Blackberry Wine Read Free Page B

not taken that well. I reckon it needs a sight more time to get comfortable.’ Jay continued to watch him with all the wary cynicism of his twelve years, alert for any sign of mockery.
    ‘You make it sound like they’ve got feelings.’
    Joe looked at him.
    ‘Course they ave. Just like anythin else that grows.’
    The boy watched the rotating blades of the vegetable-cutter in fascination. The funnel-shaped machine bucked and roared between Joe’s hands, spitting out chunks of white and pink and blue and yellow flesh.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘What’s it look like?’ The old man jerked his chin at a cardboard box lying by the wall which separated them. ‘Pass us them jacks over there, will you?’
    ‘Jacks?’
    A slight gesture of impatience towards the box: ‘Jackapples.’
    Jay glanced down. The drop was easy, five feet at the most, but the garden was enclosed, with only the scrub of waste ground and the railway line at his back, and his city upbringing had taught him wariness of strangers. Joe grinned.
    ‘I’ll not bite, lad,’ he said mildly.
    Annoyed, Jay dropped down into the garden.
    The jackapples were long and red and oddly pointed at one end. One or two had been cut open as Joe dug them up, showing flesh which looked tropically pink in the sun. The boy staggered a little under the weight of the box.
    ‘Watch your step,’ called Joe. ‘Don’t drop em. They’ll bruise.’
    ‘But these are just potatoes.’
    ‘Aye,’ said Joe, without taking his eyes from the vegetable-cutter.
    ‘I thought you said they were apples, or something.’
    ‘Jacks. Spuds. Taters. Jackapples,.
Poms de tair.’
    ‘Don’t look like much to me,’ said Jay.
    Joe shook his head and began to feed the roots into the vegetable-cutter. Their scent was sweetish, like papaya.
    ‘I brought these home from South America after the war,’ he said. ‘Grew em from seed right here in my back garden. Took me five years just to get the soil right. If you want roasters, you grow King Edwards. If you want salads, it’s your Charlottes or your Jerseys. If it’s chippers you’re after, then it’s your Maris Piper. But these’ – he reached down topick one up, rubbing the blackened ball of his thumb lovingly across the pinkish skin – ‘Older than New York, so old it doesn’t even have an English name. Seed more precious than powdered gold. These aren’t just potatoes, lad. These are little nuggets of lost time, from when people still believed in magic and when half the world was still blank on the maps. You don’t make chips from these.’ He shook his head again, his eyes brimful of laughter under the thick grey brows. ‘These are me Specials.’
    Jay watched him cautiously, unsure whether he was mad or simply making fun.
    ‘So what
are
you making?’ he asked at last.
    Joe tossed the last jackapple into the cutter and grinned.
    ‘Wine, lad.
Wine
.’
    That was the summer of ’75. Jay was nearly thirteen. Eyes narrow, mouth tight, face a white-knuckle fist closing over something too secret to be examined. Lately a resident of the Moorlands School in Leeds, now with eight weeks of holidays stretching strange and empty till the next term. He hated it here already. This place with its bleak and hazy skyline, its blue-black hills crawling with yellow loaders, its slums and pit houses and its people, with their sharp faces and flat Northern voices. It would be all right, his mother told him. He would like Kirby Monckton. He would enjoy the change. Everything would be sorted out. But Jay knew better. The gulf of his parents’ divorce opened up beneath him, and he hated them, hated the place to which they had sent him, hated the gleaming new five-speed Raleigh bike delivered that morning for his birthday – bribery as contemptible as the message which accompanied it – ‘With love from Mum and Dad’ – so falsely normal, as if the world wasn’t coming softly apart around him. His rage was cold, glassy, cutting him from