Bramble Jelly

Jeanette is making bramble jelly. She is trying to listen to the Morning Story on Radio 4 while she goes about her task. Jeanette’s brow is furrowed as she weighs the deep purple fruit and tips the berries into the heavy jelly pan that belonged to her mother and is now dented and scarred with use and her teeth bite her bottom lip. Carefully, she chops up two green apples, coring and slicing them and adding them to the pan with precise and efficient movements though her temples throb slightly. The radio continues a moving tale of survival, several sentences of which are missed as a lorry thunders by Jeanette’s front door. She strains to hear.
Into a glass measuring jug, she runs cold water, holding it so that the meniscus is level with her eye. When she is satisfied as to amount, she adds it to the pan and turns on the gas. She picks at the dark red stain under her nails and waits for the fruit to warm. The rich sweet smell of the fruit fills her kitchen, lingering on surfaces and curtains so that the scent will still be there long after the jam is made. Several cars drive by and again the radio is drowned out.
Jeanette is making another lot of her prize winning bramble jelly and she fears it could be her last. Jeanette is famed among the local WRIs for her bramble jelly and she has won prizes for it at shows in the area. Sometimes she is coerced into giving a talk about making jelly and about brambles but she does not like public speaking and never gives away her recipe entirely. Heavily made up ladies with red nails and wearing wide brimmed hats strain to hear her quiet voice as she speaks of the uses of brambles in times past. Of how Nicholas Culpeper, in his Complete Herbal of 1653, recommended bramble leaves boiled in lye for the treatment of itch and sores of the head and for dyeing the hair black. Of how, even today, bramble leaves are an effective remedy for diarrhoea and for sore throats and mouth ulcers.
Jeannette lowers the gas to simmer as the brambles heat and fall apart in the ruby liquid. She will let it cook until the fruit is soft and then she will mash it to a pulp of shimmering rubescence.
Jeanette also knows much of the folklore surrounding brambles. ‘Sitting under a bramble bush was supposed to cure rheumatism, boils and blackheads, while the arch formed by a rooting shoot was regarded as magical and children were passed through it to protect them from various disorders,’ she will say to her audience. Apart from the ladies in hats, there are usually several farmers’ wives, recognisable from their thrown together outfits, ruddy cheeks and lingering smell of the milking parlour. Neither group will ever make bramble jelly, the ladies because of the scrambling and scratching among the plants necessary to pick the fruit and the farmers’ wives because of their chronic shortage of time. But they like to hear her speak of the processes involved and after, sample her jelly on home-made scones.
But this could be the last autumn that she gathers the fruit. She has her own special patch, the situation of which she has divulged to nobody. She found it many years ago when she was newly wed and went for long, time-consuming walks away from the house. Her husband came with her once, just the once, shortly before he left her. He did not like picking brambles though he always ladled the jam generously on to his toast. She had to persuade him to help her that time, leading him on through the dense undergrowth to her patch.
Over the years, the brambles and nettles have grown thicker and denser, twining and intertwining into an almost impenetrable mass. Since her husband left, she has come alone every year to pick the fruit and to tend what she considers to be her own piece of ground. It is deep in a stretch of woodland, near to the river but far enough away from the main paths. It is a struggle to get through to it, but Jeanette has gradually trodden a narrow way through.
At the height of the brief brambling season in September, Jeanette can pick three or more pounds in an hour. She holds her bowl under the fruit and the ripe ones simply fall into it. Towards the end of September, the fruits are smaller and then she will also pick some red ones to provide the pectin the jelly needs, instead of using the green apples. But she always leaves enough berries to ripen and seed and fall to the ground and grow new plants and she spreads out the long branches and pins them down into the earth to root. In this way, the bramble patch has grown from what was those many years ago, a relatively small patch, into what it is today, covering the entire banking and spreading across the original paths.
‘I never pick the fruit after September 29th, Michaelmas,’ she says in her talks. ‘It was believed that after that date, the devil spat and urinated on the berries.’
Another huge lorry rattles past shaking her windows. Certainly, the new bypass will leave her house and those in the rest of the village, in peace. She and her neighbours will be able to walk safely along the road, will be able to reverse their cars out without fear of being hit, will be able to hear the punch lines of jokes in the comedy shows on TV. Yes, the bypass will bring many benefits to Jeanette and her neighbours. But the bypass is going straight through her bramble patch.
Jeanette sets a large bowl on her kitchen counter just under the shelving. She has a system whereby she can suspend her jelly bag from a wooden spoon inserted in the handles of her cupboard doors. She ladles the dark plum-coloured pulp into the jelly bag and the first of the blood red juice drips through into the bowl. She will let it sit there all night until every last drop is drained.
‘Brambles will grow anywhere,’ Jeanette will tell her audience, ‘in many different kinds of soil but they benefit from some feeding, a bit of blood and bone suits them fine.’ Over the years, she has almost become an expert on rubus fruticosus, the wild bramble. ‘They grow in all kinds of soil and in full sun or shade. They do like a moist soil, hence they grow well here…’ A slight murmur of laughter.
Jeanette does not sleep well that night, her tossing and turning punctuated by the occasional traffic sounds and by the steady drip of the crimson juice. For picking the berries, she wears an old jacket her husband once bought her and which she has never liked. Although it has been washed many times, it still carries a reddish brown tinge which will not fade. Her hands tingle from the numerous nettle stings she receives as she plunges her hands into the deepest niches where the best black clumps are to be found. She does not mind the pain of the stings and scratches, she is used to them and feels that they are only what is due to her.
The bypass worries her. There are public meetings but Jeanette does not stand up to speak out against it. Instead, she murmurs in the ears of the made up ladies and to the farmers’ wives as they pull on battered coats before rushing off to the next milking. The ladies talk amongst themselves, shaking their heads over the disturbance of it all and of course over Jeanette, shame she never remarried. She was quite young when he left suddenly. Nobody had ever heard from him again. Australia, some thought he’d gone to, or was it New Zealand? Looked such a happy couple too but you never can tell what goes on in a marriage.
Jeanette can. She never missed him, though she played the part of the deserted wife well. She felt such relief after he was gone that she sometimes had to remind herself to look down-hearted and sad. But she never felt tempted to repeat the experience.
Jeanette has spoken to many people about her fears for the woodland. She presses small jars of jelly, taken from her cupboards where they lie like necklaces of garnets, into the hands of councillors, planners, her MP, her MSP, even her MEP. She talks quietly and they nod their heads and take her jam and are reminded of her as they spread it on their toast and scones.
The next morning after breakfast, Jeanette carefully removes the bowl full of ruby red juice. ‘Never squeeze the jelly bag,’ she always tells her audience. ‘That way the jelly becomes cloudy.’ When she first made bramble jelly she would pound the mush in the jelly bag with a heavy meat tenderiser her husband gave her the first Christmas they were married. But now she knows better and the meat tenderiser lies unused in a kitchen drawer, still stained and dark from the juice of the berries of long ago. She has scrubbed it often, but the stains never totally fade.
She measures the liquid in her jug and pours it into the pan. Sugar is weighed and added and the pan left to come to a rolling boil. She warms the sterile jars in the oven ready for the hot jam. A saucer sits in the fridge, cooling, to test for setting point. This is the crucial part. Nothing must go wrong or Jeanette be distracted. She watches the jam froth and bubble, pink and purple, its sweetness filling the air and her mouth salivates.
The phone rings. But Jeanette cannot answer it. The jam cannot be left. She might miss the setting point and all will be lost. The answer phone switches on but a convoy of trucks rumble by and she cannot hear the speaker. Never mind. When she is finished, she will deal with it.
She tests a little of the jam on the cold saucer but it is not yet ready. Patiently she waits, testing every few minutes until at last, a skin wrinkles under her spoon. Quickly she switches off the gas and brings out her jars. The pink scum is removed and the jam stirred. She pours the hot red juice into the jars, filling them almost to the top. When the last spoonful is emptied from the pan, she tops each jar with a wax disc and sets them aside to cool. She likes the look of them. It appears to be a good making, this one, this last one perhaps.
Jeanette washes her hands of the stickiness and goes to the phone. It is one of her farmers’ wives. The voice is excited as well it might be, as it has in it the hope for a better future. The council are buying their land for the bypass. It will not now go through the woodland and the bramble patch. It is to be preserved as a site of environmental importance due to its untouched nature. The council will ensure it stays that way.
Jeanette stretches the cellophane circles over the jars and fastens them with an elastic band. Carefully she writes out the labels. Bramble jelly and the date. A last rub and then she lines the jars up in the cupboard along with the rest. They glow like beads of arterial blood. She switches on the radio to some music. Classic FM is playing the Waltz of the Flowers. She hums along and is happy.
Jeanette’s bramble patch will remain undisturbed. And so will the quiet tenor of her life. Let her husband rest there in his shallow, unmarked grave. Blood and bone give nutrients to her brambles. For once, he’d done some good.