been on other expeditions in the preceding days with her sister and cousin to a ‘pick-your-own’ at a fruit farm some miles away, returning with baskets of strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants and plums. From her freezer, she brought out other fruits she had foraged for, or grown in her garden – gooseberries from a hedgerow, rhubarb from the garden. She waged a noisy pan-banging war with the blackbirds and thrushes to protect her fruit bushes. And what didn’t make jam was turned into pasties on a metal plate.

Apples, pears and plums from the orchard were stored for winter under the spare bed. They were laid out, never touching, on opened-out sheets of the newspaper. Grandma would climb stiffly down beside the bed, pull out the sheets, turning the fruit carefully in her hands in case of rot or mould, and those that were turning bad would be cooked. When we came in from the freezing cold in winter, we would be met with plates brimming with hot food, followed by a Queen’s Pudding or an apple pie and custard.

My grandmother was an expert at turning the things the farm grew, harvested and reared into meals. Almost everything she cooked was home-grown, seasonal and local. Meat, potatoes, vegetables, or fruit and berries were made into preserves and chutneys. There was the occasional orange or banana that had been bought, and a few packets of crisps were kept in the ‘drinks cupboard’, but otherwise plain traditional food was placed on the table to be eaten and enjoyed. Grandma never asked what we wanted. There wasn’t a choice.

She never bought or cooked (or trusted) food made in factories by strangers. She cooked to a schedule that seemed to have been handed down by God to Moses (or Mrs Moses) it was so fixed. The main meal of the week was the Sunday dinner – a well-cooked lump of beef usually, but often a leg of lamb or a shoulder of pork. Any sign of blood or pinkness in the meat was considered dangerously continental. The meat had to be properly cooked until it was dried out, and potatoes were roasted. Every meal featured potatoes: they were peeled on a Monday, plopped into a bowl of water for the whole week, and brought out to be mashed, boiled, chipped, sautéed, fried or roasted. The ‘leftovers’ were cooked again. Cold beef was eaten in sandwiches for the rest of the week. We killed our own sheep and cattle in the byre, bled them into buckets hanging from the beams, skinned them and cut them up on the kitchen table with a saw and a set of knives. Every bit was used, not just the best joints, but the oxtail and the tongue and the offal bits, even the blood was used for black pudding.

Grandma had home deliveries from the local bakery on a Thursday night, and the driver came in for a cup of tea and a slice of gingerbread, and to swap racing tips with my grandfather. On a Tuesday, Bert the Butcher came and sold her a few slices of cooked cold ham, and maybe some sausages. On the whole she didn’t rate shop-bought food – that was just throwing money away. I can only remember going to one restaurant with my grandparents, on some anniversary or other. My father had a row with the snooty waiter because he called the turnip he served a ‘swede’ and Grandad said he was daft, because it was definitely a turnip.

At times Grandma did her housework with an intensity that suggested something else was on her mind. I would later learn that she had once tried to leave my grandfather for fathering a child with another woman. She had attempted to return to her childhood home, but her father had closed the door on her and told her to go back to her husband. You made your bed and you must lie in it, they said.

~

Mum’s life was different from Grandma’s. She worked hard in the byres, feeding cows and mucking them out, doing the work of the hired men that had worked on the farm until recently. Then she would have to make a meal and present it to the table about ten minutes after kicking her farm boots off. She seemed to rather like the farm work, but to resent the endless drudgery of the housework. My grandmother thought it was all wrong that my mother couldn’t be the perfect housewife because she was outside doing farm work. The men had failed if a woman couldn’t be left alone in the house to do what she was meant to do.

~

My parents were half-broke. I could see it in the second-hand tractors, rusting barn roofs and old machinery that was always breaking down and never got replaced. But I could taste it too, in the endless boiled stew and mince that was served up. I ought to have been grateful for this wholesome home-reared beef or lamb, served with mashed potatoes and peas and carrots, but I wasn’t. I hated it. I spent many mealtimes standing in the porch chewing meat to a cardboard pulp, sent there by my dad for being ‘ungrateful’ and not ‘eating the food set in front of me’. Sometimes I would feed the sheepdogs my food and lie about having eaten it. Other times I would just stand there daydreaming with a gob full of over-chewed meat.

A grey air-raid siren stood in the corner of the porch. My father was supposed to take it to the top of the hill and use it to warn everyone in the parish in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Mum was supposed to fill the bathtub with fresh water and seal