NOT a madeleine, but a pale-yellow spotty apple from a Cornish garden. A fat cooker that no self-regarding supermarket would stock, but which, for me, belongs to the epulae (feast) shelf. A poet friend, James Turner, planted this apple long ago, made this garden, hid it behind a five-barred gate, and allowed me to weed it.
Eventually, his ancient home fell into later hands, those of an artist, and she has brought me this evocative Christmas present. I core it, run a sharp knife round its girth, pack it with raisins, and, oh golly, what a rush back over the years to the Cornish Christmases.
I would leave Suffolk at dawn, get to Paddington, make sure to be on the left side of the carriage so as not to miss the red desiccated rocks at Dawlish, and arrive at Bodmin Road in the early evening. The poet and his wife would then emerge from their little car in their duffel coats, show muted gratitude for my brace of Suffolk pheasants, brag about the eternal spring of the Cornish climate, and carry me off to the lovely house in the watery valley.
Their neighbours were an outspoken old lady who sold camomile plants to make camomile lawns, a silent old man who read ten library books a week, and some wildish dogs. Their house stood next to what might have been a medieval cell for a monk or two.
On Christmas morning, James and I drove to the eight-o’clock in a bitterly cold church, where he would purposely kneel on the damp stone floor, and I would carefully balance on a big stuffed hassock. The communicants dotted themselves around the nave, and our prayerful breath left our lips in little clouds.
In the churchyard, the dead crowded each other in their shiny slate graves. But we — the worshippers — were careful to space ourselves out so as not to cry “Happy Christmas!” Then home to an enormous breakfast. And an enormous lunch-cum-dinner; for it seemed to go on all day. And talk by the blazing logs — mostly, where James was concerned, about the iniquity and folly of publishers. And, on Boxing Day, the long walk along Constantine Bay, where, contrary to church, we yelled at everyone we met.
James’s friends included Charles Causley. The three of us would be in a more accepting mood where publishers were concerned as we drank bitter in the pub. Charles was dry and merry, and had just been given the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. When he gave me his books, he would change a line here and there with his fountain pen. There were other writers, too, for literature is usually made up of small gatherings in scraps of landscape. Charles knew eastern England; for he had had his teacher-training there, but his epicentre was, of course, Launceston, where he was on speaking terms with every cat.
Three more Treneague cookers to come; three more evocations of the Cornish Christmases and their winter guests. Blowy drives to the Cheesewring on Bodmin Moor. Searches for Thomas Hardy at Boscastle. The weather always a bit wet. Never-ending drinks with friends on clifftops: “Don’t go, don’t go.” Shy glimpses of John Betjeman at Daymer Bay, and later to his grave by the church, which his father had rescued from the sand, once to find rabbits dining on it.
And always, surprisingly, wild flowers in bloom without a winter break.