My mother’s best advice: the secret to good pastry is cold wrists

I often picture my mother that wild, hot summer we moved to the house of my childhood. She is 5ft 3in in the long grass, wearing a vest and a pair of small cut-off shorts, digging borders and battling the sticky bobs, telling me about the patch of tiger lilies and the cooking-apple tree; about the light speckling through the unkempt branches.

“Glory be to God for dappled things,” she says. She has always been a rare combination of poetry and practicality — given to quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins while simultaneously hacking down nettles, or tiling walls while listening to John Betjeman records. She could transform the ordinary: a bedroom skirting board decorated with a mouse and a mouse hole, packed lunches with sandwiches cut at unexpected angles, and the most mundane shopping trip becoming a detour to admire the bottles of Winsor & Newton inks.

The house we moved into that summer was derelict.

mother, pastry, cold wrists, gerard hopkins, john betjeman, tiger lilies, apple tree, winsor newton, derelict house, childhood