When l was a kid, scrabbling about bomb sites in search of shrapnel to add to my collection, the words ‘fruit’ and ‘apple’ were interchangeable.
Simply because there wasn’t anything else.
They came in three varieties.
Eating apples, which were crisp and sweet and juicy and red. Cooking apples, huge and green and incredibly sour and eaten not only baked and swimming in Lyle’s Golden but also bitten into raw so as to prove your manliness.
And the scrumpy, a sub-type, picked straight from the tree – preferably somebody else’s – and distinguishable from the shop apple by virtue of housing a wormy thing which you had to be careful to bite around as it was somewhat bitter.
Later I encountered other delights. Oranges, which came singly, in a sock at Christmas. And grapefruits which appeared in halves on boarding house tables.
Grapes were a mystery which existed only in old British comedy films to be taken to a sick bed and then consumed by the person who brought them there – a much venerated joke of the time.
Bananas were an exotica I knew nothing about at all until well after Hitler did the decent thing.
But I was quite content with my apples – and remained so despite guavas and kiwis, lychees and mangoes and all the other fruits that began to appear in my teenage life.
They were all very nice – but never a match for a Granny Smith or a Cox’s orange Pippin.
Yet I no longer bother.
And the reason is that I have finally got fed up with the modern day substitute – the Supermarket Standard. An object grown anywhere and everywhere but in this Sceptered Isle.
A suitably attractive red on the outside yet consisting internally of anything from saturated and tasteless cardboard to sour wood, to long past – it soggy mush. All concealed within a skin with the consistency of ancient leather.
And with absolutely no way of telling until paid for and carried home. A home not situated a street or two from the greengrocers of my childhood but a car journey too far to be worth the bother of returning to complain.
I would like to think well of the Common Market, honestly I would. But sometimes it’s very difficult.
Image: Selma90
