Open Writing

I generally try to keep reminiscence to a minimum in my writing. Certainly it’s a great way to get started as a writer – write what you know is the old adage, but ultimately it doesn’t offer much of a challenge. As long as you have the basics of punctuation, grammar and construction, all you need is a good memory to write about the past. Sometimes just a memory is enough, accurate or not. So it’s important to me for my writing development to cast off the security blanket.

But like most folk who are in the late stages of their lives, I’m finding that my memories encroach on my consciousness with increasing frequency and clarity, if not accuracy. I suspect that several factors are at work in bringing this about. My mind is less cluttered with the day-to-day thoughts needed for existence, and my most distant memories now are tinged with that golden glow that softens the sharp edges, so even painful events can be revisited with some fondness. Perhaps I can be forgiven therefore if occasionally I take a walk down memory lane.

I got started on this tack the other evening when I was preparing vegetables for dinner. We usually have three, or sometimes four. As a kid I never had to be persuaded to eat my veggies; meat was a whole other matter, but that’s another story. So on this particular evening I was peeling carrots, separating a cauliflower into florets, and washing and halving those great little red potatoes. Some sliced green beans completed my assemblage.

The ruby red of the potato skins, the creamy white of the cauliflower, and the bright orange and green of the carrots and beans made a pretty sight. The work was all very tactile, and the feel of my good, sharp kitchen knives with their oil-soaked wooden handles turned what could have been a chore into a pleasure. While I was going through this mindless routine, my thoughts wandered back to a time when, as a young lad, I performed the same tasks in my mother’s kitchen, but how different it was then.

The majority of the vegetables we ate in those days were grown in our small garden. Roughly half the lot at the back of the house was given over to vegetables and herbs; the rest was a rose garden. Early in the year, as soon as the deeply frozen ground had softened, my father, sometimes with my help, would hand-dig the vegetable plot, turning in the rotted remnants of last year’s crop, and adding any composted kitchen waste that had accumulated through the winter.

The garden-fork-sized clods of earth would be left unbroken for the morning frosts to crumble, then later we would finish off the preparation with rakes, creating mounded rows or trenches according to what we intended to plant. The usual crop was cauliflower, potatoes, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and carrots, all of which had been raised from seed in the garden shed.

Whenever we were turning over the earth, it wouldn’t be long before a robin would perch on the forks, looking for worms and grubs as we took a break. He didn’t have the sense to keep quiet about his new source of supply, so in no time at all he’d be joined by a blackbird or a thrush. Later in the spring, we would set up a cane framework across the garden, between the vegetables and the roses, for the pole beans.

The herbs would pretty much go from year to year, so we would have no work to do there. Almost always there was Sage, Thyme and Mint. Sad to say, it wasn’t until much later in my life that I encountered Rosemary and Basil. Traditional English cooking, which was our fare in those days, had no place for Basil or for Garlic, which, along with olive oil, my mother dismissed as being “foreign food.” She, together with most of the rest of my family, and other people I knew then, were quite prejudiced.

As well as helping to cultivate and prepare our vegetables, it was also my job to harvest them. I enjoyed most of the harvesting; it was just the Brussels sprouts and the herbs that I had problems with. There was a belief back then that Brussels sprouts were only at their best when they had been frosted, so they were left on the stalk until we were ready to eat them. At the very least they would be crusted in ice, and more often buried in snow. Since I wasn’t smart enough to put on gloves, my fingers would be numb and aching by the time I got back to the kitchen, and if I also had to gather herbs, I would suffer the exquisite pain of what we called “hot aches” as my hands warmed up.

I derived the greatest pleasure of all from gathering the pole beans and the early potatoes. The pole beans, in a good year, had beautiful, heart shaped leaves bigger than my hand. They had crimson blossoms that were a joy in themselves, and much loved by the bees. But when the blossoms “set,” and the tiny beans appeared, the real excitement began. How long would the largest bean be this year, and what would be the weight of the total crop? Records were kept and comparisons made. Some years, when we had so many more than we could eat, our neighbors and friends became the beneficiaries.

The early potatoes were also a source of pleasurable anticipation. Since we couldn’t see what was happening under the mounded earth, we never knew what to expect when the garden fork lifted out the first plant. On the rare occasions when the earth was dry, it would fall away from the roots, revealing, if we were lucky, grape-like clusters of beautiful little golden nodules, in among some larger tubers. The smaller ones would be eaten within a day or so of harvesting, and the larger ones stored for later consumption.

My mother, like most of her contemporaries, cooked the vegetables immersed in boiling water until they were tender. No matter that most of the nutrients would have leached into the water by then, or been destroyed by the high temperature. We didn’t know, or care. In those times we ate the food because we enjoyed it and were hungry, not because it was nutritious, and we were none the worse for that.

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