Ah, those little oranges. They go two ways, such is their tricksy nature. Those you piddle away the peel to reveal a shrunken, dry, mummy-like cadaverous inside, all desiccated, old shoe leather and disappointment. Or there’s the more resistant ones, the ones where you piddle and piddle to get through to a promising glimmer of juicy flesh and then, ARGH, it defends itself with a laser beam of juice right through your eye. You end the process, one-eyed, speckled with orange blobs, juice sprayed up the wall and across the floor like you're in the middle of a fruit-murder scene, clutching the remains of a orange that looks like someone has driven a truck over it. And then reversed back over it.
I've always been a bit scared of fruit. Growing up in the East Midlands, there wasn’t a lot of it. Fruit was more of a myth than an actual thing. Perhaps in your gardens of England you were gorging on apples, pears, plums and berries. We had to make do with coal. My grandparents never ate vegetables or fruit with the exceptions of potatoes, peas, and rhubarb. Rhubarb had to be entombed in sugar, to a depth were you needed heavy machinery to unearth it, and then it was so sour your skull would shrink and pucker. Peas and potatoes were tossed liberally in bacon fat or beef dripping. Liberally, as in they were praying for rescue. Shell have spilled less oil. It wasn't a meal without lard, which was a bona fide food group when they were younger. You had to have five types of rendered animal product each day. There was a government chart somewhere.
Peas, unless I was lucky and my grandad had grown some, were the marrowfat variety. Those little green-grey musket balls that were unconvincing as vegetables. Even the name was denies they’re veg. My gran would soak them for about a week with some concoction of soda and then cook them for another week. At which point they were still vaguely bullet-like but had taken on the grey hue of the recently deceased. My gran would raise them like Lazarus with a few magic drops of luminous green food colouring. There’s nothing in nature that is or ever was that colour. A 1940s chemistry lab maybe. I suspect it had killed a lot of lab rats before my gran started testing it on children. To this day, I call it Agent Green.
Apples, though, they had apples. They never ate an apple. Apples were a decorative feature intended to sit in the bowl on the coffee table in the room that all grandparents in that time had but never used. A room stuck waiting for special occasions that never came. Those apples never went mouldy, they’d sit there and gradually and almost imperceptibly wrinkle and mummify. I can only assume the drifting fug of cigarette smoke had a preservative effect. Once as a child, I snuck in there, and as I admired the collection of royalty paraphernalia and coronation china, my eyes were tugged to the natural and refreshing green of those apples. I'd heard about people in other parts of the world eating fruit and had vague sense that apples might be edible. Tasty even. It was admittedly a strange concept but I was a curious child. So I reached out and touched one. Brought it my mouth and bit into it. And don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. Oh my god, it was like mush inside, a foul powdery, brown substance that I couldn't even spit out. I'd bitten into the Tutankhamen of apples. Good god, that apple might have dated back to the Garden of Eden.
I can't bite into an apple to this day, I have to cut a sliver off with a knife and then poke it few times just in case.
