Gooseberry - Humble Goosegog

As far as I remember, I’ve only seen green gooseberries. Now I find they come in assorted shades from yellow to purple. Yellow and green can taste sour, the rosy ones are naturally sweeter. They can be eaten raw, but they are nicer cooked and sweetened. From what I’ve read, they have what is described as ‘gentle’ laxative properties, so, enjoy in moderation.

Gooseberry puree was and still is a welcome accompaniment to a roast pork dinner. I loved this on a Sunday at the home of my wonderful (fairy) Godmother. Trifle for afters, then later on, for anyone hungry, pork sandwiches with more goosegog. I wouldn’t be hungry, but I’d always manage a delicious sandwich. Appreciated, with much love, thank you.

Gooseberry fool is crushed fruit mixed with whipped cream and served chilled. There are various ways of achieving the end result. Some involve cooking the gooseberries first and adding other fruits and nuts.

The meaning of ‘gooseberry bush’ made me smile. Babies born under a gooseberry bush is an old wives tale, except ‘gooseberry bush’ was 19th century slang for female pubic hair, apparently. Well, we learn something new every day. Let’s keep that information in the 19th century where it belongs.

The term ‘playing gooseberry’ refers to a third person accompanying a couple – a romantic couple – who wish to be alone. Gooseberry in this context is a shortened form of gooseberry- picker, meaning a chaperone who would go off picking fruit to allow the couple time alone. I can’t help but wonder where these meetings might have taken place. I’d rather have a full story than a snippet.

Here’s one of my favourite poets,

Gooseberry Season

Which reminds me. He appeared
at noon, asking for water. He’d walked from town
after losing his job, leaving me a note for his wife and his brother
and locking his dog in the coal bunker.
We made him a bed

and he slept till Monday.
A week went by and he hung up his coat.
Then a month, and not a stroke of work, a word of thanks,
a farthing of rent or a sign of him leaving.
One evening he mentioned a recipe

for smooth, seedless gooseberry sorbet
but by then I was tired of him: taking pocket money
from my boy at cards, sucking up to my wife and on his last night
sizing up my daughter. He was smoking my pipe
as we stirred his supper.

Where does the hand become the wrist?
Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
razor’s edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.

I could have told him this
but didn't bother. We ran him a bath
and held him under, dried him off and dressed him
and loaded him into the back of the pick-up.
Then we drove without headlights

to the county boundary,
dropped the tailgate, and after my boy
had been through his pockets we dragged him like a mattress
across the meadow and on the count of four
threw him over the border.

This is not general knowledge, except
in gooseberry season, which reminds me, and at the table
I have been known to raise an eyebrow, or scoop the sorbet
into five equal portions, for the hell of it.
I mention this for a good reason.

                                                                              Simon Armitage

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Short Story Week - Once Upon A Time...

A theme of 'Short Story Week' and an opportunity to re-read my back catalogue, so to speak. I hope I'm not being self indulgent in sharing my short story from 2005, Dinner With Hemingway, a 'memoir' from his last mistress.

 Dinner with Hemingway

     Hello, my love. I’m thinking about you and I can’t get to sleep…again. It’s been nearly every night this week.  I’m running out of pages in this little book which has become a part of me.

     I’m back to the time when we stayed the weekend at the Waldorf Astoria. Not the time in the summer that you always talked about, but early the following year, 1959. Freezing February in New York!  Whatever possessed us? We could just as easily have gone to Europe.  Where was Mary?  I can’t remember, but I’m sure you would have told me at the time. We spent an entire afternoon in that enormous bed sliding on the satin sheets. I can still feel the gentle touch of your beard on my skin and your warm lips on my neck. We didn’t surface until dinner time.

     The restaurant was all shell-pink linen with single carnations the exact same pale colour, discreet staff and clientele who were too busy with themselves to notice us. It was really good to relax into a romantic meal without fear of discovery. We weren’t very interesting, anyway. You’d been married four times and there was nothing new to say and I was, well, who was I anyway?  The gossip columns were all about  JFK and Marilyn, or the ‘is it on, is it off?’ between Larry and Viv.

     That was the night Larry and Vivien came in for dinner, just the two of them, which you said was unusual because they rarely dined without guests when they were working. Larry was playing Archie Rice in ‘The Entertainer’ on Broadway. I’ve forgotten which theatre. You were twiddling with the carnation, turning it round and round in the thin, single stem vase and talking about wanting to end your marriage to Mary so that we could be together.  Suddenly, there was this gush of  ‘Hemingway, dear boy, it is you!’ and there was Laurence Olivier, patting you on the back then shaking hands as you stood up. You introduced us. He was ‘charmed’ and kissed my hand. I was too star-struck to speak. I was looking into the eyes of Heathcliff and I wanted to feel bold and free like Cathy. Instead, I was nervous and flustered, like the second Mrs de Winter.  I was glad when he declined your offer to join us; something about Vivien being unwell and not wanting company.  She looked well enough, engaged in conversation with others.  Mood swings, that was her malady.  He said he was still playing Archie Rice. You told him we would go to see it, but we never did.

     We didn’t fully resume our conversation about the future, either.  I can see you, in front of me, pained expression in those grey-blue eyes, hand on your chin with thumb on one side and fingers closed together on the other as you stroked your white beard. That, above all, is my lasting image of you, better than any photograph. In my head, I can hear your voice, Chicago accent still apparent with some drawling southern tones you picked up on the way. I loved you with all of me, from the heart, nothing held back. I cherish many times spent in your company but the Waldorf Astoria offered us the freedom to be ourselves. Precious times.

      Sometimes, like now, I am absorbed by the memory; joyfully reliving each moment and feeling reborn and renewed. I believe you truly loved me. I could see it in your eyes and I could sense it, yes, I really do mean sense it and I can see you now, smiling at my funny ways!  Sometimes, though, memories can lead me to despair and sorrow for what was lost. What we lost. What you took from me when you returned to Idaho to sort things out.

 

And my poem,

 

Story Time

Come and gather round the wireless,

     It’s time for Listen With Mother.
    “Are You Sitting Comfortably?”
    A story time, like no other.
 
    A few minutes of quiet time
    With my mum every afternoon
    Enjoying our togetherness,
     I was starting school very soon.

School was great and I learnt to read

     The stories of Janet and John,
     And more besides, Oh what a world
     Full of entertaining fiction.

 Reading, writing, the love of words,

      In my childhood the seeds were sown
     To strengthen my ability
     To write short stories of my own.

PMW 2019

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Roses - Memories

An afternoon in August. I wanted to sit outside in the shaded side of the garden with something good on my Kindle, a nice cup of tea and complain half-heartedly about the heat wave sapping my energy. Alas, it’s not that sort of an afternoon. Today feels more like October. I stood in the kitchen admiring the flowers on the window sill then looking outside, watching the rain bouncing in the puddles and weighing down the foliage in the overgrown garden. Drenched buddleia heads bending to the ground, the bees and butterflies I was watching earlier have flown for cover. Peeping out from behind a sapling which is a gift from nature, as we didn’t plant it, I can see one orange rose bud on the bush which is usually abundant at this time of year. Well, it would be if it wasn’t light-starved by a massive, dark berberis that has taken over the entire border and is so fierce with long, stabby prickles that we can’t trim it. It’s time to rethink the garden and make it child-friendly and easy maintenance.  And allow more sunlight to the rose bush, which isn’t orange but tangerine when the flowers open.

The rose bush was a gift from a close friend and former colleague when I changed jobs and she’d chosen it for the colour as we both follow Blackpool Football Club. When the conditions are good, it thrives perfectly with many beautiful flowers and has done for the best part of ten years, until this berberis went berserk and overshadowed it. The berberis has to go.

When I was a child, I remember my mother had a pressed rose in the pages of a fat encyclopaedia.  It was too heavy for me so she would hold it and turn the pages and let me look at the rose. It had been red, but now it was brown and dark pink, squashed flat with the papery petal edges breaking away. The thorns had dropped off the stalk, which was more brown than green and the two leaves had stuck together. My father had given it to her, long before they were married and I kept it for many years after she passed away.

Red roses are so romantic. Before we were married, my husband took me out to dinner and had arranged for a bouquet of red roses to be placed on the table for me. Twelve perfect dark red roses, so beautiful. I felt like a princess. I saved one and pressed it in one of my historical art books. I might still have it, if it hasn’t turned to dust after all these years. And if it has gone, I have the wonderful memory as I do for my mother’s rose.

 

 

When the rose is faded,
Memory may still dwell on
Her beauty shadowed,
And the sweet smell gone.

That vanishing loveliness,
That burdening breath,
No bond of life hath then,
Nor grief of death.

'Tis the immortal thought
Whose passion still
Makes the changing
The unchangeable.

Oh, thus thy beauty,
Loveliest on earth to me,
Dark with no sorrow, shines
And burns, with thee.

              Walter de la Mare

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

 

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Candlelight - Power Cuts

That’s Wimbledon over and a hope for two British champions in the same tournament is on hold.

There’s something romantic about candlelight. A warm glow that softens complexion and reflects a gentle flicker on the wine glasses in the relaxed atmosphere of a gathering of friends. If only I could travel back in time, my chosen gathering would include my dear Lord Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Burns and the Brownings; and if only I could hear their poetry from their own voices instead of mine.

It was my voice reciting their poetry in the candle-lit evenings of early 1974 from ‘The Penguin Book of Love Poetry’ which I had just added to my bookshelf.  Power cuts meant we sat together in our dining-room, the one room that still had an open fire-place suitable for a coal fire (go easy on the coal, shortages). The room was large enough to have a three piece suite round the fire and a dining table and chairs set out further back. Our family lived in here and our bedrooms for the duration of the crisis.  For safety reasons we used torches everywhere except the dining room and kitchen. My father, still a licensee, had an off-licence as well as his brewery work and we lived in a house instead of a pub. The silence of a private detached house was eerie after noisy pubs all of my life and now it was even creepier in the dark, but our candle-lit dining room had a cosy feel. We listened to the battery powered radio, played board games and had enough light to read to ourselves or to each other. No one seemed to miss the television. I hated being unable to play my records. Luckily, we had a gas cooker. I can’t remember how long the power cuts lasted. I know we were given the times that we would have electricity and how long it would be on. I wonder how we would manage these days.

Thinking of candlelight reminds me of the wonderful ‘Carols by Candlelight’ services we had at Raikes Parade Methodist Church when I was a Sunday School teacher. I looked after the infant age group which included one of my children. She wasn’t the most trustworthy to carefully carry a tea-light in a jar to the front of the church but filled with a sense of occasion and doing something important, she did it perfectly as did the others, and all singing ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ at the top of their voices.

My husband and I are having a weekend away soon for our wedding anniversary. It might include a romantic candle-lit dinner and a Scottish sunset.

One of my favourite poems, first encountered in 1974. I’d spent years amongst the Brontes and it was time to extend my interests.
 

Sonnet XLIII, from the Portuguese.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

                   Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Thanks for reading, Pam x 

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