The Bottom Shelf 4

Simone Sekers

We have been rearranging our books, slotting them neatly into a newly built bookcase. Naturally, much time has been spent looking at them, realising half a wet afternoon has passed in the contemplation of only a few volumes.

Take this one.

It is dark red cloth, a slim volume, the spine faded but the gilt lettering still legible - Kitchen Fugue, by Sheila Kaye-Smith. Wherever did I get this? It was published in 1945 and the paper is that sort of wholemeal wartime stuff, soft and yellowish and revealing its recycled bits. Nonetheless it is properly sewn and glued and puts most modern books to shame. No price in it, no bookseller's label. A mystery. So why did I get it? Sheila Kaye-Smith is a favourite writer; a sort of Mary Webb but of the Sussex Weald and not the Shropshire hills. Her female characters are not as whispy, either, but she has that talent to sum up her chosen countryside with such strength that when you look up from your reading you are lost. She's been compared to Hardy, to Winifred Holtby, but she stands firmly on her own. Kitchen Fugue is a wartime memoir of learning to cook with Hitler beating at our shores, when a pet rabbit could be translated into any one of a dozen recipes, a grey squirrel's hindlegs made 'a nice little meal for two people' when cooked with oatmeal and onions, and as for the demise of Mrs Waddleby . . .

Roast duck was the only way to do her justice. I get up off my knees and go downstairs to prepare supper, thinking of the luck we have not to be fearing invasion and not to have to kill the animals we love. We are eating roast hogget from an unnamed lamb tonight; I watched the ram tupping the ewes in the field below our house, and I watched the lamb bouncing in the long grass later in the spring. Months later the meat was delivered to the back door by our friend Sue. I know everything about the what we are about to eat, except its name. I give it the best memorial I know, with rosemary and garlic and a good glass of claret.