(I wrote this a few months back and haven't revisited it since. Such huge things have happened in the intervening moments.)
I must have been seven the year the brambles first grew in our
garden. They came on the wind perhaps or more likely borne in the stomach of
some small animal. In any case they grew thick and strong, straddling the fence
between our garden and the next. A lesser man would have cut them down, but my
father saw opportunity. That August we went picking, and I braved the thorns to
pluck out the shiny blackberries. Children are little obsessives; no blackberry
was fit for picking unless each and every corpuscle was iridescent, beetle
black, sweet as anything.
My mother made crumbles with the earliest of these
blackberries and in our cunning my father and I gave her only those berries
which had smuggled their sour pinkish globules past my eyes. The crumbles were tart;
we had to eat them with cream. The choicest morsels however were saved for our jamming.
The temperature of hot jam is 220 Fahrenheit, the volume of
jam we made enormous. My mother was allowed, at least, to print the labels but
we barred her from the kitchen. The jamming was our miracle, to be treated with
a kind of masculine reverence. It was a world into which she could not enter.
My father and I
stewed the blackberries in sugar and water, sieved to remove the seeds and
added some store-bought pectin. We followed an old recipe in a Mrs Beeton style
book that looked for all the world like the grimoire of a bent hedgewitch. And
indeed the seedless jam on the stove looked much like a potion. It frothed a
deep purple flecked with white foam, and dragging the spoon through the mixture
it glistened. I stood on a stepladder armed with a wooden spoon to stop it
burning. It felt, I said, “like stirring liquid velvet,”
There must have been a poem there. A lost opportunity.
There was a kind of alchemy that went on, not just in the
saucepan with its magical contents. There was a kind of accord between the two
of us. Knowledge passed on, time shared. Memories built. This is how I remember
it. I also remember the sun streaming as if someone had tinted the kitchen
windows sepia, and though the August light was yellow and warm I must remember
that nostalgia cares more for preserving feelings than facts. Perhaps all we
were doing was making jam.
In my mind this is how I remember my father. Cap on, peering
intently into the gently steaming depths of a jam pan. There are other memories
of course, most tied up with taste- the sickly cider ice lollies he’d buy me at
the park in the days when they all cost 99p or the peanut cookies only he liked,
proudly presented on Fathers’ Day. Did he know what memories he was giving me,
to horde in our endless fight against the future? No. He couldn’t have done.
Still he gave them too me, and during the years where we ripped each other to
shreds with our silences I would take out these memories, like postcards from
another life. I looked, I felt, I remembered.
I don’t make jam any more but I still cook. I still listen
to the songs he used to play- Tina Turner and Janis Joplin and Otis Reading,
the records kept carefully in red leather boxes. I still remember a time when that house was
full of music. I remember. Reluctantly, compulsively, angrily, I remember.
It’s the least I can do.
