Orchards and Cider

This afternoon we drove to Pembridge to buy some cider. We buy from Dunkerton's, an oldish cider mill which has been organic since the 1930s. The 'shop' is an ageless shed, a wooden frame with brick infill, crumbling and seemingly held up by apple fumes. A stray shaft of sunlight lit the wooden pillar next to me as I waited with my empty water bottle to be filled; pitted and grey-stone wood, polished smooth by I guessed the animals that used to live here. The shop is lined with modern barrels and has a concrete floor with channels for the overflow. In the summer it was a dark place, wet and slopped with cider, which reminded me of the Dock Road pubs in Liverpool which used to waste a barrel of ale onto the road outside the pub to entice the newly-paid dockers. Even on a grey day in April the whole place had a rich appley smell, and the huge wooden crates were stacked by the entrance; TED 1, TED 4, TED 3. What does it mean? And I found some real poetry, the names of the apple varieties taped to the barrels: Sweet Coppin, Dabinett, Stoke Red, Foxwhelp.

And on the way home we passed a cleared orchard. A week ago we noticed men digging and burning a whole field of apple trees, which must have been seriously diseased. Now the ground is cleared, raked smooth like a Japanese garden of brown earth, with an immense pile of sawn logs next to the gate, and a great pile of smouldering ashes. A strange sight, dark and apocalyptic, the antithesis of the Wassailing celebrated long ago on Twelfth Night.