An English autumn

“Tell it like it is
Don’t say what you ought:
Language is but
The Avatar of Thought.”
From A Charioteer’s Advice to Indians
(Tr. by Bachchoo)
Serious fruit-picking this week! From the garden of a friend who shall, to preserve the secret of his laden orchards from those who would importune him and his lady wife next season and deprive me of my pickings, remain nameless.

Let’s just call him, so as to preserve his anonymity, “V.S.” Come autumn in past years, I have taken 12 nylon bags and climbed trees for the damsons and plucked the low-hanging pears and apples from their garden which runs down a few hundred yards to a small bordering river. The garden, through V.S.’ idiosyncrasy for not growing flowers is, this autumnal week, a myriad shades of green, mauve, yellow and brown and it has rows of apple trees and pear trees which have been pruned to ground-plucking height.
The front garden is the preserve of the lady of the house and grows flowers, but we didn’t wander there because you can’t make rose jam and who ever heard of lilac cider? Three of us went on this expedition. It meant driving from London with a car-boot full of bags, labouring for a few hours, repairing to the local pub for R&R and driving back. The fruit, tons of it, then went to a fruit-pressing farm in Sussex and our car-load yielded 140 pints of juice which will now, with due care, attention and additions, slowly ferment into pear and apple cider.
We shan’t drink 140 pints of this English soma ourselves. If it works and produces a decent drink, we’ll have presents galore to inflict on our friends. The damsons, small purple plums really, have gone into eight jars of damson ketchup and today possibly 10 jars of damson jam. Again, pre-Christmas gifts for the unwary. Not that the ketchup and jam are not worth eating. I have perfected them in past years and they and my preservative skills are now famous in at least two counties.
In Europe autumn, as J. Keats observed, is a season of mellow fruitfulness though the mists have disappeared from London. Very many people have apples, pears and even figs growing in their back gardens and thousands of townspeople have taken to reserving “allotments”, small parcels of land in a chessboard division of an empty urban space. They tend tomatoes and other vegetables there all year and in autumn the hobby farmers give away lettuces, cucumbers and other things they have proudly grown.
It is true that in most of India and in some remote rural parts of America it is undoubtedly economical to grow the fruit and vegetables that one consumes, to make one’s own alcohol, to keep sheep or cows to get milk, butter and in other ways live off the fat or lean of the land. But in London one drives to the supermarket or, if you are pretentious, conscientious about local trade or have some bees in your bonnet about small-and-“organic” being more moral or healthier than vastly capitalised and genetically modified or battery-farmed produce, you go to the “farmers market” and pick up your cukes, lettuces and even perhaps home-made cider. Without wishing to descend into materialistic vulgarity, I may calculate the price of petrol expended on the journey to and from my friend’s garden, to and from the fruit-juicing farm, the cost of the juicing charged by weight of fruit, the cost of plastic containers in which one keeps the juice to ferment, the bottles one has to buy to pour the cider into and the days of labour of several hands — and it will probably (I haven’t done this exercise) amount to considerably more per bottle of cider than going down to the Off Licence and buying professionally mass-produced, labelled and advertised stuff.
The same statistic applies to the allotment-produce freaks. And also to my year old penchant for baking my loaves of bread at home — which I joyfully do and show
off to all and sundry about.
Chappatis should be different, but truthfully, I buy mine ready-made and frozen and bring them out of the freezer when needed. I do try occasionally to make them, but however closely I follow the recipe, they become biscuity. (All tips welcome!)
So why do the city-rats, the denizens of our urbanscapes take the trouble with allotments and fruit-picking? I never thought of naani or daadi, who would bottle pickles and make malido each season as my role models! So why?
Because it gives one the illusion of being close to age-old processes of harvesting and preserving. I know for certain that making something of the fruit that would otherwise rot makes me feel like the saviour of the season.
As I write, the damson jam boils in pounds of sugar and shall be preserved in jars with rubber-ringed lids and metal clips which themselves cost more than the same quantity of store-bought jam would.
If the cider turns out to be dud, watery or vinegary, after all this bragging, I shall buy a case of the professional, labelled stuff, re-bottle it in amateur-looking recycled bottles, palm it off as my own in Christmas gifts, bask in the compliments — and live with the secret guilt!