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‘Don’t chicken out on me before we start,’ Libby said. ‘What about you, what do you want?’
‘I don’t know, really. My parents thought I ought to…’ She suddenly trailed off, her voice trembling.
‘Look, don’t go all wobbly on me!’ warned Libby, and to her surprise Josie saw that her new friend had tears in her large blue eyes. ‘If you start crying, then I will too, and then everyone will know I’m as soft as butter and I’ll be done for. I’m only cool to know because they think I’m hard as nails.’
Josie sniffed back the tears. ‘Sorry. My—my parents wanted me to go to university, but I don’t know…Now I just feel I’d like to stay in Neatslake for ever and help Granny with the gardening and Uncle Harry with the hens. Granny’s teaching me how to bake and make jam and stuff too.’
‘You can’t make a career out of any of that.’
‘Yes I could. I could be a gardener, and I think I’d like that.’ She caught sight of Ben Richards in the distance, in the middle of a group of boys. He was taller than the rest so he was easy to spot.
Libby saw where she was looking. ‘Ben’s fourteen, in the next year up from us, and he’s very popular. His parents wanted to send him to some public school but he decided he’d rather come here with his friends and he’s very stubborn. He’s brilliant at art—he’s done his O level already—but he’s totally thick about everything else.’
‘I’m sure he isn’t!’
‘He’s good at football,’ she conceded. ‘I’m not sure how clever you have to be for that, but it makes him popular with the boys too.’
They watched him in the distance and then Josie sighed and said, ‘I don’t suppose he’ll ever notice me again. I suppose it was just because he practically fell over me and I was a new face.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Libby said, looking at her thoughtfully, then added immodestly, ‘You’re not pretty like me, but sort of attractive in a different way. I’ve never met anyone else with hair that really dark red—or eyes that bluey-greyish-lilac sort of colour.’
‘Thanks, but I’m not sure I want to be different.’ Her eyes returned to Ben, now playing football with a group of other boys. She was also tall for her age…
‘Ben asked me out once, but I had to turn him down,’ Libby said.
Josie turned and stared at her new friend, feeling a pang of jealousy. ‘Not part of the big plan?’
‘No way.’ She shook her head. ‘And I think he only asked me because his friends dared him to. They probably told him I was easy, like Mum. Anyway, I don’t want to get tangled up with some village boy; I have to concentrate on the bigger picture. I’m saving myself for Mr Right. Mr Rich and Right,’ she added, then giggled. ‘It might have been worth going out with Ben, though, just to see his parents’ faces! They’re so snobby and stuck up, especially his mother, they’d have had fits.’
‘Oh? What does she do?’
Absolutely nothing, but Ben’s father’s a hospital consultant and they live up a lane the other side of Church Green, in a converted farmhouse. Ben’s already got his own studio in one of the outbuildings, because his mother doesn’t like mess in the house.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘One of his friends told me.’
‘Granny’s house is on the Green,’ Josie said. ‘That pair of cottages by the really old black and white building. My uncle Harry lives next door to us, but he’s not really an uncle, he just married Granny’s cousin.’
‘The old house is Blessings,’ Libby nodded. ‘It’s Elizabethan.’
‘Granny says she used to go there to clean, years ago.’
‘In that case, don’t get ideas about Ben Richards. His parents would probably think a granny who was a cleaner was only one step above a slutty mother.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Josie said defensively. ‘Anyway, she was a nurse during the war, but it damaged her back so she took up cleaning afterwards—just light stuff. She still gets a bad back sometimes, but that’s probably just because she’s really, really old. My mother was a nurse too, and my dad was a policeman. We lived in a police house in St Albans.’
‘Well, don’t start crying again, or you’ll set me off,’ Libby said briskly.
Josie gave a watery smile. She’d got the measure by now of Libby’s kind heart under her sometimes brusque exterior, and her friend’s lovely blue eyes were, indeed, brimming again with sympathetic tears.
‘A dad who was a policeman is at least a couple of rungs up from not knowing who your father is—and my sister, Daisy, doesn’t know either, except that we have different ones,’ Libby pointed out. ‘Maybe it’s better not to know.’
Libby left the bus before her new friend, at the other end of Neatslake, but Ben Richards and a couple of other boys got off when Josie did, suddenly swinging down the spiral stairs from the upper deck as the bus stopped, and jumping off first.
She didn’t think he’d noticed her, but as she turned the corner towards Church Green, he fell into step beside her as if he’d been waiting for her. Which he had.
‘I hear your granny makes the best cakes in Neatslake,’ he said, with that warm, irresistible sideways smile, and Josie felt the glacier around her heart crack into a million fragments and melt away.
* * *
‘Well, that’s going to put the cat among the pigeons,’ Granny said thoughtfully when Ben had finally—and reluctantly—gone off home, full of cheese straws hot from the oven and several slices of butter-rich fruitcake. ‘But he seems a nice boy—considering.’
‘Considering what?’ Josie demanded, coming out of a pleasant trance. Her mouth ached a bit from all the smiling she’d done this afternoon, and she wondered if her face muscles had atrophied over the last few months from disuse. She got up and looked at herself in the small, cloudy mirror beside the coat pegs, but it was about as much good as a reflection on water, all ripply.
‘If you two are going to be friends, I don’t think Ben’s parents, especially his mum, will be too pleased about it.’
‘I’ve heard she’s a snob, Granny. Do you know her?’
‘Oh, yes. Many’s the time Nell Slattery’s sat here in the kitchen with your mother,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘They did their nursing training together and started working at the same hospital together too, and they were quite good friends in those days.’
Josie frowned. ‘So why won’t she be pleased if me and Ben are…’ she blushed, ‘friends?’
‘Well, flower, for one thing her husband is a consultant pathologist and the very instant the ring was on her finger she chucked the nursing and most of her old friends with it, and got Ideas. And for another—well, her husband fell for your mother first, you see, and Nell got him on the rebound.’
‘Ben’s father once went out with Mum?’ Josie said, amazed.
‘No, she didn’t have any fancy for him, but he pestered her until she met your father and they got married—then he turned and wed Nell instead. Since then she pretends she’s never met me if we pass in the village. Cleaners are below her notice. Though I suppose,’ she added with humour, ‘if she really didn’t, she’d be trying to employ me!’
‘There’s nothing wrong with having been a cleaner,’ Josie said loyally.
‘No, I’m not ashamed of having done good honest work, but I was proud of your mother, getting her nursing qualifications. And she was so pretty too. You look just like her at that age, Josie.’
‘But I’m not pretty,’ she said, surprised.
‘Of course you are.’
Josie shook her head definitely. ‘No, I’m not. Libby Martin, my new friend at school, said she thought I was unusual. Libby really is pretty—small and blonde and slim.’
‘Isn’t she Gloria Martin’s younger daughter? The talk of the village, that one is!’
‘Libby isn’t like her mother,’ Josie said definitely.
‘I don’t suppose she is. Neither of the two girls has had a bad word said about them,’ agreed Granny fairly. ‘The older one is apprenticed to a hairdresser and doing well. What’s she called? Some flower name.’
‘Daisy, I think,’ Josie said. ‘So, can I invite Libby to come round here sometimes?’
‘Yes, of course you can.’
‘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!
