#autumn

Forever Autumn

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

September

Gone are the aromas of hot earth and barbecues, lollipop-coloured clothes, other people’s lives audible through open doors and windows, sunshine warming bare legs, iced drinks sweet and herby.

As Summer tips into Autumn, there’s the scent of apples; hedgerows bejewelled with garnet and obsidian and ruby berries; the skip-whine-trudge of children going to school; bare legs encased; steaming drinks warming and spiced.

Conkers peek through spiky eyelashes from tree and pavement. What were you supposed to do to harden them? Oven? Vinegar? I can’t recall. Did I ever beat anyone? I can’t recall that either.

But I remember the first day of the school year when I was fifteen, far too sophisticated for conkers, walking down the hill to collect my friend, ignoring my mother’s plea to wear a coat. It’s still too warm, Mum, and it’s not going to rain.

I was ready for Autumn. I always was. Tired of the heat – or more often – the disappointment because there was none, tired of a lack of pattern, I was happy when primary colours became muted and freedom became something earned at the end of the day. Albeit briefly, I even looked forward to school.

We walk the mile to school wearing our freshly ironed shirts, knotted ties, dark skirts and jumpers. The uniform is supposed to make us look the same but never can. Short, tall, curvy, uncurvy, maturing at different ages into different shapes, we are ourselves, pushing the rules about skirt lengths and shoe styles and make-up to make uniform individual.

We pass the path to the waterfall, cross over the bridge over the river which will run slow into the bigger one for a few weeks yet and under the narrow gauge railway.

On every deciduous tree around us, the leaves are still green but they whisper in the breeze to each other ‘When shall we change? What will be the tipping point?’

I barely notice, too busy wondering if this year’s set texts in English will be good and what stories I’ll be asked to write and thinking as I’ve thought before:

Surely this year at last, school will be fun, the teachers will be inspiring, the bullies will have lost interest, and the boy will finally see me properly and fall in love…

October

By October, leaves are red and gold and orange.

My wedding day was in October. All the days leading up to it had been grey and drizzly. Early in the morning of that day, I heard a pattering on the roof. No one had planned for rain.

My father, the tee-total, brings me a Bucks-Fizz, saying ‘Rain before seven, fine by eleven’ to help me stop worrying about what will happen if it doesn’t stop.

Then we’re caught up in a flurry. I’m too busy with hair and make-up and unfamiliar hooped petticoats to notice what is happening outside. When my mother and sister have gone ahead, Dad and I wait with nothing to say, because what can be said? I am doing something irrevocable – going from single to married, from daughter to wife. I’m aware of myself teetering on the edge of change, while my father is muttering the words he will shortly need to say.

Who giveth this woman?

Her mother and I do.

I hadn’t lived with my parents for ten years by then and I was never my father’s chattel anyway, and he never thought I was. But I was his beloved, stepping into a new stage of life.

Once he’d held my hand as I learned to walk, and later held the bicycle steady as I learned to ride and then… both times, he’d let go to see how I managed alone. Now, as I teetered, he was trusting once more that once he let go, I’d keep my balance.

And then the car arrives to take us to the church and Dad and I walk towards the entrance, late guests scurrying past.

Arm in arm for the last yards we pause and look up.

Above us in the churchyard, trees bow heads crowned with golden leaves, and above those leaves is a canopy of the deepest, clearest, most beautiful azure sky.

I am ready.

November

November is sometimes a drowning month when wind drives the last leaves from every tree to skitter angrily across grey skies before rain drums them into the mud.

Even if it doesn’t rain, the skies are dull, the night encroaching on day at either side, crushing it slowly hour by hour towards Solstice. Frosts start, snow may fall.

For a day or so, fireworks stud the grey night, rockets going up, up, up and balancing in the darkness before… Hoom! They fall in showers of impossible brightness. Bonfires scent our hair and clothes with woodsmoke. Our hands are warmed by hot dogs and steaming chocolate, before waving sparklers in defiance against the black night.

I remember a firework display when my children were very small. My baby daughter puts hands over her ears and buries her nose in my shoulder, sobbing. It’s too overwhelming for her. Not for my toddler son who tries to out-jump and out-shriek the fireworks then… losing both wellies in the mud, steps forward in his socks and…then falls flat. Just as well the noise blots out what my husband is saying as he picks that muddy figure up.

When the fireworks are over, November becomes dull again until Christmas fills the town with lights and gifts and sparkle.

In the countryside, a few brown leaves cling moistureless for a few more days, then fall to crunch under feet before turning into earth at the foot of their tree.

In three months, they’ve gone from green to … dead?

Maybe not exactly. Because they’ve fallen, mushrooms can grow. Under them animals seek food or store it. A hidden world is revealed by bare branches: the last of the berries, bark, fungus, hedgehogs, deer, rabbits, squirrels, and the curious, mischievous fox – russet, red, fawn, silver, orange.

Those Autumn leaves have transformed, every one holding a memory of eons of leaves that once emerged green then turned gold then faded so something else could grow and live. Another tree, a fungus, a creature.

Everything fades but nothing ever truly disappears. It changes. It feeds. It makes something new possible.

Everything is a matter of timing and balance.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Gears Looking at You

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

This blog is dedicated to my great friend Val Portelli who, for reasons beyond her control, has sadly had to relinquish her faithful car. In sympathy, I’m looking back to some of the more memorable vehicles in my life and hoping to raise a smile on her face.

(Just for the record before I continue, in case you’re a phisher of any kind, the following is of no use whatsoever for getting at any of my passwords.)

The first vehicle in my life was a small fiat. My parents drove to Scotland in it when I was a baby to introduce me to my Scottish great-aunts (numerous and mostly scary). In those days before child restraints I travelled in my carry-cot on the back seat. My father always said that I’d eaten the carry-cot by the time we arrived. My mother, slightly more prosaically says that I chewed the straps a bit. I have no recollection of the car, her name, that particular journey or munching on plastic, so I can’t tell you what’s true. I like Dad’s version, but suspect Mum’s is true.

The first vehicle I recall was a motorcaravan. I called her ‘Daddy Car’. I have many happy memories of New Forest holidays in her. In my head, the sun always shone, but then I was a small child. It’s the opposite of being a teenager when memories of time spent with parents tend to be under a permanent cloud of gloom. My mother has since said that those glorious balmy holidays were spent in October, and photos show us playing ball wrapped up in winter coats, but to me they’ll always be golden.

After that, there was a Skoda. Whether she had a name or not, I can’t recall. In fact the only reason I remember her at all was that I was just about old enough to understand the news on the radio. Or at least, I understood that there was violent trouble in all sorts of places around the world. (My father did not comprehend the concept of shielding small children from that sort of thing.) One of the places in turmoil was Czechoslovakia and I was a little concerned that it was around the corner. Dad reassured me, saying it was a long way away but was where the car was from. I sort of imagined she’d escaped the trouble to live safely with us and was very glad for her.

Following the Skoda was a series of Rovers, my father going through a flush period at the time. This coincided with me being vaguely Viking obsessed and I loved the logo of the longship on the steering wheel. The Rovers (whose names I can’t recall either) pulled caravans to take us on holidays. This was a brief period of luxury, although it coincided with a period of wearing short skirts and short shorts. There’s nothing quite like a long car journey from Berkshire to Cornwall with your legs sticking to leather seats. And at the time, the road network wasn’t quite what it is now, the journey being via narrow country roads, singing songs and trying to make a monarch from pub signs: King’s Head, King’s Arms, King’s Seat. There were never any legs and not enough queens, but it kept us occupied.

Cars were mostly driven by dads where I lived. Only a few mums could drive at all, and those who could rarely had a car of their own. But during this brief period of flushness, Dad bought one for Mum. It was small, black, very old, seatbelt-less, musty and somewhat reminiscent of an Edwardian maiden aunt. An Austin perhaps?

Her indicators were little orange bakelite ‘ears’ that popped out of the side of the car if Mum wanted to tell anyone she was turning. The only time I recall her driving it was when she collected me from junior school after a fainting episode. Perhaps she was too embarrassed.

When the flush period came to an abrupt end, the next car was a Triumph. She was named Weena by my sister after a character in the film ‘The Time Machine’ (equally too scary for little girls, but that was Dad for you).

Weena had no concept of running for more than a few miles without breaking down. Her exhaust pipe would drop off at regular intervals (three times crossing the English/Scots border), her head gasket would blow, the back windows would partially drop whenever it was raining and/or cold and periodically her windscreen wipers would stop working. This was problematic as we did a lot of travelling but we always felt Weena wasn’t doing it on purpose, she was just absent-minded.

One particularly horrible journey going home from Reading to South Wales in an unexpected snowstorm Dad followed the barrier on the central reservation as the only thing he could see and Mum periodically wound down her window, leaning out and prodding the wipers into action. My sister and I huddled in the back, freezing from the draught coming from our windows and now and again, hers.

After Weena, Dad bought his one and only brand-new car. She and every subsequent vehicle was efficient and economical and hardly ever broke down. Somehow they were never named. And with one exception, I never named my own afterwards either.

In the intervening years I thought that maybe naming cars was an out-of-date thing, until I met a friend who still does it, and then my daughter had her first car and named it immediately. And all of those cars are/were perfectly efficient and economical.

So perhaps it boils down to personality. And maybe that’s a lesson in life: don’t worry about being perfect, concentrate on making memories and being your own unique self.

I don’t know what happened some of the old girls Dad or Mum drove when they were sold, but I like to think that Val’s car is now trundling towards a sunset she never needs to reach on a beautiful highway along with Mum’s ancient Austin, Weena the ditzy Triumph and Daddy Car the motor caravan, being unique, making adventures, having fun, being herself.

Words (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. Image credit: ID 140885884 © Mpagina | Dreamstime.com

Apple Time in the Historical Experiment Kitchen

~ Paula Harmon ~ 1 Comment

It’s apple season and also, after ten days of being banned from cooking due to having covid, time for me to do some cooking ‘archaeology’!

I have a project in hand, adapting the sort of recipes my characters might eat, into something that’s easy to cook in a modern kitchen with modern ingredients, and mindful of modern tastes (specially not boiling vegetables and pasta forever, and being less likely to want to eat brains). So yesterday, I made a Roman/Victorian dinner and the recipes are below.

For recipes which Lucretia in the Murder Britannica series might eat, I refer to Apicius’s Roman Cookery Book (my copy is translated by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenbaum and published by Martino Publishing). My Latin is extremely rusty and the recipes themselves are more guidelines for someone who obviously knows what the normal methods are and another place I visit is the Tavola Mediterranea website where they have worked out ancient recipes from similar instruction and from which I’ve cooked some delicious food. It’s a fascinating website and well worth a visit.

For Margaret and Katherine of the Margaret Demeray and Caster & Fleet series, I use old cookery books, some facsimile, some original, with recipes that an ordinary woman of the late 19th/early 20th century might cook.

Of course their experiences would be quite different. 

Lucretia is rich and thoroughly enjoys as much imported food she can get her hands on, but she hasn’t actually cooked anything herself since she was a very young girl, so would relegate any cooking to an enslaved person, or send an enslaved person to buy ready cooked delicacies from a street trader. A Roman era kitchen was small and full of earthenware. It might have looked like this. I imagined street stalls like the one in the image below (excavated in Pompeii) in the forum in Durnovaria, selling hot pastries, sizzling meat, hot spiced wine and cider in my books. Lucretia wouldn’t have had potatoes, tomatoes, sweet (bell) peppers, chillies etc – all of which we take for granted. But that’s not to say she didn’t like spicy food – there’s ample pepper and fragrant spices in most recipes. Modern tastes of course don’t particularly fancy seasoning food with fermented fish (garum) but you can use modern fish sauce (e.g. the sort for Thai cooking), soy sauce or just salt in its place.

Meanwhile Margaret and Katherine are both middle-class and while both have domestic help (Margaret’s only coming in a few days a week in books one and two), they can both cook – Margaret with significantly more enthusiasm than Katherine. They have kitchens that we’d recognise – with a gas stove and metal pans. A refrigerator is a luxury item, so certainly in the first two Margaret Demeray books, Margaret doesn’t have one, relying instead of a cool pantry and shopping more regularly for perishable goods. It’s perhaps no wonder that the cookery books of the time rely a lot on canned and dried goods like tomatoes and fruit, and are heavily egg and cheese based. Chicken, which we think of as cheap now, was a luxury in Edwardian times (and in fact my parents both considered it a special Sunday food until the 1960s), so recipes for meat dishes tend towards mutton and pork. 

Margaret’s potential recipes look a lot more familiar than Lucretia’s and include curries and pasta dishes and vegetarian cuisine. But you can’t rely on them for timings – half an hour to cook spaghetti? (Was it a different construction then, or did Edwardians just not trust it?) And there’s advice which both agrees and conflicts modern ideas: cook potatoes with skin on but don’t cook vegetables too rapidly or you’ll spoil their colour. 

So going back to yesterday’s Sunday dinner. I experimented on my family with an adaptation of a Roman recipe for main course and a Victorian recipe for dessert. One which Lucretia might have ordered someone make for her and one which even Katherine could cook herself. NB – the pork dish is a good use of leftovers from a pork roast! They were both delicious and went down a treat.

And without further ado, here are the recipes:

PORK WITH MATIAN GRANNY SMITH APPLES

Adapted from Minutal Matianum by Apicius as translated by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenbaum

Serves 6

INGREDIENTS

2 tablespoons olive oil
100g (4 oz) ground pork/pork mince 

3 leeks, cleaned and sliced

½ bunch chopped coriander 

500 g (1lb) cooked pork, chopped into large chunks
½ cup chicken stock 

1½ tablespoons fish sauce*
2 large firm eating apples, peeled, cored and diced
3 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
3 teaspoons ground cumin
3 teaspoons ground coriander

Handful of fresh mint leaves
2 garlic cloves
1/3 – ½ cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
¼ cup pomegranate molasses
1 teaspoon cracked pepper for garnish

*(I used the sort you use for Thai cooking but you could use soy sauce or just season with salt to taste.)

METHOD

  1. Heat oil.
  2. Saute pork mince till brown, add leeks and coriander.
  3. Add chopped cooked pork.
  4. Add stock and 1 tablespoon of fish sauce and warm through.
  5. Add chopped apples.
  6. Pound together in a pestle or blend: pepper, cumin, coriander, fresh mint, garlic and add this to the pan.
  7. Mix vinegar, honey, pomegranate molasses and remainder of the fish sauce in a cup and add that.
  8. Heat through and thicken with cornflour or beurre manié.
  9. Serve with barley (Roman) or rice (borderline Roman) or potatoes (not Roman at all). I also served it with peas into which I’d mixed crispy bacon and spring onions (scallions).

APPLE HEDGEHOG

(For a version which looks more like a hedgehog and includes another ingredient, check out Mrs Crocombe’s demonstration here.)

Serves 6

INGREDIENTS

1 kg/ 2lb Cooking Apples (about 5)

75g, 3 oz sugar

2 egg whites.

Two handfuls of slices almonds

A few raisins or sultanas or currants

A glacé cherry

METHOD

  1. Preheat an oven to 180°C or 350°F or gas 4.
  2. Peel, quarter and core the apples, put in a saucepan with a little water and 25 g/1oz sugar. Heat gently until just cooked (although if you overcook them a little, as I did, it’s not the end of the world. You just want them to retain some structure and not be mush).
  3. Put into an ovenproof dish and shape into a sort of hedgehog (a large mound of apples, with a smaller bit at the front for a head.
  4. While it’s cooling somewhat, whisk the egg whites into soft peaks, then fold in the remaining sugar.
  5. Cover the apples with the meringue mixture and decorate the ‘body’ part with flaked almonds.
  6. Put in the oven for about 20 minutes till the meringue is golden and the almonds just a little brown (keep an eye on it to make sure the almonds don’t burn).
  7. Decorate the face with a glacé cherry for a nose and raisins/sultanas/currants for eyes.

Words and photographs* copyright 2022 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.

*photograph of street kitchen in Pompeii Dietmar Rauscher https://www.dreamstime.com/thermopolium-pompeii-ancient-roman-street-food-kitchen-thermopolium-pompeii-ancient-roman-street-food-kitchen-serving-image184835561