Season of Mists

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all f ruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease
For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells…

(Keats)

For 27 years my family lived in a Georgian farmhouse in Cumbria (which was then called Cumberland ) a few miles from the border with Scotland

Tales from a Cumbrian Farmhouse (1)

My mother decides that this is the day to harvest the plums from the fan-trained trees growing against the byre wall.

This afternoon she will pick the plums and make them into jam. Steamed jam pudding cooked with home-made plum jam is Dad’s favourite. But first she must go into town (seven miles away) to meet ‘the girls’ for coffee and to buy several bags of sugar for the jam.

She drives into town in our ‘second’ car - which is actually a Land Rover. This is not the fashionable four-by-four of today, but a grey-coloured heavy-duty farm vehicle. It has a cab at the front and an open back suitable for carrying bales of hay for feeding the cattle; we are always rather embarrassed to be seen in town with this rough and ready vehicle. She has her coffee, promises the ‘girls’ a pot of jam each, buys her sugar and drives back.

She prepares the kitchen for jam-making, rinsing out the jam-pan, and getting out a bowl for the plums, then changes her mind; it’s a particularly good crop this year - a larger vessel will be needed. She sings to herself, excited at the thought of the line of jam pots which will grace the pantry shelf later today.

First she must pick the plums
to make the jam
that goes in the pudding
that Dad likes

She bustles out to the front garden, and approches the trees. She looks at them, puzzled.

Something is wrong. This-morning the branches were heavy with purple-red fruits. Now - there is just green. She looks closer. Every plum - except for one or two small unripe ones near the top - has gone, neatly plucked from it’s stem.

She gasps, ’Oh’ out loud. ’Oh, no. Surely not?’ She is shaking now, her hand to her mouth in disbelief.

She goes in and collapses onto a ladder-backed kitchen chair. Mum is not a weeper, but if she was, she would weep now.


There was a boy of around 14 in the village, who often went up ‘our hill’ - and came down with his pockets stuffed either with pears from the tree halfway up, or in the winter with kindling. Dad good-humouredly called him ‘Whip-it-Quick’

We never did find out for certain who pinched the plums. But we had our suspicions.
So, Whip-it-Quick - if by the remotest chance you are reading this - well...you know who you are.
And, by the way, you owe me ten and a half pounds of plums.

Our dog, Rap, showing on the left the fan-trained
plum trees, bare this time due to heavy pruning!

A lovely word:
tatterdemalion \tat-uhr-dih--MAY-lee-uhn\,
noun:. A person dressed in tattered or ragged clothing; a ragamuffin.
adjective: Tattered; ragged.