A Handful of Broken Biscuits

Intercutting the prose of my last book are excerpts from the book my father wrote when he was dying. My mother helped with the editing; his devoted former school secretary typed up the entire text. I am continuing with this work now and hope to have it published by the autumn of this year, with beautiful woodcut illustrations by a local artist. Watch this space.

Now, the title of the book refers to early memories of my father, growing up first in Burrington Combe and then in Langford in Somerset, on the edge og the Mendip hills. His mother, so careful about housekeeping, would always order broken biscuits from the grocer. My father felt it was a way of life that was vanishing in this place. Of course, those excerpts I included in my own text were about food memories: they play an important part in the book, whether it be a description of a sweet shop, my paternal grandmother's exemplary food stores, or, as here, Christmas and the whortleberry harvest. Read on over the next few posts for these extracts. Should you read my next book, you will find that Christmas and harvest are, seasonably, in the right months of the text!

A Handful of Broken Biscuits

Chapter 13: Christmases gone.

The smell of hot cloth and spice,a seven year old face i, or a few well-sung bars of any of those old traditional carols have a strange and moving power. Again, Beth is boiling her cloth-capped basins of pudding in the scullery copper. Again, Ed is plucking the big savage , spurred cockerel that will be Christmas dinner. Again, Miss Constance, Elsie and Sally are standing by the tree, lapped in the lemon glow of the fairy lights. Back come visions of the once a year exotica, the dates and the coconut ice, the Brazil nuts and the figs, and for the adults the bottle of sherry which will last from Christmas to Christmas.