An old Rosemary Russet in Wisley Gardens , Phil Hall 2021
by Phil Hall
Eating an apple is like drinking milk. Apples come from a living organism, a relative. The original apple was a fig. Our ancestors co-evolved with fig trees. We are a by-product of fig tree ecology – along with the wasp larvae that nestle inside the soft, caressing fruit. Our ancestors licked out the sweet insides and threw away the green and purple, shivering skin.
Inhabitants of Greater London, coming out of their centrally heated cocoons, soon learn about mud and slippery clay. Slippery leaves, wet pavements, puddles. Wind-flagged, you walk into sprays and flecks. Damp patches on your trousers, on your shoulders, the wetness of your hair makes you smell like a big hamster.
Sheep stand in the fields, their wool protected by lanolin, but cold droplets fall onto their black muzzles and into their eyes. Cows press their sides together under clumps of trees. Foxes curl and huddle between the walls of the roots of great oaks and sycamores, or form orange and grey balls on the shed tops. Only the crows seem to like the wet. Going for walks in the countryside in the rain is for coprophiliacs.
But wetness and mud give everything their flavour on these islands. We are, or we become after we arrive, people of the bog. Building straw huts on stilts over marshland thousands of years ago. The fish that are alarmingly big. Too strong and very hard to catch. They are almost warm-flanked in their strength and muscularity, banging against the legs of the people fishing for them without biting.
Sloes, rowanberries, sour fruit. Or else bitter and strange, like the acorn and elderberries. Ungenerous landscape, like the portions of peas, fish fingers, boiled carrots and ‘Smash’ that my friends’ parents served. In the world of green and rain and mud of our temperate archipelago, there is sometimes more life in the vegetation than in the people who are slow and purposeful, cold weather monitor lizards. Immobile, but hooligan and wick in anger, in lashing out when the moment finally comes. Children of egg swallowing thieves. Eaters of squirrels and hedgehogs, eaters of the eaters of sludge; of eels, of whelks and snails. Too slow for the birds.
Apples, I have read, were brought over by the Romans to Britain, but, remember, potatoes came to Ireland from Peru. Corn came to Africa from Mexico. Maize and tomatoes and peppers and who knows what else were dexterously purloined by the Spanish and their European brothers, and passed off as their own.
The poor of England are grown from apples. You feel it as you bite. You bite into something alive, and then you understand the Howling for apples. There is a hunger we remember, the hunger that we may feel again that makes us howl. You come across an apple tree and your stomach is soon full of juice and apple flesh and you are sated, if not content; a little angry, perhaps, that the fruit is not as feeding as hazelnuts.
One of Oliver Cromwell’s Model Army scrumps apples. A little girl coming home from working in the fields with her friends eats fallen apples. The pregnant washerwoman, with her hands red and raw, is thinking of the apple tree at the back of the house and would like an apple. The family sits in front of an apple pie. The solitary genius, in Teddington, thinking of Sleeping Beauty, bites into a poisoned Cox’s Pippin. The old man with five teeth would like, once more, to feel them bite hard in an apple.
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Old apple tree we wassail thee
And hope that thou shalt bear
For the Lord doth know
Where we shall be
Come apples another year.
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For to bloom well
And to bear well so merry let us be
Let every man take off his hat
And shout out to the old apple tree.
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For to bloom well
And to bear well so merry let us be
Let every man take off his hat
And shout out to the old apple tree.
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Old Apple tree, we worship thee,
And hope that thou will bare
Hatfuls, capfuls, and three bushel bagfuls
A little heap under the stairs.
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Three cheers for the apple tree:
Hip hip horray!
Hip hip horray!
Hip hip horray!
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Traditional Wassailing chant
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Throughout the archipelago, the land was stolen from the people: enclosed, fenced, and kept. The whole of Richmond Park was only there for the pleasure of the King of the Frankensteinian monarchy brought back from the dead after the English revolution. Charles hunted for his venison and after he killed it he let the meat rot a little for the pleasure of the flavour, before he had a haunch of it roasted on a spit, and ate it with apple sauce.
The man himself, this royal defecator of the stool, was killed by a mole who had built a little mole hill. The king’s horse tripped over it and Charles snapped his neck and died. He was restored to the earth some time after he was restored to the British crown – by a mole. In revenge, they decided that moles should be caught and killed, and so had built a mole catcher’s cottage. The moles were all killed. I don’t see them on the lists of flora and fauna on the handouts and the pages of Richmond nature societies.
The mole catcher’s cottage became Pembroke Lodge, the home of Lord Russell, the prime minister, and of Bertrand Russell, the philosopher. Queen Victoria gave birth to a piglet in Pembroke Lodge, who then became the great hairy, rutting German boar, Edward IV.
In Richmond Park, the fawns match the colour of the autumn leaves so perfectly that they disappear and all you can see of them are two floating black eyes and a twitch of ears.
What was left of England and Scotland and Wales and Cornwall and Northern Ireland after the industrial revolution were people living in rows and rows of terraced houses with long, thin gardens behind them. The long, thin gardens always ended at a railway line, and at the end of the garden near the railway line, there was always an old apple tree.
At first, the children of the apples, the British, ate the apples hungrily because they were so desperately poor. The nuttier and sweeter the apple, the better. Apple varieties became rich in taste and difference and fed their wetness back to the people of the wet. But after a while, after wars and the long absences of millions, the billowings of chimneys, the pyroclastic dustings of industry and construction made of smoke, coal and masonry, flavoured everything, even the apples at the bottom of the garden.
There was more food. More Sunblest and Flora and Marmite and sugar for your tea – brewed up from little bags of sweepings. Sometimes there were worms in the apples in your own apple tree. There were prettier apples on sale. So many people, to forget the blessed taste of poverty and want, left their own apples to rot at the bottom of their gardens and bought them from a shop instead.
The colour of the Golden Delicious and its name shed a light, though the flavour was abysmal. Golden Delicious, the Double Diamond of apples. A taste memory of the 60s and early 70s. No hungry person should ever howl for a Golden Delicious, only someone French who wants to make a tarte aux pommes.
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