HAVE YOUR CAKE

GROWING UP

Memories are made of this: fruit grown, picked and eaten with love.

APPLES My cousins were only allowed to give bruised apples to the horses. We spent afternoons dropping apples on the kitchen oor, waiting for them to soften.

APRICOTS This is the recipe for stewed apricots: halve the apricots you have picked and put them in a stock pot with as much sugar as you want: maybe a cup, maybe two. Cook until the apricots are swimming in their juice and the sugar has dissolved. Depending on your harvest, you can ladle it into blue 2 litre ice-cream containers and put it in the deep freeze to make sure you have stewed apricots all year round.

I made stewed apricots this summer, with 10 kilos of apricots I bought at my innercity suburb’s farmers’ market. I spent an afternoon in a friend’s kitchen, stirring the apricots until they oozed deep orange. I burnt my ngertips dipping them into the juice as it boiled. It almost tasted the same.

My mother and I make stewed apricots, but Grandma was famous for apricot jam. The apricot tree in her backyard was immense, stretching out across the garden shed and the woodshed. The last year she made jam, she had us get up on top of the woodshed to pick as many apricots as we could reach. The woodshed was rickety, riddled with termite damage, and the corrugated iron rusty, peeling and searing hot. Below, in her housedress, Grandma watched with her hands shielding her eyes from the sun, occasionally pointing at an apricot she wanted us to pick.

That last batch of apricot jam set in the pantry on the top shelf where no-one would disturb it when looking for biscuits.

BLACKBERRIES Once we

made a blackberry pie and took a thick slice wrapped in baking paper down to our Pa. He ate the pie with us sitting on the oor around his chair and asked where we got the blackberries from. We told him, down in the bottom gully where the bushes cling to the rocky wall. He said, ‘There were never blackberries down there in my day.’

We were all a bit sunburnt from the picking blackberries, all a bit scratched from reaching too far into the bushes, all a bit stung from mozzies that lingered in the puddles at the bottom of the gully. The snake bandage was still tucked in my back pocket, just in case, as was the note that we had taped to the front door that said, ‘Gone picking berries at 11am.’ The bath was still streaked with dirt from where we had lined up to wash our legs and the kitchen was still a mess of our. Our ngers were stained, but the pie was once-in-a-lifetime good.

Years after Pa ate the slice of pie, our uncle sprayed the blackberries and we couldn’t pick any that summer. But the year after that the blackberries were back and a fox made its den somewhere deep in the bushes. We could smell it when we checked to see if the berries were ripe.

CUMQUATS There is a single cumquat growing stubbornly on the cumquat tree two doors down from my apartment. I noticed it a week ago—I can’t gure out if it’s an extremely late cumquat or an exceedingly early one. There is a man working from the front room of the house and I don’t want him to see me stealing his only cumquat.

The cumquat tree that grew out of the front porch of my grandparent’s red-brick house was always fully grown, even when I was small. It was laden with fruit. I don’t know why it was planted—only one person from church ever dropped in to pick cumquats to make marmalade. We watched her from the lounge room, mad that she was taking our cumquats.

We claimed the cumquat tree as our own. The sole purpose of the tree was to entertain us. When our aunts and mother sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, we stood on the front porch lobbing cumquats over the front fence and down the driveway. Over and over. We would sit in a circle under the shade of the tree, peeling cumquats and eating them segment by segment. Our eyes would water and we’d gasp. When we convinced the little cousins to try them, they would cry at the

sourness and sit on the garden bench, arms folded, watching us with accusing eyes.

I really, really want to eat that cumquat growing two doors down.

MANDARINS If my father has picked a mandarin from the drought-stunted tree at the bottom of the yard, shined it against his Ruggers shorts, and brought it up to the house for me, it’s the best mandarin I will ever taste in my life.

‘OUR FINGERS WERE STAINED, BUT THE PIE WAS ONCE-IN-ALIFETIME GOOD.’

PEACHES & NECTARINES

We weren’t allowed to open the windows of the school bus when we were looping around the dirt road, because we’d choke on the dust. But sometimes, on a Friday afternoon, one of us was allowed to pick the nectarines and peaches growing on the corner. We all knew, without anyone telling us, the trees grew from fruit stones thrown from the bus by school-kids years earlier. They were ours.

Usually, the cockatoos got to the fruit before we did. Now, I eat peaches from the tin. n

Words Alaina Dean Illustration Naomi Bulger

have your cake

Her parents’ choice to pull up stumps and move to the country makes more sense to Megan Morton, now she is a very urbanised mother of three herself.

Words Megan Morton Photograph Michael Pham The day my dad blindfolded my mum, spun her around in front of a map of Queensland and told us we’d move to wherever her finger landed, Johnny Cash was singing ‘The Gambler’ in the background, mum’s finger landed on banana country in the Gold Coast hinterland, and I was astonished at how carefree and adventurous my city-slicker parents appeared to be, all of a sudden.

Later that night, I went to mum to check for any signs of flagging. Disguising my ploy to check her dressing-gown pockets for sodden tissues as a hug, I put my head on her heart to count the beats. My mother wore the best of game faces, but there were no tissues, no racing heart beats. This might actually happen, I thought with mounting excitement.

That night l asked my sister from the top bunk if she thought the whole thing was preplanned and if the map was even real. She whispered that sadly it was, and that she had major reservations about the entire thing and planned to call the authorities (whoever they were) the next day to check her rights. Our beautiful baby brother didn’t mind either way.

At dinner on our first night in our new life, I asked my father what language our new neighbour Farmer Ruffles and his wife Noreen spoke. Mum and dad laughed loudly and explained that I’d get used to the way they spoke soon enough. And I did. I adored Noreen. A glorious marmalade born-and-bred country woman, pale blue eyes, chubby to the point of explosion. She was the first person I heard admit that banana bread wasn’t bread at all. ‘If you are bloody lucky to be enjoying it, call it for what it is, a cake.’ >