Golden Apples

 

 

 

 

"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.