October

Autumn colours at their best. What an irony it is that as the days grow cooler the land, grasses and trees turn to the colour of the sun. The hedgerows and trees changed from green to yellow and gold. As autumn advanced most of my friends in the village were occupied in helping to harvest the produce from the family allotment. The main work of summer was over and all that remained was to gather the produce and then tidy up. Bonfires were set in the allotments with all the useless rubbish and left-overs. In our orchard Grandpa supervised the picking of all the fruit from the trees. Apples were taken to the lofts and covered with old sacking. Plums went into the kitchen for jam making. Pears went into the larder and were eaten quickly - everyone loved them.

Grandma was a good country cook. She said a stew had no flavour without the addition of a good chunk of chopped swede. During the frugal years of the war and food rationing, the lowly swede would often end up on our dinner plate as the vegetable. During dinner preparation I would be sent out behind the barns to the ‘clamp’ to get the swede. Some were so large and heavy that if thrown with accuracy at a nearby cat, I could have performed murder. I didn’t, of course. I can remember wartime school dinners. They often were a slice of fried Spam, runny mashed potatoes and chewy yellow cubes of swede. Yuk!! These swedes had formerly been grown mainly for cattle fodder. Years later in Canada, I learned this same vegetable had a different exotic-sounding name, the rutabaga. But to me a swede is still a swede, and not from Sweden.

To find nut trees around Appleby was not easy but we did have some hazelnut trees growing in one of our hedges. They had quite a good yield. Over towards Culloden Farm, on the border were two walnut trees. They gave lovely big nuts, full of plump meat. Grandpa used to say that hazelnuts were for women and children, while walnuts were for men, making them all tanned both inside and out. Grandpa was a good nutter and would keep foraging deeper and deeper into the branches of a tree. On one of our nutting forays he spotted a whole bunch of big nuts out on the end of a branch. “Climb up on that limb,” he told me. “You’ll not hang so low as I,” he said in explanation. The limb was slender and the more I struggled my way along, the lower the limb sank to the ground. Soon my weight bowed the branch to the ground so that he was able to gather all the nuts. He finished at about the same time as I fell off into a bed of dried old stinging nettles. We walked back over fields of stubble carrying our bag of nuts and I hurried to keep up with him, as I scratched my legs that were burning from the stingers.