For pancake day - an old short story.

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The Lemon Tree

Aunty Dor­is had a lem­on tree.
She didn’t live in Limone on Lake Garda, where the lem­ons grow in abund­ance in the rich fer­tile soil. Nor did she live in Sorento where the Ponderosa’s grow to the size of a small bowl­ing ball. None of those places where the sun shines in per­fectly blue cloud­less skies for most of the year and the old people are wrinkled from years of work­ing out­side under intense sunlight.
She lived in Shaw, a small densely pop­u­lated mill town in the val­ley of the River Beal, at the foot of the Pen­nines. Fam­ous for its forty eight dark satan­ic cot­ton mills — large rect­an­gu­lar brick built build­ings that once dom­in­ated the pan­or­ama, mak­ing the area the power­house of tex­tile man­u­fac­ture dur­ing the indus­tri­al revolu­tion. A town where the cold damp air caresses you, wel­comes you, makes you feel like you belong, before its dark angry clouds dump their rain on you before they rise over the Pen­nines. A place of poor sterile soils and rugged ter­rain. A place described by Samuel Lewis as hav­ing pro­duced ‘a race of hardy and labor­i­ous men’.
She lived in a Edwar­d­i­an mid-ter­race oppos­ite the Ideal Bakery. A two-up-two-down house that stood proud flush on the pave­ment, branded with years of smoke that bel­lowed from impos­ing fact­ory chim­neys and rows and rows of chim­ney stacks ser­vi­cing cosy but func­tion­al coal fires.
The house had a back garden, noth­ing more than a small yard that sep­ar­ated it from the cobbled alleys the inter­wove between the sur­roun­ded houses. Large slabs of stone — not the per­fectly formed con­crete pav­ing stones of mod­ern, but rough, nobbled, and dis­col­oured slabs that might have been pulled from the loc­al quar­ries — made a path between the neigh­bours yard wall and the small per­fectly preened patch of grass, toward the back of the yard.
There at the back, nestled between a low wooden fence and the out­side privy-cum-coal shed, stand­ing slightly lower than the out­build­ing, and sur­roun­ded by mis­placed hom­ing pigeons, stood the tree. It didn’t grow those gnarly, fra­grant, and fresh lem­ons that you find in the mar­ket stalls of Por­to­bello Road, nor the per­fectly dull and sym­met­ric­al more com­mon to brit­ish supermarkets.
The tree wasn’t covered in long dark green ellipt­ic­al leaves, finely toothed. It didn’t have small per­fect red buds or white purplish flowers with yel­low anthers. It wasn’t a tall majest­ic well nursed tree with light yel­low fruit shown beau­ti­fully against blue skies. It was non­des­cript, fit­ting of its place — in the corner of yard in a small cold Lan­cashire town. It was old, woody, and ever so slightly out of con­trol. But on it, at the end of every branch, sat the most eleg­ant lem­ons; per­fectly formed by years of love and care. Ten­ded for in a way that only a little old lady could.
Every shrove Tues­day when I was still so small that I could barely reach the fruit on the low hanging branches, we would cross the yard, pro­pelled by excite­ment and expect­a­tions, to har­vest a pre­cious lem­on to squeeze on our pan­cakes. I would lift my hand up and caress one of the many per­fectly identic­al plastic fruits hanging from every branch by the thin­nest of cot­ton. No mat­ter which one I took it was always full of the most won­der­ful juice, the taste of which would always remind me of this spe­cial place, this spe­cial moment. We would take off the lid and check, just to make sure, before return­ing to the house to con­tin­ue with our feast.
Aunty Doris’s Jif Lem­on Tree — a work of won­der and beauty.

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