Apples

I’ve been working on a writing exercise called the Character Alphabet, where you take a letter of the alphabet, let your character pick a word that starts with it, and write a short scene from their point-of-view. I knew straight away that for Sarah, A is for “apple” – which does have a certain clichéd children’s alphabet feel about it, I know. But I’d been thinking about apples. The last of the peaches and nectarines have disappeared from the supermarkets, so this week’s lunchtime fruit for me will be juicy, crunchy, Pacific Rose apples. And I’d been writing about William, Sarah and Ovid visiting the Horticultural Exhibition on Wellington Anniversary Day 1842, where the first apples grown in the region were exhibited.

The apples were grown by the Baron Alzdorf in the Hutt Valley. He put four of them into the exhibition and they received a special prize and a mention in the newspaper reports. They must have been a bit small and confused, those apples, it being January at the time. For new arrivals like the Norgroves, they were probably the first apples they had seen in almost a year, having left England at the height of summer, and arrived in New Zealand at the end of spring. New Zealand’s only indigenous fruits were berries, and there wouldn’t have been many about since William and Sarah arrived – and anyway, how would they have known which ones were safe to eat?

So, knowing I was going to write about Alzdorf’s four apples and Sarah’s reaction to them, I needed to do a little apple research. After all, I don’t want any accidental anachronisms – I don’t mean having her bite into a Pacific Rose, which is a late twentieth-century apple – but if I needed to describe an apple’s colour, texture and taste, it had better be an apple that she might be familiar with. This led to a fantastic voyage around the internet to discover that there are a heck of a lot of varieties of apples out there, with some weird and wonderful names. Ashmead’s Kernel, anyone? Or how about a Flower of Kent or a hefty Peasgood’s Nonsuch? By the time I got to the Cornish Gilliflower, I was drooling into the keyboard, and had to stop for a Pacific Rose of my own.

I wanted to know what sort of apples William and Sarah had been familiar with back in England, which is how I ended up reading Mrs Beeton (loads of apple recipes, but she’s not particular about the varieties to be used) and The Whole Art of Husbandry, written in 1716 by J. Mortimer, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was rather more helpful, if colourfully descriptive : “The Aromatick or golden-russetting hath no compare, it being of a Gold-colour’d Coat under a Russett Hair, hath some Warts on it, its Flesh of a yellow colour, its form of a flattish round…” Mmmm?

I decided William and Sarah were probably familiar with the Blenheim Orange; the Decio, which dates back to Roman times and looks like the great-grandmother of all apples; the Golden Reinette (or Golden Rennet, according to the spelling of J. Mortimer above); Ashmead’s Kernel; Fearns Pippin; and the White Pearmain, which had been grown in England since about 1200AD. And it was the Pearmain that seemed the most likely candidate for Baron Alzdorf’s first apple trees, being a self-fertilising type, not reliant on other fruits for pollination. At this point, I had to stop myself from diverting down the research path of finding out how the early settlers got their first fruits, vegetables and flowers going without bees for pollination, a topic for future enquiry. Back to the story at hand – here is how “A is for apple” played out.

At the Horticultural Exhibition, Wellington, January 1842

A is for apple.
The next table had only one display, a white china plate holding a pyramid of small green-and-red apples. When had she last seen apples? Certainly not since they had been in New Zealand. In fact, the last time she could remember eating apples was early in her pregnancy with Ovid.

She hadn’t even been sure that she was pregnant; they had only been married a few months, after all. William and Mr Allardice had gone to work on the roof of a house on the outskirts of Ilford. The men were told they could take windfalls from the orchard, and William came home with his lunch-cloth bulging with russety golden rennets. He held them out to show her, and she snatched one up and crunched into it as if it was the only food in the world. Which it was, for her, for the few minutes it took her to gobble it, pips and all. She was licking the juice from her fingers when she saw William’s expression, surprised, but oddly pleased.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, suddenly conscious of her greed. “I don’t know why…….I just wanted it so badly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t you who wanted it,” he had said, with a meaningful look at her waist that had made her blush deeply, still a little shy with him about the unexpected pleasures of marriage.

He had been right, though. She looked at them both now, as Ovid reached out for the shiny fruit, and William caught him up and held him so that the apples were out of his reach. He looked at her over the top of Ovid’s head, and smiled.

“He still wants apples, then”, William said, winking at her.