Salad Days
He plucked two little potatoes from the fridge and placed them side by side on the sunny kitchen windowsill. The sun streamed through the window, ignoring the light filter of cloud that had blossomed as I washed up. “Let’s see if they go to seed”, he said. “What, you mean - and then maybe plant them in the garden?” I said, my heart making a little leap. “Yes”, he agreed, “you never know…..” I finished the washing up, musing on the fact that a couple of decades ago I could never have imagined feeling such a thrill at the thought of growing my own root crop, in an overcrowded tiny patio garden. At one time, shopping for clothes or visiting nightclubs provided a transitory, somewhat insubstantial happiness. Now, the notion of digging out spuds from our rented soil promises a more enduring sense of satisfaction.
Terraces of tomatoes cascade down their vines, which weave between the woody struts of rosemary bush and the sky-reaching limbs of a very tall sunflower. Almost every day, one of us gathers another ‘crop’ from the garden, and they are tasty. Today, I ate them for lunch on crispy fried bread. Some of the fruits hang over-ripe on the vine and then drop to the ground, seeding an offspring, which explains why a single plant has now become a jungle of tomato-foliage. Each time I go near this part of the garden, my nostrils are filled with the tangy scent of it. I breathe it in, fully and copiously. That we have had not had to buy tomatoes from a shop for weeks, and can enjoy the privilege of simply furnishing another bowl-full straight from the garden gives me a good feeling. There are so many that sauces and relishes are now under consideration. Somewhere, lost amongst the confusion of leafage, and perhaps not doing as well as the tomatoes, is a seedling slowly developing into a dwarf apple-tree. A thriving colony of lemon-balm has been in flower for a while now and is visited all the time by bees. A strawberry plant has grown more shoots and continues to flower even now so late in the summer. Unfortunately the fruits themselves were quite bitter, so we’ve left them for the snails, who probably don’t mind their distinctly acid bite. I think about this patch, imagining it perhaps next year, when we might once again be consuming the self-regenerating tomatoes, or may remember, finally, to use the lemon balm or rosemary for some aromatic flavourings, will be enjoying (perhaps) our own potatoes, and remaining hopeful of a few apples some year soon. My small dream and I linger in the kitchen, slowly wiping the counters and sweeping the floor until it is shining and there is not a crumb to be seen.
Mixed flocks of gulls wheel about the sky above the beach, their plumages disco-trouser bright against the peerless blue. The sea is calm, the waves subtle. We are at Hengistbury Head, in Dorset. The day, from it’s beginning, has seemed infused with that breathless sense of perfection a very few days in a lifetime will ever possess. We’d set off just before 7 – a miracule in itself – and the morning was already warm. Packed lunches and everything we could conceivably need was stashed in the boot of the car or next to me on the back seat. My offer to drive, strangely, had been jokily refused by my husband, who steered the car, with his customary calm and expertise, through the spaghetti of main roads leading south-west. Relieved of the task myself (uncomplainingly) I sat in the back seat, my daughter in the front next to her father, and I studied the passing landscape-blur from the passenger window. There was the only flaw in the day. It was sobering to observe, as we passed through the heavily arable country of South Oxfordshire and West Berkshire, the number of fields where, the summer’s crop already no more than a memory, a green stubble of next year’s already hazed the manifold brown acres of tillage. This was intensive agriculture at it’s most unappealing, and I was glad when we’d driven the gauntlet of those fields and entered a different landscape where hope did not seem to have been so efficiently eliminated. Suddenly, too, the coast did not seem so distant as it usually does, living as we do in a part of the country with just about the furthest reach from the sea. In a little over an hour – we’d made good time down the A-roads and motorways – we were in Hampshire, and on a road through the heather-purpled heathlands of the New Forest, where ponies grazed and haste was not particularly in evidence.
The sea is cold! My daughter and I hold hands and pigeon-step our ways over sharp, sole-pumelling pebbles into the water, all the while uttering small screams of shocked delight. This must mark us out instantly as tourists who do not regularly enjoy the pleasures of sea-bathing. Equally timorously, we enter slightly deeper and more daring waters. And just as slowly, waists and shoulders are submerged. And then she swims – and I’m delighted to see that she still can. It’s been months since our last swim – at the pool, and though she still counts as a beginner, her natural ability is still obvious even away from the relative safety of chlorinated water and tiled walls. The waves don’t challenge her too greatly, in fact she seem to relish them, and soon, I too, swim. I haven’t swum in the sea for years, being always, resolutely, a paddler, refusing to believe that submerging myself into the chilly surf might be an enjoyable experience after all. But it is, this propelling myself with a peculiarly effortless breaststroke through the seemingly placid currents, towards this or that rock, this or that surf-crashing dog or kid-clambered lilo. We enjoy little races against each other, my daughter and I, and stay in for what counts as one of the best half-hours of my life, until hunger persuades me out and I persuade her out too, and we enjoy cheese and pickle sandwiches (plus inevitable grains of sand) on our picnic rug pinioned to the sand with bags.
Later, her father stands at the shore-edge, his feet submerged in froth-laced wavelets, watching her as she swims again. I stay sitting on the blanket and take a photograph of a tall man looking out to sea and at his daughter, who is nothing but a small head and a slope of shoulders rising from low waves in an endlessly textured blue-beneath-the-blue.
Hengistbury Head is more than just a beach, or a series of beaches. It’s also a nature reserve of coastal grasslands, sandstone and ironstone cliffs, heathland and trees. You walk on a descending grey path between serpentine woodlands of oak, birch and poplar, and come to Mudeford Quay where wading birds stalk the reedy salt-marsh and lagoon habitat. At the visitor centre on the way down, I’m entranced by fish in glass houses. In one of the tanks, delicately-limbed shrimp stalk the gravel like harvestmen, and I laugh as one of them encounters the waving purple tentacles of a sea-anenome fastened to a ‘rock’, and appears to ‘rear’ in surprise at it. Blenny swim and I gaze at iridescence. In the other, ubiquitous but gleaming minnow shoal, and sticklebacks hide. On the pond outside, in the wild garden, pond-skaters stalk the meniscus of the water with an incredible gravity-defying combination of features. Long, flexible, segmented legs, combined with the high surface tension of the water, allows them to remain on the surface and flow with it’s movements. Another adaptation to the aquatic environment are the many thousands of water-resistant ‘hydrofuge’ hairs covering the body of the insect - these tiny hairs also trap air if the pond-skater is submerged beneath the water.
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At Mudeford Spit – the beach opposite the quay - we buy canned drinks and sit on the dunes drinking them. A plateau of double-decker beach huts lines the bay in a colourful shanty town of summer living. People throng in swim wear and shorts and moored yachts anchor the crescent of slow blue water. I feel a mental fogginess – cider, quickly consumed in the sun, along with the accumulated heat of our slow walk down from Hengistbury imbues the moment with a strange sense of hedonism. This sense of not being entirely in control is both fun and somehow uncomfortable. Sitting down somewhere cool for a few moments helps and we turn back for the beach again and a final swim before the drive home. Over the grasslands, flocks of starlings swirl, murmurating briefly. For us, it’s been a quintessentially languorous, late-summer day, but the birds are restless, forming dynamic, autumnal flocks now. At the Hikers Rest Café, we enjoy last victuals for the journey and I remember that as we’d drunk coffee here this morning, post-arrival, we’d watched evidence of a late nesting, perhaps one last brood of starlings for the end of the summer. A nestling – or perhaps a bird about to fledge – had poked it’s head out of a ventilation shaft in one of the café walls, maybe getting ready for a first flight, perhaps waiting for the food the adult dutifully brought back and forth. Today felt like our own last of something, for the summer. Something, and not just the tomatoes, that we’d harvested for the longer months ahead.
