The scent of wild garlic

I remember how we used to clamber back up the path out of the woods, checking our watches that we got in the airport the time we went to Crete on holiday. That was our first ever trip abroad. Dad had seen it advertised as a last minute bargain in the travel agent’s window after he’d finished his early shift at the factory and had called into town on the way home to buy cheese and bacon at the market.

My watch had Hong Kong Phooey on it with his arm spinning round as a second hand. My brother’s had a bear on it I think but don’t remember as it would have been broken and long gone after not many months. I still have mine - it’s at the back of my sock drawer with other childhood memories like the clip on bear that mum’s friend gave me when we played at her house during the summer holidays.

The path out of the woods was always wet, even in the warmest part of the year when the days were long and the light would last for ages after bed time. I always remember lying in bed and it still being full daylight outside. Mum and dad would be out on the driveway talking to the neighbours like it was the middle of the day. Gran, who lived next door, would usually be out too, doing things in her front garden and singing or laughing like she always did in that high pitched laugh of hers that was punctuated by the odd snort.

Gran loved her garden. She used to show me how to weed, to make sure you got the root out, and not just pull up the stalk. She showed me the plants that you could eat, though I was never too sure. There was always a bit of the gypsy in her I thought, with all her strange ideas of what could cure you and make you well.

I remember the night me and my brother stayed at her house in the bedroom that used to belong to my two aunties. My brother had a cold and Gran didn’t want me to catch it with us sleeping in the same room, so she put an onion in there with us, peeled and cut in half so it absolutely stank the place out. I don’t remember if I caught his cold or not but I didn’t get much sleep for the stench of the onion and the rags that Gran had insisted on threading into my hair before bed. She said it was what she’d always done for my aunties when they were little girls. I don’t know about how the ringlets would have looked as I pulled the rags out during the night. Gran was cross about that, but not for long.

We’d come out of the woods depending on two things. Whether it was time to be fed or time to go to bed. If it wasn’t bed then it was dinner (that’s a meal at midday if you’re working class and live in the north of England) or tea (that’s what you have at five o’ clock). I remember those meals at tea time when mum and dad had got home from work, or sometimes it was just us and mum if dad was on a late shift. Cold meat and chips with the left overs from the Sunday roast. Stuffed hearts or liver - there was always some sort of offal once a week. Maybe chops. Lamb or pork. Dad always said it was a bonus if you got a bit of kidney stuck on the side of your chop. I still retch now thinking of the fatty edge that he’d insist that we ate while he’d mop up any excess grease on his plate with a slice of white buttered bread.

We always got homemade bread - at least in the years before mum went back to work. I remember being in the kitchen before setting off to school. I’d have finished my porridge or cereal from the cream coloured bowl with the brown edging and then mum would let me mix the live yeast. It gave off a pungent smell as I used a teaspoon to mix the sticky brown clumps with sugar in a little glass jug until it turned into a frothing liquid. Mum would then bind it in with the flour and water and leave it to rise on top of the cooker with a tea towel draped over the top. She always took her rings off to make bread. I remember them sitting on the counter top. Her wedding ring and an eternity ring. The engagement ring had been lost years ago when they were building the house and was thought to be somewhere in the foundations.

Our bread always had burnt crusts. I remember on a school trip to a castle in the Yorkshire Dales, I had sardine and tomato paste sandwiches on thick slices of homemade bread with burnt crusts. My red flask with a picture of Snoopy on the side had leaked orange squash all over them so the sandwiches were wet and soggy. The other kids had things like wafer-thin ham or Dairylea on Sunblest white-sliced bread and a Capri-sun drink in a little silver pouch with a blue straw stuck on the side of it. I think at the time I envied them with their supermarket drink and bread that had come out of a plastic packet but then when mum went back to work, we started getting plastic bread too. It was brown and had a picture of a windmill on the bag and tasted like cardboard.

There was one time we came out of the woods and it wasn’t for food or sleep. It was the summer of 1984, one Sunday afternoon. We’d been there with our ‘gang’. That’s gang in the loose sense of the word. A handful of five kids from the village in shorts and t-shirts ranging from ages of eight to eleven. We had a little den by the river in the woods. It wasn’t really a den to be fair. More like a piece of a fallen tree that we propped branches up against. It was ours anyway. But that summer someone had been down to our spot by the river with a shotgun, told by the orange and green cartridges that littered the paths.

The woods were full of wild garlic, it seemed all year long. I’ve never known it like that anywhere else, where the heady smell lingers and greats you as you descend the path between the trees, stepping over the giant gas pipes, green with moss, and leaping over the small rivulets that cut across the dirt path.

The sound of the river would drift up through the leaves and branches, cutting the course that the Victorians had designed for it when they built their mills and controlled the water to turn their wheels. The mills were all gone but the river was still there and as we’d arrive in the bottom of the woods, we tiptoe over the slippery green rocks from one banking to the other side where our den awaited at the foot of a steep banking that was always covered in dead leaves even at the height of summer.

Now our ‘gang’ wasn’t tough. We played innocent games of dare or hide and seek and when one of us had been brave enough to take a box of matches from home, we’d make little camp fires in a ring of stones and ‘cook’ the wild garlic in an old camping pan that we’d discovered near the road one day. When we’d finished with our fire, we’d use a big metal bucket that had been found with the pan, and put the fire out with water from the river. That was as brave and edgy as we got. And we always checked our watches, Hong Kong Phooey with his dislocating arm, to make sure we went home when we should.

That Sunday afternoon, we decided to have a little fire amongst the dead leaves. Just a small one. I remember how it caught so quickly amongst the dried debris. The one square foot quickly spread to three. I ran for the metal bucket and filled it from the river, but by the time I’d returned to the fire the bucket was half empty, riddled with holes from the shot. The fire grew. My brother yelled at me and tried to carry more water in the small garlic cooking pan. It was futile. The fire was making its way up the banking and was at least twenty feet wide, devouring its way through the leaves and beginning to lap at the base of an old oak tree.

Sally (not her real name, might I add) ran off in tears, quickly followed by her sister Abigail (also not her real name) leaving me and my brother and the farmer’s son. We were in trouble and we knew it. The fire was out of control and there was not a single thing we could do about it.

The next thing I remember is running away, over the river, back through the nettles and the ferns on the path back out of the woods. On my way I met my dad, heading down towards the seat of the fire, his newspaper in his hand as if he might use it to bat it out. I think I just cried and ran home. When I got there I locked myself in the bathroom and lay on the floor with a towel over my head. I wanted to disappear and for it all to be over. I’d never done a bad thing in my life. I was distraught.

What happened next, I only know from what my parents told me as I stayed hiding under the towel on the bathroom floor for a long time, in my clothes that stank of smoke.

Someone had called the fire brigade. They’d arrived with big beaters on poles and successfully put out the fire. But that wasn’t before it had destroyed the whole banking and burned the trees too, leaving them like dead black ghouls, standing in protest at what we’d done. Every time we went down the road through the woods into town after that, I’d close my eyes or look away. I couldn’t bear to be reminded of what we’d done.

There had been consternation at the village chapel that warm Sunday afternoon. The old ladies were serving afternoon teas, and some of the more spritely ones would often take the path from the site of the old mill, up the hillside and along the edge of the farmers fields that backed onto the top of the woods. Here, the flames had apparently lapped at their feet and they’d fled, quite quickly for old ladies, across the fields to the safety of the lane that led them to the chapel where they’d recounted their story of the terrible flames and smoke and how they’d been lucky to escape alive.

The firemen had asked my dad who had started the fire. And to his credit, he said he didn’t know and that maybe it was the person who’d been down there recently with a shotgun. We definitely never heard anything about it from anyone of authority or community standing, not at chapel or at school. Even my parents were kind to us about it, knowing full well that it was the kind of thing that any country kid might have accidentally done, and that we’d not done it in malice but as part of a game. And my dad, with a sense of nostalgia for his own childhood, was probably secretly proud that his such well behaved children had actually done something unruly for a change.

On Monday morning at the school bus stop, we made a pact that none of us would ever tell anyone about what had happened in the woods that weekend. Sally and Abigail were particularly upset, due to their normally well behaved nature and Abigail being top of the class at everything and shortly due to go to grammar school.

Of course, by dinner break that day, all the boys in my brother’s class knew about it.

After that summer, we never played in the woods again. Abigail started at her new school and the ‘gang’ drifted apart. Me and my brother got a ZX Spectrum 48k for Christmas that year and so there was less playing outside and more zapping at aliens and jumping about in the pixelated worlds of platform games (spacebar to jump, z and x for left and right).

And even now, when I smell wild garlic or see smoke rising in the distance, I’m taken back to that summer of 1984, to the gang in the woods, to Hong Kong Phooey ticking on my wrist, my dad with his newspaper, and the moment a spark got out of control.