Christmas At Thrush Green Page 5

  ‘Ooh, do you think we’ve got the certuficate again?’ asked the girl, examining the envelope. ‘I see now, that teapot thing is the same as on the certuficate out front.’

  ‘We’ll soon find out,’ said Nelly. ‘Now, get on with you.’

  Poppy did as she was told and disappeared. The kitchen was quiet again, with just the murmurings of chatter coming through from the pantry where the two kitchen girls were working.

  Nelly cut a strip of pastry and carefully lined the edge of the first pie dish with it. Then she dipped her pastry brush into the bowl of beaten egg beside her on the work table, and painted the strip. Next she cut a circular piece of pastry for the lid, and carefully placed it over the meat. Using her forefinger, she pressed the lid on firmly all the way round before trimming it.

  As she prepared the nineteen other little pies, she thought about the Guild of Tea Shops. It was an organization Mrs Peters had applied to join a year or two before she had died, and Nelly had been so pleased for her when, after an inspection that had been carried out incognito, The Fuchsia Bush had been awarded membership of the Guild.

  Now as the sole proprietor of the tea-room, Nelly had strived to keep up the standards that had meant so much to Mrs Peters. She knew that at some time during July or August an inspection would be made and towards the end of the year she would receive a letter with the results of the inspection - and, hopefully, a Certificate of Excellence. For the first couple of years, there had been no certificate, just a gentle letter of criticism yet also of encouragement. One year, the Guild had said the inspector had reported there was a stain on the tablecloth and Mrs Peters had reprimanded Rosa who should have changed the cloth. Another year, it had been stones in the cherry jam.

  ‘That was bad luck,’ Nelly had said to her friend, Mrs Jenner, shortly after the letter had been received. ‘Whoever the inspector was must have had the only cherry stone in the place. We are always careful to buy jams without stones. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

  Nelly had half considered giving up the membership of the Guild but she changed her mind when Mrs Jenner told her about a Guild certificate she had seen, framed, in a tea-shop she’d visited in Chichester.

  ‘It’s ever so nice,’ Mrs Jenner said, reporting back to Nelly. ‘It’s all in scrolly sort of writing, red and gold, and has the date big in the middle. You know, the year. Like those awards you see in B&B places.’

  Nelly knew what Mrs Jenner meant, not that she had any occasion to stay in that sort of establishment. She had heard from Albert, however, that The Two Pheasants had a certificate saying the inn provided good beer.

  Two summers ago, she had introduced more varieties of tea - leaf tea always, never a bag! - and was pleased that some of her regular customers appeared to enjoy choosing a different variety each time they came in. And at the end of that year, The Fuchsia Bush had been awarded a Certificate of Excellence, one of just thirty or so awards the Guild told Nelly they handed out each year. Nelly was thrilled to bits, and rewarded her hard-working staff with a few extra pounds in their Christmas pay packet. She bought a pretty photograph frame to put the handsome certificate into, and it now hung close to the till in the tea-room. She wasn’t sure how many of her customers noticed it, but it made her and the staff feel good.

  She hoped that this big envelope contained a Certificate of Excellence for the coming year. Once more, there hadn’t been a customer who had been definitely identified as a Guild inspector, although Gloria thought that one particular woman was a possibility.

  Telling Nelly about it at the end of the day, she said, ‘She were sitting at table 2 in the window, and writing in a little notebook, and kept looking round her. I had just taken a tray to table 1, and instead of coming back to the counter, I turned to her table very quick, hoping to catch sight of what she were writing.’

  ‘And did you?’ asked Nelly.

  ‘Yeah, but it were just a shopping list. I could see the name of the supermarket at the top.’

  ‘I’m told it’s likely to be more than one person when the inspector comes,’ said Nelly. ‘A couple isn’t so obvious.’

  When her tray of twenty steak and ale pies were all topped, and waiting to go into the oven in batches a little later, Nelly washed her hands and then turned to the small pile of cards that Poppy had left on the edge of the work table - with the bigger envelope on the top. She wiped her hands down her apron before picking it up.

  She slit the envelope with one of the kitchen knives and carefully extracted the contents. Yes, hooray! There was the Certificate of Excellence with next year’s date glittering in gold in the middle. There was also a letter, which Nelly now read:

  Dear Mrs Piggott,

  We are delighted to enclose the Certificate of Excellence for the forthcoming year, and would like to congratulate The Fuchsia Bush on another good performance. Our inspector commented especially on the wide range of teas that you provide, but also asked me to mention that he was totally bowled over by your coffee cake.

  I am also very pleased to tell you that the Guild has decided to award The Fuchsia Bush first place in the regional awards, in your case the Cotswolds area.

  Nelly gasped with delight, and sat down heavily on the kitchen chair. First place in the regional awards! Oh lordy-pips - this was totally unexpected. In fact, she wasn’t even sure she knew anything about regional awards. She read on. The Guild explained that the regional awards were made following a second inspection, incognito of course, to a select number of tea-shops that had most pleased the inspectors after the first round. Both the inspectors, the letter continued, had been fulsome in their praise for The Fuchsia Bush which would now receive the Guild’s Gold Award for the Cotswolds.

  The final paragraph said that the president of the Guild would come in person to present the award, and they hoped four o’clock on Thursday 18th would be convenient. The award, Nelly read, was sponsored by Cotswold Highlights - a local glossy magazine - which would arrange for the local media to be present.

  ‘Oh crikey!’ Nelly exclaimed. ‘What on earth shall I wear?’

  Nelly’s heart beat even faster, and she fanned herself with the letter. She would have to take some time off to go shopping. But now, she thought, pulling herself together, she must get on with the lunches.

  That afternoon, Ella Bembridge - spinster of this parish, and in her late sixties - had arranged to visit her friend Dotty Harmer. The sun that had occasionally struggled out during the morning had seemingly given up the effort, and was well hidden behind heavy clouds from which rain of the most depressing kind persistently fell. There were puddles lying on the green, and garden birds huddled miserably in the shelter of shrubs and bushes.

  Ella, who was swathed in a mackintosh that resembled something between a cyclist’s cape and a Scout tent, left her cottage and took the narrow alleyway that ran down the side of Albert Piggott’s cottage. This led to a path through the meadows lying between Thrush Green and Lulling Woods and it was here, in a thatched cottage, that Dotty lived with her ever-patient niece, Connie, and Connie’s husband, Kit.

  Dotty was one of the local institutions. She was now in her mid-eighties and, despite being stick-thin, she had remarkable resilience and was often to be found outside, tending her beloved ducks, chickens and goats, in all sorts of weather and rarely dressed adequately. Some years previously Connie had come to live with her ancient aunt and, not long afterwards, the inhabitants of Thrush Green had been delighted when Kit Armitage returned to the area and had wooed and won Connie. They were a pair of mature love-birds, it has to be said, but the marriage worked exceedingly well. It had meant that Dotty could continue to live in the cottage that had been her home for so many years, with her animals round her. They had extended the cottage to make room for the three of them, and despite Dotty’s protestations had installed central heating which was a great comfort to old bones.

  Dotty continued to concoct alarming potions from the herbs she grew in the garden, or gathered in the s
pring and summer from the hedgerows, and these she pressed upon anyone who called to see her. Her friends from Thrush Green and Lulling would think up any of a dozen reasons for not partaking of a glass of nettle beer or sweet cicely cordial that would undoubtedly lead to a go of what was known as ‘Dotty’s Collywobbles’, a complaint with which Dr Lovell was well acquainted.

  Connie had long stopped trying to persuade her aunt from making these concoctions. She knew it made her aunt happy and she reckoned that their friends were well aware of the risks they took if they accepted a glass of ‘a little something’ from Dotty. One of the blessings, if you could call it that, of Dotty’s old age was that she didn’t seem to miss the bottles and jars that Connie would quietly take from the pantry, disposing of the contents down the sink or onto the compost heap.

  Ella was stomping along at a fair pace, her mind turning over which excuse she had given Dotty on her last visit, and which excuse she might use this time. She had only recently had a lunchtime snack so perhaps she could—

  And at that moment, Ella went flying. She was a substantially built woman and there was no way she could save herself. She landed in a heap in a particularly muddy part of the path.

  For a moment she lay there, breathing heavily and uttering little curses under her breath. When she struggled to her knees, she decided nothing had been damaged other than her pride. With some difficulty she heaved herself to her feet. Her voluminous mackintosh was covered in mud, and was not improved when Ella found a cleanish bit round the back on which she wiped her hands. She peered down at her skirt. ‘Drat!’ she muttered. There was a tear near the hem.

  Ella turned round to see why she had fallen. There was a small but stout branch lying across the path, obviously brought down in the wind earlier that week. But why hadn’t she seen it? she thought. She would normally sidestep such a hazard automatically.

  Since she was so close to Dotty’s cottage, Ella decided to continue on her way. The old girl would be disappointed if she didn’t turn up as promised. As she plodded on, she thought back to what the eye specialist had told her some eighteen months earlier, information that she had pushed to the back of her mind and refused to think about. She had blamed her fall on the muddy and slippery path, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that she hadn’t seen the small branch.

  A few minutes later, it was a very bedraggled Ella who presented herself at the cottage.

  ‘Hello, Dotty!’ she called, letting herself into the kitchen.

  ‘Through here, Ella. Come along in,’ sang out Dotty from her sitting-room.

  Dotty, sitting on the sofa with a favourite tartan rug over her legs, was looking expectantly at the door to greet her old friend. When Ella’s muddied bulk loomed in the doorway, she squawked in dismay.

  ‘Good gracious, Ella! What on earth has happened to you? You look as if you’ve been competing in an obstacle race - through hedges, over ditches, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I had a close encounter with the path coming down here. A branch I swear wasn’t there one moment suddenly tangled itself round my legs and I went a purler.’

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ ordered Dotty. ‘Connie will be back in a moment, and she can make us both a nice cup of tea. That is unless you would like a little of my crab apple brandy?’

  Ella shook her head firmly. ‘No, thank you, Dotty. Tea will do nicely but first I must wash off some of this dirt, so I’ll put the kettle on at the same time.’

  She disappeared back into the kitchen and from the huffing and puffing noise Dotty surmised correctly that Ella was taking off her mackintosh. There followed a few bangs and crashes, then the tap was turned on and the kettle filled.

  Ella came back into the sitting-room, pushing her now-clean hands through her short-cropped and wet hair. She had large hands for someone who was a most accomplished needlewoman.

  ‘What I need now most of all is a ciggy. Do you mind, Dotty?’

  ‘No, of course not - except I thought you were trying to give up.’

  ‘And so I am but I’m not succeeding very well,’ replied Ella, extracting from a pocket a battered old tin which contained her cigarette-making equipment.

  There was silence in the room for a moment, then from among a billow of blue smoke came a great contented sigh and ‘That’s much better!’

  At that moment, they heard the sound of Connie and Kit’s car returning, and soon Connie was clucking round Ella to make sure she was all right.

  ‘I expect I’ll have a bruise or two in the morning, but nothing to worry about,’ said Ella robustly, accepting a mug of sweet tea. ‘It worries me that I didn’t see the wretched branch.’ She took a sip of tea then continued: ‘I’ve got an appointment with the eye man next week so will find out more then. I know I’m not seeing as well as I did because it takes ages to thread a needle, even with my specs on.’

  A little later, kind Kit drove Ella home and as she heaved herself out of the car, clutching her dirty mackintosh to her ample frontage, he called after her. ‘I hope the appointment with the optician sorts things out, Ella.’

  He wasn’t sure she’d heard him since she shut the car door with a bang and stomped up the path to her front door without a backward glance.

  Edward and Joan Young had decided to go to The Bear in Woodstock for dinner that evening. Their son Paul was due home from boarding school any day now, and this was an opportunity to give Joan a treat before she had to cook endless meals to satisfy the fast-growing boy, let alone the festive food for Christmas itself.

  Edward had just got to the stage when he found he was able to drive past the Burwells’ house in the Woodstock Road without turning his head to see what latest ghastliness had been perpetrated, but from the corner of his eye this evening he saw something that made him apoplectic. He pressed the brake so hard that Joan’s seat belt locked automatically.

  ‘What on earth—’ she spluttered. ‘Edward! What’s the matter? Are you ill?’

  ‘I am most definitely ill,’ stormed Edward, and got out of the car, slamming the door behind him so hard that the car rocked.

  Joan released the seat belt and swivelled round to see what had made her husband so angry. Edward was standing on the pavement, looking across at the Burwells’ house. By the glow of a nearby street light, she saw immediately what the problem was. The perfectly ordinary wooden gate that used to stand permanently open had gone, together with its metal gateposts. In their place were two large new stone pillars and on the top of each - even Joan shuddered - there was a lion and a unicorn, turned slightly inwards. It was one thing to have such resplendent statues on the gateposts of a stately home, but not a house built between the last two wars!

  But her eye was drawn not so much to the statues but to something much worse and, knowing her husband as she did, she knew it would further enrage him. At the foot of each pillar was a light which shone up the stonework, and seemed to end under the chins of the two stone statues. ‘Floodlighting’s for places of beauty, and nowhere else!’ Edward had said to her not long ago when they had passed a Victorian pile that had been converted into a hotel, and had been garishly illuminated.

  Edward returned to the car, again slamming the door shut. ‘I simply can’t believe it. How could anyone be so vulgar! And do you know what else they’ve done?’ He turned almost accusingly towards Joan.

  ‘No, dear, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Did you see those shield things set in front of each of the statues?’

  Joan hadn’t and it was too late now since Edward restarted the car, letting the clutch out so quickly that the car kangaroo-jumped forward and stalled. She shook her head.

  ‘They’ve gone and put the name of the house on the shields. And do you know what they’ve called the place?’

  ‘No. I didn’t think it had a specific name. I thought the houses along here were just numbers.’

  ‘Hah!’ snorted Edward, re-starting the car. ‘Mr and Mrs Hoity-Toity Burwell have gone and called it Blenhei
m Lodge. Blenheim Lodge! Can you beat it! I can’t think why they didn’t call it Blenheim Palace while they were at it.’

  It wasn’t surprising that dinner that evening at The Bear was not a very happy one. Once Edward’s architectural taste had been slighted, he was a difficult man to calm down. As they drove home, past Blenheim Lodge, Joan was horrified to see that both her husband’s eyes were tightly shut.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  New Clothes and Old

  The Fuchsia Bush was increasingly busy as Christmas approached and Nelly Piggott was dog-tired when she got home each evening, but even so her thoughts often turned to the forthcoming award ceremony.

  Clothes also were very much on her mind but there was nothing she could do about it until her day off the following Sunday. As soon as Albert had left the house to go and open up the church for the ten o’clock service, Nelly lumbered up the cottage’s steep stairs to her bedroom and went through her entire wardrobe to see what she could wear for the ceremony.

  She tried on several dresses and, to her shame, had to set two aside to take down to the charity shop in Lulling. ‘Must’ve shrunk,’ she muttered to herself, knowing perfectly well that wasn’t true. One dress was possible but, having a rather low neckline, it was more suitable for the evening. She had bought it when Charlie the oilman had taken her to a dinner dance when they lived in Brighton, and that had been the only time she’d worn it.

  There was nothing for it, she decided, surveying the pile of discarded dresses on the bed, she’d have to buy a new one. And why not? She rarely spent any money on herself, and had Mrs Peters been alive, she’d have insisted.

  Next she checked on her pair of good black shoes. They were several years old, but were still in decent shape. She rubbed her sleeve across the toe, and planned to ask Albert to give them a polish. It was one of the few things her husband did without complaining.