"My troubles are
all over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am
still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my friends under the apple
trees."
Anna Sewell Black Beauty (1877)
I’m at Wisely Coffee & Bakery, on 7 Makara St, Krong,
Siem Reap, Cambodia, typing into my ageing iPad Air. There is even more red
dust outside than usual, and that’s due to the local council breaking up, and
perhaps eventually relaying, the pavements. Meanwhile, to get anywhere I either
have to walk on the side of the road, and in that dust which plays hell with my
sinuses, or ride an equally dusty tuk tuk.
The waitress has brought me wedges of watermelon to finish
off my lunch of fried noodles. The fruit is complimentary, as is the chilled
water, and I’m very grateful for both. I don’t come here too often, but I‘m
happy to receive that watermelon when I do. Generally speaking it’s apples,
that's what I think about when I think about fruit. Well bananas, coconuts,
mangos and durian too, and there is also some really unusual fruit here in
Cambodia, but I really don’t want to get into that here, just now.
I want to talk about English apples, specifically those
apples of my childhood. Not the Beatles Apple Boutique and The Fool (Simon
Posthuma and Marijke Koger), or the tech firm Apple (iPad air and my big Mac
desktops), those came way later, but here’s a little about my early life and,
of course, apples.
Here’s some appley facts. In Old English "Apple"
(or aepel) was the generic word for almost any fruit, not only ‘apples’. The
ancient Greek word μήλον (mēlon), or μᾶλον (mālon), in English is melon, but it
meant tree fruit in general. In Latin it became ‘mālum’, meaning 'apple'. The
French, who invaded England and stayed there for far too long still call
potatoes "apples of the earth," (pommes de terre) and pomegranate (in
Latin) ‘pōmum’ is "apple" and ‘grānātum’ "seeded". In truth
there are roughly some 7,500 varieties of apples in existence. Some people say
that the ‘modern’ apple fruit developed from the bitter wild variety during the
first millennium B.C, in the Tian Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan. Whereas
fossilised apple seeds have been found dating back 11.6 million years.
It was Virgil, Cato and Pliny who wrote about apples, but
more specifically Hesiod, (Theogony 211 ff, about 8th – 7th century BC)) who
wrote that in Greek mythology a grove of apple trees (bearing golden apples)
was in the Garden of the Hesperides, which belonged to the goddess Hera. Those
golden apples were believed to give immortality to anyone who consumed
them. In Roman Britannia (400 years in
length), the Romans along with many other things, like asparagus, turnips,
peas, garlic, cabbages, celery, onions, leeks, cucumbers, globe artichokes,
figs, medlars, sweet chestnuts, cherries and plums, but they also brought the
modern apple to England’s shores. The French, after the 1066 invasion, further
cultivated the apple in England.
In my retrospective illusion it was always summer in my
youth. In reality, of course, it wasn’t. Some when, in my early years, perhaps
when I was seven or eight, we as the Bradley family, my mother, father, and my
nine years older brother (Victor) and I, upped stakes and moved to live on the
Bremner's (apple) farm (really called New Lodge farm) in Little Baddow, down
those once leafy lanes of rural Essex.
The internet tells me the name Baddow comes from an Old
English word meaning 'bad water', and which was the original name of Essex’s
River Chelmer. Rob Bremner started the farm that I remember. He and his wife
(Marion Edith Bremner née Lidell) returned to England, from China, and founded
that fruit farm in Little Baddow, Essex. The Bremners never had prodigy and, by
the time that I write this, they have both moved on to new planes of existence,
as have my parents and older brother..
My father had given up his laborious (and labour intensive)
job as a flour mill labourer, in Rankin Flour Mill, Rochford, near
Southend-on-sea, Essex. My mother equally surrendered her job making light
bulbs in Southend-on-sea, and took us all over to the beautiful ruralness of
that multiple acre apple farm in the sumptuous depths of the Essex countryside.
This reminiscence has all the echoes of H.E Bates and his Larkin family as well
as, curiously, a more impoverished Durrell family making their own nests in
Corfu, but this was England.
We had to make do with a motorcycle and sidecar as family
transportation, and houses devoid of bathrooms (and indoor toilets). There was
nothing hinting of middle-classness about the Bradley family, nor anything
special, just a working-class family struggling to survive in those post-war
years, with rationing still rampant.
Certainly New Lodge (Bremner’s) apple farm was no Garden of
the Hesperides. The fruits, mostly, were not golden, but when you're seven or
eight, apple farms, well, any farms, are such amazing places to be. Imagine if
you will Laurie Lee and Cider with Rosie, though I didn’t get to taste either
cider or Rosie in those most delicate pre-pubescent years. Farms are chock full
of adventures, for the adventurous, but most especially for adventurous tousle
haired boys in short woollen trousers and tank tops (before they, briefly,
became a fashion statement). At that point in time my father, who had had many
jobs after his discharge from the British Army (fishmonger, Harley Davidson
restorer and repairer and flour mill labourer to name but a few), was a tractor
driver and general labourer, as was my elder brother Victor.. My mother became
a housekeeper for Mister and Missus Bremner. I was given the run of that (to
me) expansive countryside and became endeared to Mrs Bremner, as a surrogate
grandchild. In those young years I learned so much from my life on that farm,
and with the Bremners, that I am eternally grateful for everything they exposed
that innocent small Londoner to.
Generally, after my school day, seated in the Bremner’s
copious kitchen with the cream coloured Aga range consuming apple wood, Mrs
Bremner would be cooking large meat cakes for ten cocker spaniels, and would
ply me with the sort of pastry delicacies my family could never afford, only
dream of, like cream horns and chocolate éclairs. This became a regular item.
My new surrogate grandmother would regale me with stories of her days in China
and Hong Kong, encouraging me to ask questions so that she could regale me with
yet more stories.
The Bremner family had been in China. That was where the two
of them met. I know, and knew, little of Mr Bremner, except that he was
Scottish, grumpy, and to keep out of his way so as not to annoy him. When
returning to England, the Bremners brought back copious artefacts of Chinese
origin; odd statues that looked like weird pudgy dogs and huge colourful vases.
Among the items to follow the Bremners back to England was one Chinese maid,
called May Po Ling. More of her later. Then there was a strange rectangular
structure, which I mistook for a birdcage, with a large wooden frame. Inside
this cage was foliage I had never seen before and, instead of birds, some sort
of large grubs.
I learned later that the foliage was mulberry leafs (genus
Morus), and the grubs were silkworms (Bombyx mori). I barely knew what silk
was, having never seen it, let alone the worms (moth caterpillars) which
excreted silk. However, the kindness of May Po Ling, whose excellent English
had a pleasantly slight lilt, exotic and unlike anything or anyone I had
encountered before, was my unpaid tutor in this and in many things. She was
also the first non-British person whom I had encountered, and definitely the
very first Chinese person I had met. Like Mrs Bremner, May Po Ling was the very
essence of patience with me. Between those two exceptional ladies, they gave me
the education, which was sorely lacking at Little Baddow Primary School, or the
larger school that followed. I learned to write my name in Chinese characters,
and I learned about books and silkworms all because of the generosity of Mrs
Bremner allowing her maid time to teach me.
May Po Ling was engaged to an American Chinese car designer,
whom I only remember as Peter. I was there, at the Bremner house, for their
wedding reception. But not, I remember, allowed champagne. There is an old
photo of me in a thick woollen suit, with short trousers, replete with a dickie
bow tie and a flower in my lapel. Not knowing what to do with my hands for a
photograph, I held my hands together. In the background you can see the red
brickwork of the front of ‘New Lodge’.
Mrs Bremner’s kindness didn’t stop there. Because she didn't
have children of her own, and therefore no grandchildren, I became her
surrogate grandchild. I was borrowed from my mother, and happily so, and was
given not only the run of the countryside but I was also given books too. One
especially, from her friend Anna who was a writer. Anna turned out to be Anna
Sewell, and the book - Black Beauty. Other presents were more practical, like
the small wicker basket in which I could keep the secateurs she gave me to
‘help’ her prune apple trees. Mrs Bremner showed me where and when to cut, and
demonstrated grafting and the application of liquid pruning sealer. Something
now frowned upon, but was widely used in the 1950s.
Those acres prospered apples a plenty. Apple trees in their
rows seemed to stretch on forever. Cox’s Orange Pippin; Golden Delicious; Worcester
Pearmain; Laxton’s Superb and Bramley were just some of the varieties the
Bremner’s had planted. Those trees were an absolute marvel when in blossom, and
again when in fruit, but a terror at pruning time with piles of drying branches
scattered on the orchard floor or piled in heaps waiting to be collected.
An apple orchard, with pruned branches littered around, was
not the sort of place that you’d want to be riding a sports bike with
Derailleur gears, as Victor (my brother) found out. Eager to be with his first
(and only) ladylove, Sandra, my brother took a shortcut through one freshly
pruned part of the apple orchard. Hitting a stubborn branch, he buckled the
cycle’s front wheel and partially destroyed his rather expensive gear system.
It was to be the end of his cycling days and the beginning of his motorcycling
(Beezer Bantam) ones. It was a happy accident which eventuated, some time
later, and when I was tall enough, in me having Victor's old cycle which had
been repaired by my parents. Those farms, and its surrounds, were a haven for
me. It felt like home.
When it was determined that I should have a two-wheeler
bicycle, I was given a second-hand black vintage ladies 3-speed bicycle,
replete with a wicker basket on the front. That bicycle had a distinct esemblance to something you might have associated (later, 1964) with either
Mary Poppins or Miss Gulch’s bike in The Wizard of Oz (original film, 1939).
Having that old, black, women’s bike meant that, at 7 or 8
years old, the world was my mollusc. I was no longer confined to the limits of
apple orchards, no matter how pleasant and at times, idyllic, they were. Little
Baddow and Danbury lay spread out before me. I was an English Zheng He,
Magellan or Columbus, my bike, my ship, charting waters afresh and going where
no small boy on a black women’s Hercules bike had gone before, probably.
Because the crossbar was low, it meant that I could ride the
bike even though I was (at that time) diminutive. Being short, and being young,
never stopped me from racing off on adventures around Little Baddow and
Danbury. I could peddle down from New Lodge Farm, right onto New Lodge Case,
down the inclining Hurrell’s Lane to the ford and its small bridge, and once
there lazily bend over that bridge watching reeds swirl their way down stream,
or stand watching cows in the nearby pasture lowing and fertilising the
earth. Occasionally, I might witness
keen anglers meditating, pretending to watch fishing floats.
Sometimes, when free from school, I would cycle across and
into Chapel Lane and down to Church Road. It was too cumbersome to wend my way
through the apple orchards, so I would follow the road round along New Lodge
Chase, past the hazel tree hedgerows, turn left past the church and along to
the weir at Little Baddow lock. That was where brightly coloured narrow boats
would occasionally pass through (as part of the Chelmer and Blackwater, rivers,
navigation), leaving me a little awestruck and yearning for a different life.
On that farm, opposite the edge of Blake's Wood, its
abundant foliage, its adders and its inherent mystery, we lived in a curiously
semi-detached cottage. Two cottages, abutting, and once identical, existed
together. When we had moved in, there was an elderly couple next door. The
Kents. Mrs Kent welcomed us into our new home with an apple pie, once the
moving van had left. In the 1950s it was a tradition of welcome and kindness,
now sadly lost.
Though at times forbidding, Blake's Wood was also enticing. It
wasn't a place for cycles, so I would tramp and wander that deeply wooded area,
finding my way through and up to Lingwood common, whose vegetation was spiky
gorse, and entirely different from trees of the woodland.
Inside our cottage was rustic, antiquated, with blackened
beams suitable for severely whacking the overly tall, but it quickly became
home to us.
The extensive gardens were split down the middle. Our side
front garden prospered roses, to my mother’s delight, and we always thought of
our home as ‘Rose Cottage’, though I’m not sure that was its name. The rear
garden was huge. Even though we only had half, it was still massive, to me. It
was also, incidentally, where our toilet outhouse was, for the cottages had no
bathroom or toilet facilities.
Crowing the glory of that fruit and vegetable filled garden,
was a tremendously ancient walnut tree (Juglans regia), which had the habit of
dropping its plentiful fruit on the unwary. Inside the fruit hard casing was
hidden the brain-like nuts, which crumbled nicely in the mouth. Walnuts are,
like apples, not native to the British isles, but were taken there, once again,
by the Romans who not only like the nuts, but also the medicinal properties the
leaves and the nuts were believed to have. It is even said that there were
walnut groves within the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Towards the rear of that lengthy garden grew the huge leaves
of rhubarb, like vegetable elephant ears (which my father would have seen in
his travels in and around India), aplenty. Nearby were thorny gooseberry,
blackcurrant and redcurrant bushes, which in season would have to be covered
with old lace curtains (to protect the luscious berries from scavenging birds),
were a sheer delight to us all, but to mother in particular (as jam maker in
chief). But the main purpose of that garden was vegetables. With shops no
nearer than Little Baddow village, and a small mobile shop visiting weekly, we
had to be as self sufficient as possible. Frequently we dined on rabbits or
pigeons, which were shot as pests, but ended up as dinner. I didn’t get to see
much seafood, except when we went on holiday to Maldon, or further afield to
Great Yarmouth camping, when we would, without a doubt, have fish & chips.
Like it or not, it was the only meal out my father could afford. It was during
that time that I developed a severe dislike of fish & chips. These are
other reasons that I enjoyed my time with Mrs Bremner so much, her scrumptious
cakes and her divine pastries.
For me, living on an apple farm gave me more opportunities
than just being near apples, their heady scent and the siren temptations of the
female ‘sorters’, which was a world unknown to my Enid Blyton/Arthur Ransome
innocent boy’s eyes, but seemingly beckoned mightily to my father, or so I am
led to believe.
Between the sorting shed, its adult temptations, and our
picturesque cottage, were constant stacks of wooden apple boxes. These were
used to transport the apples whither and thither. Howsoever, those apple box
stacks provided great opportunities for a small boy’s den making. So I did.
Time and again I built dangerously precarious dens out of arrays of apple boxes
and, not once, despite all the warnings, did the dens tumble to crush me. I was
probably a beaver in a previous life. From my apple box lair I could watch the
comings and goings of the farm, my father or brother on tractors passing,
people smoking, gossiping, maybe even flirting.
That old farm also had a refrigeration unit, which cooled
the apples to help them stay fresher longer, but not the ardour of the workers,
and no doubt the proximity was tempting beyond words for some.
The not so good apples were sent away for cider making, and
soon enough we departed for a mushroom farm in Little Horkesley, near
Colchester.
Just as I rarely eat fish & chips, I rarely eat apples
either. Those years of living on an apple farm, with access to copious amounts
of all kinds of apple, has left me with a disinterest in apples as food. Even
decades later I feel glutted with apples.
Many years later, when
I was still living in Malaysia, and writing about Malaysian artists, I met one
artist, Lim Kim Hai, in Malacca, who paints nothing but portraits of apples.
His reasoning was, that he painted to improve his technique; his subject matter
was therefore immaterial. He had a selection of apples in his refrigerator, to
keep them fresh for painting.
