A story of celebration, cherries, Wimbledon and fresh peas

It's that glorious bijoux-stone-fruit time of year, forever linked with tennis in my mind. Here's why. AND it's the 1st anniversary of KB's Joyous Things (whoop!), so there's a special offer in store…

Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash

This newsletter is slightly less about food than usual and more about memories with an evocative backdrop: the fuzzy back-and-forth thwack of tennis balls on rackets and the joy of Kentish cherries, sweet-sour and juicy. Keep on reading for fruity recipe recommendations – you’ll find those near the end… Enjoy!

Azure skies, scuddy clouds and celebrations

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash

Before I get to that, this week marks a moment…

It’s the FIRST BIRTHDAY OF KB’S JOYOUS THINGS

Cue fanfare, fizz and a sense of disbelief that the past 12 months have whizzed by at such a pace. Cheers to you for being here; read on for an extra-special offer.

FYI: Where I’d like to be right now. Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

The anniversary significance is heightened as KBJT is the outward symbol of an empowering life shake-up that I’d recommend to anyone teetering on the brink of change but nervous of that new adventure. I remember the inner voices so clearly: “What if it doesn’t work out? What if I don’t earn enough? What if I’m useless at being freelance? What if… What if… What if…”

For anyone contemplating change, those worrisome voices are pesky. More than that: they hold you back.

If you missed the story about my moment of plunge-taking (some would say madness), leading to a broader big life shake-up, here’s a link.

SO…The warmest welcome to the many new subscribers, both the free and the fully subscribed, who’ve joined over recent weeks (there are 1.6k of you in total now – amazing), and an equally warm THANK YOU to the people who’ve found me, read my incoherent ramblings well-thought-out writing, joined the conversation and supported me so generously for for the past 12 months. Know this: you’re all appreciated! I’d love to hear what you’d like to see more of, so do make a note in the comments below if you feel so inclined. I’ll be dedicating a whole lot more time to KBJT in upcoming months, evolving it, publishing recipes more regularly and drawing in special guests.

Here’s what you’ll receive: one or two posts a month will be free for all to read, with extra key editions, guides and recipes for paid subscribers.

Special subscription offer (fanfare #2)

I’m giving a short-time-only first birthday discount of 20% on paid subscriptions, and I’d love you to join. Click above or below to see what it’s all about (clicking doesn’t commit you to anything, I promise; it just reveals the offer details).

And now to that story of tennis and cherries

Here’s Dad in his youth, tennis racket always in hand (great hair)

My late dad was born and grew up in the gatehouse at the entrance to a country estate called Clowance in Cornwall. It was (and still is) on the edge of a mining village called Praze-an-Beeble, an evocative name for what was an austere, slightly down-at-heel village. It was my second home as a child and I loved it: a haven of warmth, unconditional love and the smell of baking pasties.

The scenesetter for this story was World War II… When Dad was a little boy there were prisoners of war living in huts in the grounds of ‘The Big House'. The small gatehouse garden backed on to those grounds. My Cornish grandma looked after the evacuees from London, making sure they went to good and kind homes for the duration of the war, and my grandad continued to run the family’s traditional bakery in the village; his pasties, bread, madeira cake and saffron buns were renowned throughout Cornwall. We called him Papa or Pop – a man of many eccentric sayings in a broad Cornish accent, including ‘Father put on trousers’ when he put the collar on Jamie the wire-haired terrier.

Back then, small villages had small bakeries, and vans went house to house delivering local meat and veg. That was before the empty years of local bakeries giving way to burgeoning conglomerates, when sole-trader food-delivery vans nigh on disappeared. Now there’s a new season, with artisan bakeries springing up all over the place like well-proved loaves in the heat of the oven. The grocery vans are back, too – only now the majority are from brightly coloured supermarkets rather than local farms and veg growers.

After the war, my grandparents bought a plot of land to build their own home, in a field at the end of a narrow farm lane on the edge of Praze. It wasn’t a huge plot and they didn’t want a big house; what they dreamed of was building a tennis court because Nanny (my grandma) loved playing and wanted to create a place where people from the village and beyond could come whenever they wanted to.

They built a modest three-bed house with a narrowish strip of lawn encircling it, edged by the hydrangeas that grow so lush, purple and blue in Cornwall (acid soil). Beyond the strip of lawn was the tennis court, the dominant feature framed by almost every window. Looking back, it was an eccentric choice: a plot where the house had a smaller footprint than the whacking great full-size, tarmacked, white-lined, high-mesh-fenced rectangle of a tennis court.

There was a small hut next to it where the heavy net was stored, rolled in a tight bundle, smelling of tennis balls, hot summer days and dust. Whenever anyone played, they had to lug that net through the gate onto the court, unroll it, secure it, wind it up, check the height, then… all set. I did that so many times when I was little, helping people put up the net, watching them play and running to pick up balls, then, as soon as I was big enough to hold one of the heavy wooden rackets, playing tennis myself.

The court was fringed on two sides with runner beans and pea plants. My daily job during long weeks in Praze – often there on my own, without my parents or little brother – was to pick peas and beans for tea. More peas made it into my mouth than they did into the chipped white enamel bowl with a blue rim. The third side of the court was a disused lane full of brambles that ended up home to scores of mis-hit tennis balls.

Nanny, the warmest and kindest of women, with razor-sharp intelligence, was a brilliant traditional cook and worked long hours in the bakery shop. In between she had a tennis racket in her hand as often as she had a potato peeler. She carried on playing into her 70s, until she could barely run, one shoulder and both knees wrecked from all those years of serving balls and pounding the tarmac.

And so we get to Wimbledon… At some point Nanny became the president of the Cornish branch of the Lawn Tennis Association and, in that role, had tickets for Wimbledon every day for the first 10 days or so of the tournament.

Dad, meanwhile, became an excellent team tennis player and ended up playing at a club in south-east London, then umpiring matches for his club and other clubs… Which led, eventually, to him umpiring at Wimbledon for years.

You could say my family was obsessed.

Pop, Nanny and Dad in his Wimbledon umpire garb – before Ralph Lauren gave the kit a designer makeover

I was so lucky: as a little girl I went to Wimbledon with Nanny whenever I got the chance. We’d get the train from south-east London to Wimbledon in the south-west of the city. A walk, two trains and another long walk. There was a fruit and veg stall close to Wimbledon station and our tradition was to buy not strawberries but a huge rustling brown paper bag of burgundy-red Kentish cherries, so ripe they were already starting to ooze juice. Perfect. Nanny would tuck the fruit in her sturdy handbag, along with a couple of cans of ‘pop’, as she called it. Warm. Our sustenance for the day. There might have been a couple of over-ripe pears lurking, too. That handbag always had a slightly fermented, fruity smell, a Tardis full of anything you could possibly need (I’ve copied the trait; small bags are not my… bag). But never any sandwiches – or I don’t remember them, anyway.

We usually had seats on one of the show courts – before Centre and Number One had rooves (roofs?) – and we didn’t move unless we were desperate for the loo or a storm came through. We were there to watch, every last minute until lack of light stopped play, eyes glued to the match and the muzzy thwack of every ball, back and forth, back and forth, passing the bag of cherries to and fro in harmony. Nanny loved it when the score was even: ‘Two sets all, five games all, 30-all,’ she’d whisper in her soft Cornish accent. Or: ‘Two points from vict-ry’ when it was almost match point.

There was no big-scale corporate hospitality back then – or, if there was, it wasn’t obvious: no logos, swanky tents, four-course lunches or champagne breath. There might have been somewhere you could get a burger, but all I remember was a tiny unglamorous hatch under Court One where you could buy a little polystyrene cup of whole strawberries (never cut up) sitting in a sad little puddle of less-than-single cream. Our bag of cherries and warm pop trumped them, simply because I was sharing them with the person I loved more than anything… although it wasn’t all sunny-rosy: there was a lot of huddling under umbrellas, bums wet from the rain-drips.

I was forever dreaming…dreaming of one day being Chris Evert (super-glam/cool) or British hope Sue Barker. As it happened, I had a good eye for a tennis ball but was never lithe of limb so those dreams were of the pipe variety, however much I loved lugging that net and heavy gut-stringed wooden rackets out of that dusty hut in Cornwall. By the time I was a teenager the court in Praze was cracked from years of use and sunshine, its heyday past.

At the age of 14, tennis star Bjorn Borg was my pin-up. And then my moment of mortification came. Dad, who was ordained in the church of England but whose primary job was in human rights, was the baseline judge for an Iliē Nastase match. Nastase kept foot-faulting during his serve; Dad kept calling it. Eventually, infuriated, Nastase grabbed a chair, positioned it next to Dad, sat down and said, ‘Who do think you are? God?’ To which Dad replied: ‘No, but I do know him.’ The moment (photo and verbal exchange) was captured by The Times – my memory is that it was on the front page, with front-page mortification to match. I was in my early teens: the age where parents are an eternal source of embarrassment.
UPDATE: see Mark Diacono’s comment and link below. My brilliant friend has found a picture of the Nastase/Michael Bourdeaux moment in the Getty archive. Now I’m on a mission to track down the feature itself in The Times.

After my Cornish gran retired from the LTA and Dad retired from umpiring (both a long time ago now), the days of going to Wimbledon regularly more or less ceased, but the tournament – in its final throes this week – retains a magnetic pull. Tennis, for me, will forever be associated with being sent to pick peas from the tangled veg patch around the long-ago-bulldozed tennis court in Praze-an-Beeble, and with paper bags of Kentish cherries, rustling and warm, pulled from the Tardis handbag.

Happy memories indeed.

A few tennis moments to amuse you, then… RECIPES!

To revert fully back to food (for those of you wondering why I’m wittering on about tennis, however topical it might be), here are a few favourite cherry recipes from my hey-day at delicious. magazine:

• Cherry upside-cake by Chetna Makan

• Roasted buttered cherries with orange sabayon by Debbie Major

• Spiked cherry cheesecake

• Cherry ripple ice cream

• Cherry conserve

And from my newsletter archive…

Here’s a reminder of my mum’s shortcake recipe, which would work well with ripe and juicy cherries. Or raspberries, come to that.

And this cake would work with stoned ripe cherries or apricots, too.

I’ll leave you with a quote…

“Food is our common ground; a universal experience.”
JAMES BEARD, chef, author and teacher

Thank you, as ever, for reading. I would LOVE you to hit the heart button. Feel free to share this newsletter with anyone you think might enjoy it – and do tell me in the comments below what you’d like to see more of in KB’s Joyous Things.