Wedding Tiers. Trisha Ashley
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try, but I have a wedding cake to ice and more green tomato chutney to make. I’ll put some in your fruit and veg box later, shall I? And did you say you wanted some frozen blackberries? I’ve got loads.’
‘Lovely,’ she agreed, preparing to cycle off, ‘yes, please. Dorrie Spottiswode’s giving us some apples, so we can make apple and bramble pies. Pansy’s knitting her a tam in exchange, from some leftover mohair. We thought that was about equal value in Acorns.’
Pansy isn’t some kind of ingenious squirrel—Acorns are simply a unit of currency I devised a few years ago, to help a little group of us to swap produce and services.
‘You can have the latest copy of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine too. I’ve read it. And I must finish off the next instalment of “Cakes and Ale” and get it off to them,’ I added guiltily. My deadline was always the twentieth of the month, which wasn’t that far away.
‘Righty-oh, see you later!’ Violet cried gaily, and then cycled off round the Green to Poona Place, leaning forward over her handlebars, earflaps flipped backwards like psychedelic spaniel’s ears, while I, suddenly shivering, went back inside.
In the kitchen, under a tea towel, Ben had arranged root vegetables and green tomatoes into a heart shape and added a carrot arrow.
It was a pity he’d created this earthy symbol of our love on the immaculately clean marble surface dedicated to making my wedding cakes, but it still made me smile.
Later, sitting in our cosy living room overlooking the garden, logs burning in the stove and a glass of Violet’s non-alcoholic but fiery ginger cordial by my elbow (three Acorns per bottle), I was trying to wrap up the latest episode of my long-running ‘Cakes and Ale’ column for the alternative women’s magazine.
I’d written the obligatory ‘what’s-happening-with-the-garden-and-the-hens’ bit, describing September’s mad scramble to get all the fruit and vegetables harvested and stored, clamped, preserved or turned into alcohol, processes that were still ongoing, if not quite so frenetic. Some things, like the elderberries, were quite over and well on the way to being turned into ruby-red wine.
I do love the season of mellow fruitfulness, and there’s nothing quite so blissful as having a larder full of pickles, chutneys and preserves, crocks of salted beans and sauerkraut, and wine fermenting gently by the stove…So maybe I am the squirrel and that’s why my subconscious decided we would call our barter currency Acorns!
Anyway, I finished that part of the article off with Ten Delicious Things to Do with a Plum Glut (crystallised plums—oh, be still, my beating heart!) and then, after an eye-watering gulp of ginger cordial, embarked on the philosophising section, my readers’ favourite:
If we are not quite living off the fat of the land, as self-sufficiency guru John Seymour once put it, we are at least utilising the cream clinging to the edges. And what cream, cheese and yoghurt there has been recently, provided by friends who keep goats, and a Dexter cow or two, at their smallholding on the outskirts of the village…
Mark and Stella, our friends with the smallholding, are a much older hippie couple, and I’ve often wondered whether Ben and I were behind the times or ahead of them when, as teenagers, we dreamed of one day being self-sufficient. Whichever, I was more than happy that the way we lived was suddenly very trendy and aspirational so that the magazine, and especially my column in it, had something of a cult following. I love to share—ideas, inspiration, tips, food…
Granny and Uncle Harry were a great early influence, managing to produce practically all their own fruit, vegetables and eggs, plus the occasional hen for the pot, just from their combined back gardens in Neatslake, which is quite a large and pretty village in Lancashire, not far from Ormskirk.
Ben and I had more of a country smallholding in mind, even if we were hazy about how we could ever afford it—unless Ben’s paintings began to sell really well, of course. That was the dream: we would work our plot together, and he would paint while I baked and bottled and preserved. It sounded such bliss!
But just as Ben was finishing off the final year of his postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art in London, and I was living with him and helping make ends meet by working in a florist’s shop, Granny suddenly died and left me this cottage.
Since she’d taken me in at thirteen when I was orphaned, and was my only remaining blood relative, I was absolutely devastated. It brought back lots of long-forgotten memories of my parents and how I felt after I lost them…and I know all this orphan business sounds a bit Charles Dickens, but I can’t help that—that’s the way it was!
But I couldn’t contemplate selling the cottage, which was my home as well as a link with Granny, and nor did I want to leave Harry, of whom I was very fond, to cope alone. But then, I didn’t want to be parted from Ben either!
I expect I was a bit neurotic, needy and tiresome for a while, but Ben was always there for me, in his strong, silent way. And in the end he came up with the solution, suggesting that he go back and complete the last weeks of his course alone, and then we’d settle down together in Neatslake.
Despite it being Ben’s idea, his parents never forgave me for dragging him back from what they were convinced would have been instant fame and fortune in London; but then, they’ve never thought me good enough for him anyway. At one point they even threatened to cut off the small allowance they were making him, though they changed their mind. I thought he should tell them to stick the allowance where the sun don’t shine as a matter of principle, but he wouldn’t, so we had one of our rare arguments. I’ve never used any of the money—it goes straight into Ben’s account to pay for art materials and CDs and all those gadgets that mean so little to me and so much to him.
But his parents were wrong, because here we still were, living a version of our dream on a slightly smaller plane than we’d envisaged, perhaps, but none the less very happy, for all that. Perhaps one or two things hadn’t worked out how we planned…though as Ben said, as long as we had each other, nothing else really mattered.
And luckily, it was all the compromise involved in trying to balance living a greenish life in the middle of a village, against earning enough to pay the inescapable bills, that interested the readership of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine enormously. While they didn’t pay a lot for my articles, it formed a regular part of my income, and then the icing on the cake came, quite literally, from my hand-modelled wedding cake business, catering for the alternative market—sometimes very alternative:
JOSIE GRAY’S WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WEDDING
CAKES
Do you want something different? Original? Personal? Truly unique?
Josie Gray will design the cake of your dreams!
Or at least it had formed the icing, until Ben had won a major art prize about eighteen months previously, and his work began to get the recognition it deserved at last and fetch much greater prices.
Looking back now, I suddenly had an uneasy feeling that the equilibrium of our lives had subtly changed at that point…but maybe I was being over-imaginative?
Ben bought me a shiny, expensive breadmaking machine to celebrate his win, which he said would take away all the endless kneading. Though, actually, I always rather enjoyed doing it, going off into a dreamy trance and forgetting time, which made for very light bread.
But that, and one or two other little gadgets he’d brought back for me from London, seemed against our whole ethos, though it could be that I was unsettled by them because I simply didn’t like change. It made me uneasy. I just wanted us to go quietly on as we always had, happy as pigs in clover.
The wood-burning stove crackled quietly and nearby a door slammed, waking me from my reverie. The top of Harry’s felt hat appeared as he shuffled slowly down his garden, hidden by the dividing fence, to feed the hens.
There was an arched gateway between our two plots so we could both come and go freely, for though Harry was nominally in charge of the hens, we shared our gardens and what