Picking Fruit

A gentleman is looking for figs in the branches hanging over a wall in Langley Green. ‘Any there?’ I ask. ‘They are never ripe here,’ he replies. He continues with a story from childhood (rather than the judgement parable) about how he used to steal figs from a neighbour’s tree in a village near where we are moving. We all gaze up into the tree together and I realise his childhood is our children’s childhood. Children pick fruit here, children pick fruit there. There’s an apple tree in West Green we have to make a detour past, its redness is so tempting. I am so glad Pakistan has never been far away.

Uncle tells me off for speaking in English to my children. ‘We must keep our Urdu alive, my child.’

‘Uncle,’ I reply, my head bowed, ‘I will do my best.’

****************************

We are picking blackberries. Ever since my son could pick them I have thought, ‘Pick well, for this will be your last harvest here.’ We go out daily every late summer and eat our fill then get fat on berry and apple puddings. I hardly buy any fruit from Asda these days; we are getting our five a day in the hedgerows. But this year, the shrivelled bramble remains are making me sad. The season will be over soon and we will not see them flower in spring.

‘How do you say ‘blackberry’ in Urdu?’ my son asks me. I pause, not because I am struggling to remember, but because I am wondering how to tell him there are no blackberries where we are going. I break it to him and quickly try to cheer him up with the promise of barrows of fruit pushed round the streets that might stop at our door. He has been interested in these for a long time, probably because they have wheels. He knows that they are called ‘reddiyan’, and likes the word and keeps it alive.

Besides teaching the children new words, I have another project: etching Sussex on their memories. I cannot know where it will be that they will go in their sleep or what will make homesickness burst its banks or what it will mean to them when they say, ‘We come from England.’ But still, I want them to know that somewhere there is a Saxon church, a mobile library, a millpond with ducks. We look at books about foxes and rabbits; school railings and ice-cream vans; old greenhouses and dens at the bottom of gardens. They are all things just round the corner, but soon they will be hankered after, then half-remembered then strange. ‘You must keep these memories alive, my children,’ I will find myself saying. Maybe one day their strangeness will replace the strangeness of things I tell them about now: those reddiyan and the fruits upon them, the vendors’ cries and the kites circling above, high in a Lahori sky.

Sometimes when the wind blows it’s hard not to imagine the trees are waving goodbye.