Wedding Tiers

‘Cool!’

‘I’m glad to see you making friends already, though I didn’t think you’d be starting with the boys quite so quickly!’

Josie blushed. ‘Ben’s just being nice. I mean, it’s not like he’s asked me out. He did ask Libby out once but she turned him down.’

‘Quite right too. At your age, friendship is better,’ Granny said firmly. ‘I don’t mind him coming here to see you, but no goings-on.’

Josie blushed furiously. ‘Granny!’

Later, in her room, she took the framed photograph of her parents out of the drawer where she’d hidden it away and looked from her mother’s smiling face to her own serious one in the dressing table mirror. Her mother was pretty, even with laughter lines and a bit of extra weight plumping up her cheeks, but Granny was just being kind, for surely her eyes had been bluer and her skin less sallow than Josie’s own?

Then she tried to remember what colour her father’s eyes had been, but already the memories were fading, along with the first sharp edge of pain and anger.

As the years passed, she forged a bond of hopes, dreams and laughter with Libby and moved seamlessly from friendship into love with Ben. But, deep down, she never quite lost that slight feeling of insecurity, the fear that those she loved might just be snatched away from her at any moment.

And she always hated the cry of peacocks.

Chapter One Cakes and Ale (#u7c249ba6-0fc7-5846-b7bc-e6e167e8659d)

The Artist has gone off to London again, for the opening night of an exhibition that includes his work. The source of his inspiration may come from the countryside, but these increasingly frequent trips to the metropolis are yet another necessary compromise to our way of life.

We aim to be as self-sufficient as possible—and still the twenty-first century constantly intrudes. Realistically, we’re doing well if we can strike an eighty/twenty balance! Even this diary is now written directly onto a laptop and emailed straight off to the editor of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine, just one example of the constant contradictions involved. And, of course, many of you now subscribe to the online version.

But it has to be admitted that the Artist has a weakness for all kinds of gadgets and bits of technological wizardry that I don’t share even when, with the best of intentions, he presents me with something like a breadmaking machine, which he is sure will make my life easier…

‘Cakes and Ale: the musings of a backyard good-lifer’

The sun was making a brave attempt to warm a dank and fuzzy mid-October morning when Ben, looking as big, tousled and wholesomely delectable as always, turned on the doorstep to say goodbye.

‘Oh, I wish you didn’t have to go,’ I said, putting my arms around his neck to pull him down to kissing level. Honestly, you’d think he was going on some exotic foreign trek into uncharted territory, rather than to stay with old friends in London for a couple of days. I really must get a grip! But these moments do sweep over me occasionally, because when you’ve been orphaned as a child and then lost the grandmother who brought you up, it’s hard not to be afraid that fate might also decide to snatch away the person you love most in the whole wide world.

‘You know I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to, darling.’ Ben enfolded me in a reassuring if asphyxiating hug, like a good-natured grizzly bear.

‘Liar, liar, your bum’s on fire!’ I chanted rudely. ‘You’re loving your bit of fame, admit it. These days there’s a glint in your eye and a spring in your step every time you set off for London.’

He grinned, though guiltily, his fair skin flushing slightly. ‘Perhaps—but aren’t I always more than happy to be back home again, with you?’

‘Maybe,’ I conceded, because it was true that he always came back exhausted and more than ready to slip back into the old, familiar rut as if he’d never been away—until the next time. ‘But then, maybe you’re just missing your home comforts?’

‘You’re one of my home comforts,’ he said, squeezing me again and then letting me go. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get to Russell and Mary’s flat—promise.’

‘That’s OK, I don’t really think anything awful will happen to you between here and Camden, unless things have changed radically since I last came with you.’ I paused reflectively, trying to remember when that was, and then added in surprise, ‘Do you know, that must be more than a year ago!’

‘Is it?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem like that long.’

‘No, the time has just flown. I feel I’m losing touch with Mary too, and we used to be such friends, but now if I phone she’s always about to go out and never rings me back like she says she will. I really must find someone who would look in on Uncle Harry and walk the dog, so I could start coming with you again.’

‘You know Harry’s too independent to let anyone else keep an eye on him and too frail to leave on his own,’ Ben pointed out patiently. ‘Anyway, you’ll be much happier here, doing something with all those baskets of apples and pears Dorrie keeps giving you.’

‘Actually, I always enjoyed my trips to London, catching up with everyone and visiting my favourite places,’ I protested, which was true, especially when Libby was in town so we could meet up. ‘But you’re right, there’s a huge amount to do here at the moment. I’m appled out and I still need to get the last of the marrows in, make green tomato chutney and start pickling beetroot—plus I have a really tricky wedding cake to finish icing. It’s just that I do miss you when you’re away.’

‘And I miss you too, darling,’ he said, but absently, looking at his watch. ‘I’d better go—speak to you later!’

He gave me a kiss and then off he strode across the Green towards the High Street and the bus to the station, swinging his overnight bag, while I mopped a weak and pathetic tear from my eye with the belt of my blue towelling robe and summoned up a bright smile in case he turned round to wave.

He didn’t, but that was probably because Miss Violet Grace whipped around the corner on her tricycle just as he reached it and he had to take sudden evasive action.

A collision was averted and Ben vanished from sight. Spotting me, Violet veered rapidly in my direction, the bobbles of her gaily coloured Peruvian-style knitted helmet flying in the breeze.

‘Isn’t Ben an early bird?’ she called, coming to a sudden halt in front of me, so that her hat fell forward over her eyes. She pushed it back and peered upwards, and what with her mauve lipstick, pale complexion and fringe of silvery hair, she would have looked quite other-worldly had it not been for the faint flush on her cheeks engendered by pedalling hard. ‘Off to London again, is he?’

‘Yes, and I would have driven him to the station in the van, but he insisted on catching the bus. At least, I hope he’s caught it, because I held him up a bit,’ I said guiltily.

Violet had been to fetch the newspaper from Neville’s Village Stores. However hard she and her two elder sisters might find it to make ends meet on their pensions, their father, General Grace, had always had The Times, so it was unthinkable to them that they could possibly start the day without it.

‘Ben is a brilliant artist—The Times said so.’ She looked doubtful, though willing to believe anything written in that august organ. ‘I thought I would just pop across to remind you that there is a wedding at St Cuthbert’s today—ten thirty. Will you be there, dear?’

The Three Graces and I are all wedding junkies, lurking outside the church as the happy couples emerge, although this was a habit I had so far managed to keep from Ben, who was stubbornly anti-Establishment in the matter of legal wedlock. He hadn’t always been so adamant about it; it sort of came over him by degrees while he was a student.

‘I’ll try, but I have a wedding cake to ice and more green tomato chutney to make. I’ll put some in your fruit and veg box later, shall I? And did you say you wanted some frozen blackberries? I’ve got loads.’

‘Lovely,’ she agreed, preparing to cycle off, ‘yes, please. Dorrie Spottiswode’s giving us some apples, so we can make apple and bramble pies. Pansy’s knitting her a tam in exchange, from some leftover mohair. We thought that was about equal value in Acorns.’

Pansy isn’t some kind of ingenious squirrel—Acorns are simply a unit of currency I devised a few years ago, to help a little group of us to swap produce and services.

‘You can have the latest copy of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine too. I’ve read it. And I must finish off the next instalment of “Cakes and Ale” and get it off to them,’ I added guiltily. My deadline was always the twentieth of the month, which wasn’t that far away.

‘Righty-oh, see you later!’ Violet cried gaily, and then cycled off round the Green to Poona Place, leaning forward over her handlebars, earflaps flipped backwards like psychedelic spaniel’s ears, while I, suddenly shivering, went back inside.

In the kitchen, under a tea towel, Ben had arranged root vegetables and green tomatoes into a heart shape and added a carrot arrow.

It was a pity he’d created this earthy symbol of our love on the immaculately clean marble surface dedicated to making my wedding cakes, but it still made me smile.

Later, sitting in our cosy living room overlooking the garden, logs burning in the stove and a glass of Violet’s non-alcoholic but fiery ginger cordial by my elbow (three Acorns per bottle), I was trying to wrap up the latest episode of my long-running ‘Cakes and Ale’ column for the alternative women’s magazine.

I’d written the obligatory ‘what’s-happening-with-the-garden-and-the-hens’ bit, describing September’s mad scramble to get all the fruit and vegetables harvested and stored, clamped, preserved or turned into alcohol, processes that were still ongoing, if not quite so frenetic. Some things, like the elderberries, were quite over and well on the way to being turned into ruby-red wine.

I do love the season of mellow fruitfulness, and there’s nothing quite so blissful as having a larder full of pickles, chutneys and preserves, crocks of salted beans and sauerkraut, and wine fermenting gently by the stove…So maybe I am the squirrel and that’s why my subconscious decided we would call our barter currency Acorns!

Anyway, I finished that part of the article off with Ten Delicious Things to Do with a Plum Glut (crystallised plums—oh, be still, my beating heart!) and then, after an eye-watering gulp of ginger cordial, embarked on the philosophising section, my readers’ favourite:

If we are not quite living off the fat of the land, as self-sufficiency guru John Seymour once put it, we are at least utilising the cream clinging to the edges. And what cream, cheese and yoghurt there has been recently, provided by friends who keep goats, and a Dexter cow or two, at their smallholding on the outskirts of the village…

Mark and Stella, our friends with the smallholding, are a much older hippie couple, and I’ve often wondered whether Ben and I were behind the times or ahead of them when, as teenagers, we dreamed of one day being self-sufficient. Whichever, I was more than happy that the way we lived was suddenly very trendy and aspirational so that the magazine, and especially my column in it, had something of a cult following. I love to share—ideas, inspiration, tips, food…

Granny and Uncle Harry were a great early influence, managing to produce practically all their own fruit, vegetables and eggs, plus the occasional hen for the pot, just from their combined back gardens in Neatslake, which is quite a large and pretty village in Lancashire, not far from Ormskirk.

Ben and I had more of a country smallholding in mind, even if we were hazy about how we could ever afford it—unless Ben’s paintings began to sell really well, of course. That was the dream: we would work our plot together, and he would paint while I baked and bottled and preserved. It sounded such bliss!