Memories

Those souls who reside in the United Kingdom and who still consume the products of the organisations both private and public that engage – for better or worse – in the televisual arts, will have been unable to avoid over the last year or so the nationwide enthusiasm for the category of comestible cookery that utilises prolonged dry heat by convection rather than by radiation… known more commonly as baking!

I refer – of course – to the ‘Great British Bake Off’.

The Kickass Canada Girl is a fan. I don’t mind it being on in the background. The recent ructions on the show – which need not detain us here – have done little to impinge on its overall veneer of gentle British whimsy which has proved for many a welcome corrective to the endless diet of so-called ‘reality’ shows.

Naturally, our broadcasting and other media corporations – never known to go easy on an expiring equine – have parachuted aboard the passing bandwagon and all things bakery related have now been hailed as the best thing since – er – sliced bread!

Thus is was that I found myself on a recent Saturday morning listening to one of those Radio 4 (a sort of talk radio, for north American readers) programmes that is a miscellanea of items comprising in the main interviews with interestingly ‘normal’ people (sometimes in extraordinary circumstances but just as frequently not so) only to discover that this particular episode had a ‘baking’ theme.

One interviewee in particular caught my ear. Louise Johncox – a journalist who writes for publications such as The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian – comes from a long line of bakers and confectioners. Her father ran a tea shop for more than forty years in the Home Counties and she grew up surrounded by the smells and tastes of fresh-baked bread, cakes and patisserie.

The object of Mrs Johncox’s appearance on the radio was to promote a book that she has recently had published. The Baker’s Daughter is a charming cross between a memoir and a recipe book. Mrs Johncox speaks well and passionately on the subject and has a clear love of all things related to the baker’s art.

Given my ambivalence on the subject you might be surprised that I am expending precious words on it. Well – as you might have guessed by now – there is a hook. Mrs Johncox’s father’s tea shop – Peter’s, Weybridge Ltd – was located in the small Surrey town in which I grew up.

Peter Johncox and his wife Frankie moved to Weybridge in the spring of 1960 – in the same year as did my parents! I was six at the time and I remember this delightful emporium existing virtually unchanged throughout my adolescent years. Peter’s was famous amongst other things for its Welsh Rarebit which I swear – no doubt erroneously – that I can still remember. The recipe for this treat is – fortunately – included in the book. The tea shop stayed open until after the turn of the millennium, by which point Peter Johncox had become too old and infirm to continue its management.

What really took me by surprise – as I listened to Mrs Johncox’s reminiscences on the radio – was just how teary I found myself all of a sudden. My mother never drove a car and thus could for many years be seen trundling her shopping bag on wheels the mile or so from our house down to the centre of town to do the shopping. Once all had been crossed from her list she would repair to Peter’s for a much need cup of tea and – mayhap – a sweet treat – as a means of recharging the batteries for the fully laden return trip up the hill!

My mother died in 2010 – a mere two years before Peter Johncox. Peter’s – as with so many other such familiars – is long gone, and I rarely now find myself with a reason to visit Weybridge.

The book is a delight – both as a culinary treat and as a reminiscence of times past. I thoroughly recommend it.

On re-reading my recent post – ‘Blue remembered hills‘ – I realised that I had not expressed to my satisfaction that which was on my mind when I composed same. This is a not infrequent occurrence for me as it happens, but on occasion – this being one such – I feel moved to revisit a topic… to give it a second shot, as it were.

The seed for that particular post was in the photograph that accompanied it – the which I took over the bank holiday weekend on the West Sussex/Surrey borders whence we had gone in search of azaleas. Whenever I find myself gazing at a vista comprising ever distant ranges of hills – each hued in an increasingly translucent azure – I am reminded of those lines from Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad‘ most commonly known as ‘The Land of Lost Content‘. There is to this – of course – no surprise and I feel sure that many another stargazer would float reflectively down a similar stream.

There has been a fair degree of conjecture as to the subject and meaning of Housman’s verse – this segment no less than any. Its enduring appeal may – quite naturally – be in fair measure attributed to its ambiguity. On one point – however – there can be no equivocation… this particular poem is concerned with Loss!

I suspect that my fascination of recent decades with Loss – which along with Longing and Love (as I have ventured previously) comprise the three great subjects of all art – is in no small way connected with my advancing years. Those of a similarly cogitative nature will quite probably also find themselves at some point thus contemplating the infinite.

Some read Housman’s lines as a lament for a passing pastoral idyll – the mythical ‘golden age’. ‘A Shropshire Lad‘ was published in 1896 but did not really catch the public’s attention until the turn of the century, by which time the second Boer war was well underway. The work’s depiction of the premature deaths of young men clearly struck a chord and its popularity only increased further with the outbreak of the Great War – many soldiers reputedly carrying a copy into battle with them. At a time of great change – the thinking runs – it is hardly surprising that those caught up in the maelstrom should needs cling to the certainties of the past. As the mechanised beast of the war machine devoured Europe, longing for a lost arcadian utopia made perfect sense.

Those critical of this view claim that such a paradise never actually existed – that this ‘chocolate box’ view of pastoral life was a myth and that in truth rural life for many really was – to quote Hobbes – ‘nasty, brutish and short‘.

An alternative reading of this ‘lost content‘ is that it refers to childhood – and more particularly to the blessed state of innocence with which those formative years are commonly associated. Denis Potter dealt this view an irrevocable blow in his 1979 BBC television drama for the title of which he ruthlessly appropriated Housman’s own phrase – ‘Blue Remembered Hills‘. This classic – if somewhat dyspectic – work required adult actors to take the roles of a group of children, demonstrating in the process that savagery and intolerance are by no means the exlusive preserve of those of us supposedly old enough to know better.

What does that leave us with?

Well – whenever I am brought up short by some breathtakingly beautiful vista of varigated cerulian and those lines of Housman’s insinuate their way into my brain – it is not the loss of childhood innocence that I lament (for though I have no complaints about my early years I certainly have no wish to revisit them) and nor is it a rose-tinted yearning for some mythical golden age – and that even though I grew up in the magical decade of the sixties! Rather it is that the distant azure horizon speaks to me of all of the choices not made, of all the opportunities let slip – and that however wonderful life actually is (and mine is particularly blessed) it is our human nature to regret that we can only select from the astonishing palette of life a limited number of possibilities… and all the rest must be forever lost as the flood tide sweeps them away into some far ocean.

Time to turn away from the view – to count one’s blessings – and to focus on that which is…