Dear LPG,

When it comes to diversity, LPG never disappoints.   There are so many subjects covered in your pages that I defy any reader to find a subject that is not covered.   Well, I say that I defy readers although I have found just one. 

It appears that pensioners have a little difficulty letting their imaginations run away with them.  It occurs to me that few stories feature on your pages; that story telling is left to the children these days, even though we pensioners have the added advantage of a lifetime of memories to help us produce some really special ones.

With this thought in mind I would like to tell a story today and I have picked one from my childhood…

The More, The Berrier   

It’s summer. The season when people enjoy eating ripe fruit. I’m over ripe myself, now - what the bible considers to be the human lifespan: three score years and ten. Meanwhile, supermarket shelves brim with berries, pots of clotted cream, temptingly positioned nearby. This reminds me how much my dear mother enjoyed pre-Covid Wimbledon strawberry teas. That is if you’re into berries. But they are not for me. At least not raspberries. Never again!

Fast rewind to July 1956. I’m twelve, uprooted from Manchester’s urban sprawl to the Perthshire village of Abernethy, together with my parents and younger brother Jonty. It’s all down to Dad’s job. And he’s warned us that an English tax collector won’t be particularly popular in Scotland, so if we’re ever asked what our father does, we’ve got to say he’s a civil servant.

It’s the summer holidays now and I can’t wait to pick raspberries at the farm around the corner from our house. The job will last two weeks, but there’ll be no work on Sundays. Jonty and I will get tuppence for every pound we pick. He’ll buy sweets with his money. Mine’s going straight in my piggy bank, because I’m saving up to buy a pony. The job starts Monday, July 2nd at eight o’clock sharp.

My fingers are working hard, dropping the plump, ripe raspberries into my can and when it’s full, into my bucket at the end of the row. Jonty has joined some other children in another row and grown-ups are picking further down the field. At lunchtime, we queue up while the farmer carries all the buckets to the scales to be weighed. I let Jonty go in front of me.

‘Twelve pound of berries,’ the farmer says. But when he heaves mine onto the scales, he gasps. ‘Och, I canna believe it, lassie. Forty-two pound!’

I do some mental arithmetic - seven shillings. My piggy bank has now got ten shillings.

Jonty and I are sitting on a bench eating the marmite sandwiches Mum’s made us and slugging Dandelion and Burdock from a great big flask.

‘Phil,’ Jonty says, ‘Something’s just bit me.’

‘Tuck your shirt into your shorts then and don’t scratch. It’ll make it worse. Dad told me raspberry flies give horrid bites.’

‘Ow, it really hurts. What time do we finish?’

‘Four o’clock. Then we get our money. Cheer up. You’ve already picked enough for two bars of chocolate.’

 Jonty grins.

Back we go to the raspberry canes and the hot afternoon passes slowly. My hands feel sticky and a raspberry fly’s bitten me on the back, just where I can’t reach. Jonty’s behind me as we queue to have our last bucket weighed. The farmer hauls mine onto the scales. ‘Fifty pound! You’re the best wee picker I’ve ever had, so y’are. There’s enough berries here to make into jam.’

‘Jam?’

‘Aye - jars of jam. They sell well at the market in Perth.’

‘Oh.’

At the end of those two weeks, I’d earned nine pounds five shillings. Dad was so pleased he made my money up to ten pounds. Mum was pleased too. On her birthday in August, she told us she had a surprise.

‘Scrumptious scones, kids. With clotted cream and Scottish raspberry jam from the market in Perth.’

Ugh!  I had to rush out of the room. I just couldn’t tell her the trick I’d played to make so much money. The farmer was closer to the truth when he said I was the best ‘wee picker.’

Nine months later, Dad’s job came to an end and we went back to Manchester. It was some time later when I realised how lucky I’d been that nobody spotted me crouching in the farmer’s field. Making my own liquid addition to the raspberries, aided by Dandelion and Burdock. I know my naughtiness outdid that of Minnie the Minx in my favourite comic, The Beano. But the pony whose purchase was forty per cent due to the raspberry jam, became mine when I was fourteen. Fast forward more than six decades to July 2020. My secret has been safe until now. However, I still can’t face eating soft fruit, either fresh or in jars.

PF