It was when a young couple we know, a cool, sweet girl and her jolly spouse; it was when they arrived with sweaty hands and a tendency to giggle that I knew something was afoot.
It was when the girl asked, “have you any empty pots?” and my wife replied, “Well there’s our big one but he’s always full” that I knew that there was a lurking motive behind the badinage.
Then it hit me. The dreaded time was upon us again. The season of unreason, the outrageous ripening, the obese bough bending, the pandemonium of the stewing pot.
The apricot orgy was at hand, underfoot and overhead.
Now friendships would wither, now would come the heated, even boiling, exchanges from exasperated kitchens. The terrible prospect of a chutney Christmas. Not all the goodwill or pretty paper in the world could conceal the dreaded outline of a chutney jar. Like lava the apricot tide would flow; the yellow peril in which we would be apricot flammed, apricot surprised, apricot tarted and apricot conserved until our nostrils turned daffodil.
Here they were again, the harbingers of the chutney charade, getting under our guard early, taking wax impressions of our locks and scrutinising our window sashes ready for a nocturnal dumping of their over-production.
I could hear my wife rattling her empty jars.
We are picking tomorrow,” said our young visitors. “The golden glow is in the orchard. We are giving ourselves over to chutney.”
I began singing a little ruminating song:
Chutney comes but once a year
Apricots from far and near.
Will we have a pretty pot?
Frankly, we would rather not.
They had hardly left before I was adjusting the security doors and nailing the window frames. I set a few rabbit traps in the fernery Yes, the fernery. They came in the dead of night last year and left us six jars there. It withered the ferns and shall never forget the awful sequel to a dropped jar in the garden; snails fighting and screaming around the taps as they sought to quench their tormented little throats.
I shan’t forget the kitchen scene when we made apricot jam, the bubbling, hissing, erupting and continual stirring, and that was only from my wife.
The whole terrible upheaval came as quick as Krakatoa, rolling out of the stewpan in a tide of fearsome fruitfulness.
We shrieked and leapt on the sideboard clinging to each other and the eggtimer.
It took hours before the inundation congealed and cooled and, as we proceeded across that sticky plain, we knew it had been a close-run thing.
But we accepted it. Wall-to-wall apricot is something that you learn to live with. Ants carried some of it away. Next day they brought it back.
Now, by examining our floor you can find the various layers of apricot that have accumulated during the years.
I do believe we have pioneered a new science, apricot archaeology.
A somewhat brownish stratum represents the awful moment in ’77 when the apricot caught fire and the air was so thick that we spread it on our toast.
There is the 1981 layer, the year when we bottled ourselves close to madness.
We went out at night dropping pots of apricot through our neighbours’ windows. We left pots on doorsteps. We had no trouble without, guard dogs except for their terrified yelping when I gave them a sniff of our chutney. Our output has since been cut and so has our tree. We offered the tree as an exercise to the Army but the apricot juice kept putting out their flamethrowers.
Our tree is still bearing—down on us mostly. But our main threat comes from outsiders. I have installed electronic sensors. While they will not react to fires or people demolishing the house, they screech in electronic dread at a the first whiff of chutney or the scarifying scent of the dreaded jam.
All the while there lurks the memory of picking and preparing. Cutting the apricots in sections. Panning for their fruity gold. Rolling their stones and saluting their kernels.
So never come to our door hoping for pot luck.
Once more unto the peach, dear friends.
Out, out damned chutney.
We have declared our street an apricot-free zone!
Max Fatchen