In the garden of 73, Church Street in the Nottinghamshire village of Southwell has stood the same tree for a very long time, like about 180 years.
It was planted half accidentally in the garden by a young girl called Mary Ann Brailsford, using seeds that she had picked up from the kitchen where her mother happened to be cooking an apple pie.
In 1846, the house and its garden was bought by a local butcher, Matthew Bramley, who in due course allowed a local nurseryman to take cuttings from the tree for grafts, on the basis that the fruit was exceptional. In gratitude, he named the apple Bramley’s Seedling, and the rest is history, history that you can still go and see for yourself if you knock on the door.
When we bought our own house in 1994, we found one of that tree’s descendants down at the bottom of the garden. It is huge, and it regularly bestows on us somewhere around a quarter of a ton of cooking apples if we get to it before the equinoxial gales, or the wasps. It is what is known in the trade as a ‘heavy cropper’, which is what I nearly came when I climbed to the top to saw off a rogue bough with a new and much loved chain saw, in the days before I knew better.
Over the years, the tree has become something of a cause celebre for Caroline, who climbs up it for months on end in the winter to prune it back, prevent vertical shoots and, above all, stop branches crossing each other. If we had allocated the same energy to getting advice for our financial affairs as we have for that wretched tree, we would be long gone by now, sitting on a beach in Tobago, drinking pina coladas. As it is, whatever we do to it, it still manages to bung about 600 enormous apples at us each October, serious half kilo affairs that could knock you out if they dropped on you. Had Isaac Newton owned our tree, gravity would have been a lot quicker, and more painful, than it actually is.
The problem is that, having spent half the year telling each other how much we will do with them come the harvest, and how we will fill gingham-lined baskets of them to give our friends, time after time they just drop on the floor and rot, bunging up the mower and squidging brown stuff into the lawn. The truth is that no one wants them. And the deeper truth is that everyone else in the Northern hemisphere has a Bramley tree, too, and they are trying to get rid of them with the same cunning energy as us.
There is a practical limit to the things you can do with a Bramley apple in the privacy of your own home, which basically amounts to: a) apple puree, b) extremely tart apple juice and c) apple crumble. And these apples are so huge that a couple of them will allow us to do all three, and still have spare for the number two dog, who pretends to like them more than us, which is not hard.
Eventually, we put a box of them out on the side of the road, imagining grateful and moist-eyed city dwellers filling their cars up with buckets of them, and then heading back to Chelsea to cook them. No one has ever taken even one, to my knowledge, apart from some wit who was coming to lunch and found the box, bringing it in with him as a gift, redolent with cheap irony.
On one occasion, I took a barrow of them round the village, trying to press them on the poor benighted people who, I imagined, had no trees of their own. I was wrong. They did. And they had just as many apples as us, and they hated me for it. I taook them in to work, and no one wanted one; I once took a car load to the harvest festival and the vicar of the day thanked God for his generosity, not ours, mind, and then suggested I took the bloody things home.
In other words, they are like courgettes, only more so.
But this year, we are trying a bit harder. We chuck away 6 million of tons of food in this country, which accounts for about 12% of our total carbon emissions, and yet we still manage to have 400 thousand under-nourished children. Our apples of themselves might not change that, but us being a little less pathetic about finding things to do with them might. I have stored about 300 of them in the shed, on the basis that we have a tolerance for about 150 apple crumbles in us before next Spring.
When the first courgette will emerge.
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