Gleaning in the Countryside.

Celandines

The countryside around Knaresborough was not only our adventure playground, it was a source of delightful and delicious treats. Spring brought with it the first wild flowers. Carpets of primroses, violets and snowdrops appeared in cool, leafy woods along with celandine and anemones. We picked posies for our mum on Mothers' Day. They took pride of place on the windowsill, in rinsed out Shipham's Paste jars. They meant as much to mum as any bought gift.


    Summer mornings meant dewy meadows covered in mushrooms just waiting to be picked. Oh! the joy of being out, roaming through the fields, the early morning sun warming a clear blue sky with the promise of mid-day heat. Birds singing their hearts out in praise of this bright, new day: and thoughts of fried mushrooms and fried bread for breakfast.
   Autumn was bountiful. Crab-apples grew wild. We picked pounds of them: mum made crab-apple jelly, golden and tangy. Blackberrying was a family outing. Our favourite place was Scotton Banks where thick bushes were laden with ripe, purple berries.

We followed a narrow path through tall, golden bracken, down to the river and picnicked there. In the afternoon we filled our baskets and containers with fruit and trooped the mile or so back home, tired and happy, knowing that soon there would be jars of luscious jam on the pantry shelves alongside the crab apple jelly. More immediately, we tucked into blackberry and apple pies and blackberry suet puddings until all the fruit was gone from the hedgerows.
  We went 'nutting' in Hazelnut Wood down Hay-a-Park Lane when the leaves turned golden and bronze and the hazelnuts had grown large and brown.
  As the weather grew colder and the late autumn winds stripped the trees bringing down twigs and small branches, we took our wheelbarrow and went 'sticking' in the woods and hedgerows, collecting fire wood.  We enjoyed it and every little helped.
  Bachelor's market garden, on the outskirts of town, supplied produce wholesale to local greengrocers. Any tomatoes, cucumbers and vegetables which were too miss-shaped were disposed of and taken to their tip. We paid frequent visits, along with other local kids, rooting around and proudly taking home perfectly good produce. The shape didn't matter one bit.

Nettle Beer

Some years my mother made a dandelion and burdock fizzy drink and nettle beer in an old copper,kept in the cellar especially for that purpose. How she found the time, I will never know.

  Empty jam jars and bottles were sort after. They were worth a penny each on return. It was worth trawling around the neighbours, cadging empty jars to take back. Just one was enough to buy a sherbet fountain or a bag of Kali or liquorice bootlaces.

Penny gobstoppers were the best value. I could make one last all day by taking it out of my mouth every so often and tying it in the corner of my hanky for a while. The interesting thing was, that each time I removed it, it was a different colour.

  Looking at it from today's point of view I suppose that rooting around in a tip for food could be regarded as scavenging but we didn't see it like that at all. It was simply another fun thing to do. It was like digging up a bit of treasure which happened to put food on the table into the bargain.
  We certainly didn't think of ourselves as poor or deprived. I never heard my parents moaning about being hard up or badly done to, they just got on with the job; making sure that we had as healthy and happy a childhood as possible.

Primroses

  Illustrated by Barbara Chounding.