How friends push past your barriers to become family
Last September, in the BBC programme The Truth About Carbs, I learnt about Hambleton Bakery, that specializes in ancient grains and sourdough breads. I looked them up; sadly, they don’t deliver to my town.
Then I saw they were very near Peterborough, where one of my best friends lives. I am calling her Angela here, because if I compromise her privacy, she will kill me.
I texted her breathlessly. She should check this place out pronto! Sourdoughs!
She told me about the pippins.
She responded, slightly amused. She and her husband Hugh had only been going to Hambleton for years. Yes, she loved them. Then she told me about the pippins. Hambleton’s Rutland Pippins are homemade pastry tarts filled with ham, sausage, stilton and granny smith apple puree. And shaped like little apples, with two leaves and a cheeky pastry stalk. Once a Christmas treat, they invoked such a fierce and passionate demand that Hambleton now sells them all year round.
“You shall have pippins,” Angela texted me. “At Christmas. When you come to visit us.” But then, lockdown, of course. 2020 had been bad enough without these dull disappointments; we had each lost a parent, she having nursed her father till the end, all the while enduring chronic temporomandibular jaw disease which has caused her terrible pain for at least as long as I have known her, which is 32 years.
This is why Angela and I text more than we speak; her worn jaw makes it painful for her to talk for too long, and difficult for her to endure too much noise. It’s why when she does speak, Angela does so softly, judiciously. No flippant bluster, no mundane fillers, just a sparse, gentle proffering of thoughtful words.
Angela’s first husband, Richard, battled schizophrenia for decades. He negotiated the landscape of prescription meds deftly, urgently. He knew them all and would describe them as one would DIY tools. “This pill makes me feel the slippery floor of my brain, that tablet rounds out the walls around my head…” . Always, Angela was close by his side, holding his hand, cooking him — and us when we visited — stunning dinners, marinating whole chickens in yogurt, listening to Enya, sharing spanakopita recipes, and wafting sea-scented incense around their beautiful apartment. Always hoping that just around the corner lay a solution to all this sadness.
The years of knotted stomachs and panic attacks took their toll on my friend.
I don’t think that solution ever came. Or maybe it did when Angela and Richard separated, then divorced. Richard is so much better now, a prolific poet and mental health advocate. But I think the years of knotted stomachs and panic attacks and watching Richard get committed into high-security wards took their toll on my friend. Being a wife, an advocate, a provider, and a carer will do that. Apart from the jaw disease, she has battled crippling digestive issues leading to drastic weight loss she can ill afford, and is often confined to bedrest when she would rather be walking her beloved dogs on the fens.
She has been so poorly of late that when she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I begged her to conserve energy, and to get better. For some days, I did not get a response.
This morning, though, there was a “lockdown knock” on my front door — where the postman leaves a parcel in front of a closed door, pounds like the devil on it, then backs up to watch from a safe distance. On my doorstep lay a package wrapped in birthday paper. Incredibly light, slightly rattly. Inside was a Hambleton Bakery box, and when I lifted the lid, three perfect little pippins lay in their nest of corrugated cardboard.
Angela had dispatched lovely Hugh to Hambleton to fetch freshly-baked pippins, and then methodically trimmed strips of cardboard and cradled each pippin safely for a Special Delivery journey.
Nobody wraps things anymore. We go online, pick a present, click to pay and have it dispatched anonymously, at arms’ length, maybe with a machine-printed message. I thought of my grandfather — back in the early ’60s — in India packing three tender coconuts in raffia and sacking, to send through a relative travelling on Air India to my mother in Singapore, who was missing her home and the food of her youth. I thought of my late mother, living in Chicago in the last two decades of her life, marinating huge flat fillets of seer fish in turmeric and frying them crisp before packing them all in a shoe box to UPS to her sister in Wyoming. This is what family does.
I hadn’t realized this before, but the clues were always there. Angela is my family. She goes where friends don’t, especially in England, where to be reserved and respect boundaries is the norm. But Angela will not be fobbed off by my carefully constructed veneer of cool independence. She goes straight to the heart of the matter, as she sees it:
· Is it hard being so far away from Nadia for so long? (my partner and I live in different countries so our daughter Stella can complete school in England)
· How are you affording the school fees?
· Do you need money?
· What do you want for your birthday?
· How is Stella coping with school stress?
· What can I do?
· What can I do?
· Here’s what I’m going to do.
I put a plumptious Pippin on a floral plate and slice it open. Inside, its cheerful pink heart glistens. The stilton hits the roof of my mouth, but just for an instant, before the bright, honeyed fizz of bramley rounds out the walls of the salt ham. If I concentrate hard enough, I can smell the sea.
