HERE we are in the blackberry season and I haven't picked a single one. My grandmother will be looking down from somewhere in high dudgeon. I don't even know if it's a good blackberry year or a bad blackberry year. I used to dread the latter as a child because it could put my grandmother in a bad mood for weeks on end. She used to start around the end of June, trotting out gloomy predictions based on country signs, such as 'the magpies are flying backwards it'll be a bad blackberry year', or some such nonsense. These usually came from some of the old village locals who hovered around outside shops just waiting for an innocent townee to come along so they could fill them with wise ancient sayings about the weather, the lack of bumble bees and the sounds Farmer Smith's cows were making. All portents of a bad berry year, a bad apple year and a lack of sprouts. Sometimes, surprisingly, the sayings were right, but I suppose they had a 50-50 chance of predicting a good or bad blackberry year or anything else. By the time the first blackberries were ripe, the good or bad news would be known. Bad blackberry years were when the berries were small, sparse, wizened or mouldy. It almost always had something to do with the weather, not any old country lore about magpies and the strange habits of the badgers on the common. Good blackberry years were when the berries were big, plump and plentiful; and easy to reach. Easy to reach that is if you took the trouble to dangle a small child by her ankles over a fast moving stream to pluck those plump berries hanging over the bank. That was my job. Incidentally, do people in Cornwall use the expression 'blackberry kittens'? I seem to remember that these were kittens born at the end of summer which were said to be far inferior to anything born earlier, small runts of the litter which had little intelligence and were never going to make good mousers. People would excuse their cat's faults by saying 'it was a blackberry kitten, what do you expect'. Perhaps these were second litters from poor exhausted mothers. I don't think people pick blackberries as much as they used to, certainly you don't see many children combing the hedgerows, perhaps because children can't go out on their own so much any more. Then are also a lot more cultivated blackberries, some which don't have any prickles. To we, the wild blackberry afficianados, this is cheating. Picking blackberries means getting purple hands, scratched arms and legs and a few bruises where you fell into a ditch or off a tree. It doesn't mean sashaying down the garden in your best frock to pluck berries off a thornless bush growing next to your rhubarb. Anyway, they don't taste the same. Our blackberry year began in late August with the dewberries, which grew on low bushes on chalkland and were my least favourite because they squashed easily and wouldn't come off their stalks. Then there were the early blackberries, quite hard at first, and then the most sought after really ripe ones. Sussex is good blackberry country and there were lots of places to find them – abandoned quarries, railway embankments, old brickyards, remote fields. These were my grandmother's chosen places rather than handy fields and hedgerows nearer home because we were unlikely to find anyone else on our patch. There was a certain protocol to picking. If you saw anybody else on a stretch of hedge it was most un- neighbourly to join in, worse still to get ahead of them to a bit they hadn't reached. There were some taboos. You didn't pick blackberries from hedges or fences round someone's garden. Or, in our case, you didn't pick blackberries from someone's hedge or fence if they were in at the time. You avoided certain fields if the owner was known to be a bit touchy about trespassers. Or in our case, ditto plus only if you were prepared to run like the wind. A personal rule was that you didn't pick blackberries which were less than two feet off the ground, in case dogs had been past. Hopefully, no- one in the village had a Great Dane. Blackberries were also not picked after a certain date, which date I can't remember, because old country lore had it that after that date the devil had spat on them, or worse! On blackberry trips we set out with a basket each, plus a tin with a handle, plus a hooked stick, plus a stern warning from my mother to my grandmother that I wasn't to be encouraged to wade through neck high water, hang by my ankles over rivers or climb dangerous trees. Berries were collected in the tin, then tipped into the baskets. The biggest sin was dropping the tin. Even if you fell from a great height you were supposed to land with the tin held high and unspilt. We returned home only when the baskets were too full to hold. Sometimes we found another party of pickers on one of our patches. I learned very early on what giving someone the evil eye meant as my grandmother stared balefully at the rivals until they moved away. If they didn't take the hint she would casually mention open shafts or nests of adders in the vicinity. Back home, it was my job to pick though the berries to remove any bits of stem and, the bit I hated, picking out any maggots, although my grandmother wasn't too fussy about these on the grounds that they wouldn't survive long in boiling sugar. A word here about glass jars. To this day I can't throw away a glass jar without feeling guilty. I've even taken them out of the bin liner where they've been discarded by someone who hadn't spent a childhood under the total law of never throwing away anything which could possibly hold even miniscule amount of jam or jelly. Even those ridged jars which Shipham's fish paste came in were kept, and hopefully washed properly. Consequently, today my house is now full of carefully washed empty jars. The fruit was turned into a variety of preserves, although some went into pies. My grandmother was all for trying unusual combinations, marrow and blackberry being one of the least successful. I think she even tried beetroot one year, an interesting, and very red, combination almost rivalling her sprout chutney. Mostly, however, it was blackberry and apple jam and blackberry jelly, called bramble jelly in posh shops now. The latter involved straining the blackberries through muslin bags which were hung up in the larder to drop over big china bowls. If you opened the larder door during this time it looked as if a whole series of bloody limbs were hanging up and gave you quite a turn. Blackberry picking went on until the devil did his thing, and by this time there was a whole line of gleaming jars on the shelves, joining the various other jams, jellies, pickles and chutneys made during the year. Alongside was the year's consignment of picalilly, which was always made despite the fact that only my grandmother liked it and there would still be some left from the year before and years before that. We possibly had the national collection of vintage picalilly pickle. Later, these would be joined by pickled onions and one year, after grandmother discovered a walnut tree in the garden of an empty house – or possibly a house where people had gone on holiday leaving a full walnut tree and returned to find a half empty one – we had pickled walnuts which were even nastier than they looked (I like them now). As the year drew on we still had chestnuts to gather ('Just put your foot on that little branch and hoist yourself up onto the top branches, it isn't that difficult'), mushrooms to find ('Only an idiot wouldn't know the difference between an Angel Death Cap and an ordinary field mushroom') and the last of the season's apples to find in our favourite abandoned orchard ('Trespassers will be prosecuted signs only mean it if they catch you'). Sometimes we picked Rowan berries, which made a lovely pale pinky orange jelly crab apple jelly and, when we could find them, quince jelly. You were certainly never short of a bit of bread and jam in our house. Some of these jams were entered into local horticultural shows, although I can't remember them ever winning. My grandmother alleged this was because she was an outsider and the judges were biased. Possibly the judges were people who owned the orchards, hedges and walnut trees that some of my grandmother's entries contained. After the bounty of nature ran out about November we had to wait for a few weeks for the great hunt for the best holly tree in the village to begin – a tree which had to be laden with berries, be not too tall and easily accessible from the road, and preferably on a property where there were no street lights and where the said tree was not visible from the house with or without binoculars. Not an easy task but one which my grandmother took on with renewed enthusiasm each year.
