Christmas At Thrush Green (6 page)

‘Now,’ concluded Harold, after the date for the next meeting had been set, ‘I think that’s all, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming out tonight. We are sure to see plenty of each other over the weeks leading up to Christmas.’

And after the customary final prayer, the members of the Thrush Green PCC dispersed into the night.

 

As Harold walked back across the green, soft moonlight was shining down on Nathaniel Patten’s now well-scrubbed head and face.

‘Good night, my friend,’ he said, putting a hand out to touch the plinth on which the statue stood, and then he hurried home to a nice warming pheasant casserole that had been promised for supper.

F
riday, two days later, provided joy and anguish in equal parts for several people in Thrush Green and Lulling. During the morning, the weather seemed to match the mood - it was like April: rain one moment and soft sunshine the next. The bare branches of the lime trees round St Andrew’s church had hardly stopped dripping when they were once more drenched.

Nelly Piggott knew it was going to be another busy day in The Fuchsia Bush, and had arrived especially early to make the cakes and scones that would be needed. The High Street was bursting at the seams with people who looked increasingly harassed the closer it got to Christmas. By mid-morning, the tea-room would be full of exhausted shoppers who had decided they couldn’t face another moment without a restorative cup of coffee and a piece of lemon drizzle cake or a warm scone and butter.

Then there would be the lunches. The Fuchsia Bush didn’t have a large menu. There was always the ‘soup of the day’, something wholesome at this time of year, served with home-baked crusty bread. Nelly had prepared some creamed fish today as one of the two main courses - it was funny how ‘fish on Fridays’ was still an accepted ritual - and there was also steak and ale pie, which was always a great favourite with the men.

Shoppers would come in for tea throughout the afternoon, their parcels and overflowing carrier bags littering the floor.

‘Do be careful of them bags when you’re carrying the trays across,’ Nelly would exhort Rosa and Poppy daily. ‘We can’t be doing with any accidents. Try to get the customers to put them under their chairs.’

Nelly was hard at work rolling out the puff pastry for the steak and ale pies when Poppy came into the kitchen with the morning post.

Poppy had worked here for nearly a year now. She was a pretty girl with long fair hair pulled back in a loose pony tail. When she had left school, she had tossed her head at her sister Rosa’s suggestion that she should join her working at The Fuchsia Bush. She had her sights set on the music industry and thought that working in a shop that sold guitars and recorders, drum kits and music in all shapes and sizes, would be a good stepping-stone. But a few months working in a rather dingy shop at the far end of the High Street had decided her that perhaps, after all, the music business was not for her.

A brief spell as an assistant in a chemist’s shop had followed, but Poppy didn’t like the ogling eyes of the pharmacist, and had left before he got any funny ideas. Her next job was in one of the High Street shoe shops, but she complained about having to handle customers’ often smelly and grubby feet, and didn’t last more than a few months there.

Rosa was beginning to despair that her little sister would ever settle down, so when a vacancy occurred at The Fuchsia Bush, she again suggested Poppy should go along for an interview. Rosa herself was enjoying being in charge of the tea-room (after Mrs Piggott, of course) now that Gloria was next door running the sandwich shop, and had smartened herself up. When Poppy arrived for her appointment with Nelly after the tea-room had closed for the day, Rosa checked her over to ensure that she was clean and tidy.

‘Go on, then,’ she said, dusting down the shoulders of Poppy’s coat, ‘and mind you’re polite.’

Poppy did as she was told, and said ‘Yes, ma’am’ or ‘No, ma’am’ to every question Nelly put to her. When asked whether she could add up quickly and accurately, Poppy replied, ‘Oh yes, ma’am. I came top of my class for arithmetic at school.’

That settled it as far as Nelly was concerned. Anyone who was good at sums earned her admiration. She agreed to take Poppy on a month’s trial and now, a year later, was satisfied in every way. The two sisters made a good team and were careful to keep their chatter for either before customers arrived or when they were in the kitchen.

‘Morning post for you, Mrs Piggott,’ Poppy sang out, brandishing a wodge of envelopes.

Nelly looked up from where she was working. ‘Could you sort through them for me? My hands are covered with flour. Anything that is obviously a bill can go straight through to the office for Mrs Border, along with anything that has a trade address on the front.’

Poppy hummed as she sorted the post into two piles. ‘It looks as though you’ve got quite a few Christmas cards, Mrs Piggott. From satisfied customers, I expect. Gosh, that smells great,’ she said as Nelly pulled a tray of individual steak and kidney pie dishes towards her, the meat steaming gently from inside.

‘We’ll add the cards to the others out front later,’ Nelly said. ‘It’s good to show off what folk think about us.’

Poppy held up the last of the envelopes, which was slightly larger than the rest. ‘I’m not sure which pile to put this into. I don’t think it’s a Christmas card because the envelope’s been typed.’ She turned it over. At the bottom of the gummed flap was a symbol printed in gold. She ran her thumb over it.

‘Look,’ she said, holding the back of the envelope out towards Nelly, ‘that’s embossed, that is. Very posh!’

Nelly leaned back a bit and squinted at the envelope that Poppy had thrust in front of her. A symbol of a teapot! She knew what that meant.

‘Aha!’ she exclaimed, pushing away the envelope with a forearm. ‘I know who that’s from. That’ll be from the Guild of Tea Shops. Put it on my pile. Then take the rest through to Mrs Border.’

‘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:

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.