Mulberries, orange roofs, spitting at a target, and clafoutis
Abundance: Thursday 5 June 2025
We aren’t very alike, Pat and I. She a little bit posh, me a little bit rough; she classically cultured, me very differently so. Pat is the archetypal swan: eternally busy, yet moving as if on a conveyor belt in a cloud of calm. She has a gentle grace and elegance; a warm, wise gentleness. She seems to have more time than the rest of us: enough to finish her breakfast like a human while we all scrabble to get ready, enough to speak slowly and thoughtfully while the rest of us verbally jostle, enough to glide through every day no matter how overcommitted it may be. It is impossible not to love Pat.
We were first thrown together working on the Suffolk Landscape Assessment: the team I was part of examined geology, soils, field size and shape, woodland form, topography and more, to arrive at - if memory serves - 400+ units of distinct landscape, each of which would need a pair to walk through them to examine the accuracy of the desk study, the condition of the landscape elements, the nature of the build environment, visual character and more. Our small team wasn’t enough; we hooked up with Pat’s consultancy, and often she and I found ourselves a pair. Suffolk was where she called home, and there was a quiet pride about the places she loved. Orford and its winding, misty waters; the heaths, arrested woodland as they maybe, rich in wildlife where they hadn’t been replanted with conifers.
Halfway through a particularly chilly August day surveying, Pat took a call from her partner Rob - mobile phones were still a novelty, inspiring a shiver of self consciousness: there was to be roast chicken.
By the time we finished for the day, all I could think about was the chicken. I think Pat was talking but I couldn’t hear. With 17 years vegetarian eating drawn to a recent close, I had an occasionally feudal fever at the prospect of salty-savoury in the shape of a roast chicken.
We arrived at their house at the moment the oven threw its drawbridge down, a dragon’s breath of steam rolling anticlockwise on itself to the ceiling. At last. Rob, a man incapable of disguising his warm humanity behind a facade of gruff stuff-and-nonsense the-old-ways-were-better, jazz, blues and brandy - lay it on the stove top: ‘It’ll be ready in 20, once its rested’. TWENTY! I have rarely wanted to disable a man more.
Mid August, the chilly wind blown out, made for a calm, almost balmy evening in their garden. A glass of mulberry vodka sat on the table, but first: mulberries from the tree. I’d never eaten a mulberry - how many of us has - and I was still thinking about the crisp chicken skin when Pat instructed me to try one: surely, I thought, they’d be in the shops if they were any good.
‘Not that one; it has to be so purple it’s black.’
I let it dissolve on my tongue, for a third of a second regretting that it wasn’t over-peppered, heavily salted chicken skin before that juice ran thick and sweet from the fruit. A mulberry is impossible to accurately navigate from other flavours - blackcurrant, wine, sherbet, rose, blackberry are all there, and more - but that’s utterly inadequate. That mulberry tasted like coming home.
I ate more, one at a time, each feeling like a retelling of a favourite joke; undiminished by the repetition. Something changed in me, genuinely. As with listening to Spirit of Eden1 for the first time, I knew this was a piece of the jigsaw of elemental moments on which we hang our years on this mad planet. I couldn’t imagine more of my life lived without mulberries.
Too delicate to make anything but the short distance from branch to mouth - to the kitchen at best - you’ll never find mulberries in the shops. I had two choices: go to Suffolk every mid August (still drunk on the fruit and its vodka, this was, for a short time, the favourite option), or I’d have to find enough room to grow some myself.
Later that week, was the first and likely only time I remember Pat being slightly ruffled. Stretched beyond the bounds of reasonableness at work, she was visibly fraying just enough for me to know there was serious turmoil beneath the surface: I covered for her when she literally had to be in two places at once - and I think the final thread of a decision she and Rob had to make snapped that day. They moved to France - looking for a place ‘where the roofs turn orange, and the woods are alive with walnuts and chestnuts’. She got her wish.
Soon after, on the way back from being married, my wife and I stopped to look at a place the estate agent described as ‘interesting’ - an end of terrace former cider barn with 17 acres of land. A few months later, we moved in and Otter Farm was born.
A few months later, so was our daughter.
While the orchards and vineyards and forest gardens we planted grew along with our daughter, Pat came to visit: my work was still landscape assessment and - thankfully - having completed Suffolk and Norfolk, I had won the contracts for Devon and Cornwall. Over a few years, Pat was a regular visitor, giving our daughter one of her most treasured soft creatures, that we still have all these years later. I was writing by now, and starting to find an audience as the place developed. In time, she ate our mulberries; a moment not lost on either of us.
We crossed the channel in the opposite direction. A visit in late spring meant Gariguette strawberries and white asparagus in the markets; it meant Rob tearing through the woods in his gator, terrifying all but our young daughter whose sense of fun knew no danger. A second visit a couple of years later, right at this time of year, and the old tree up the track was weighed with cherries. A post lunch stretch of the legs, and I tried one: it was as good as childhood cherryade, which is saying something. Succulent as a peach, warm as those red roof tiles, and with a long deep, intensely cherry flavour with just a hint of rose. I made a quiet deal with myself, that I could keep eating cherries until I hit that stone across the track with a cherry stone launched from my mouth. I aimed properly every time - what’s the point in shaking hands with fate if you don’t stick to it - and it was 10 minutes, my lips pink with juice, my tongue tired from arching to make the finally accurate U, before a cherry stone bounced off the rock across the track.
We all came back to the tree later that evening, my daughter eating cherries like it was the first time she’d ever eaten one, and in any ways it was. I remember she was quiet, for once too intent on eating cherries to make a noise, a smile never leaving her face. For the rest of that trip, there was rarely a time that a small part of my mind wasn’t on that tree and its luscious fruit: an edible earworm, a tone - like a dog whistle - audible only to me.
Pat and Rob had - in a few short years - made a home exactly of the kind they dreamt of; Pat busy with creating a garden2, Rob busy with the manly business of axes, gators and tools. They both seemed like a blanket of tedious commitment had been lifted from them; at ease, elevated and content. And of course, they’d planted a mulberry.
We ate, we drank, we swam, we built days around the markets and the kitchen, and we placed an invisible pin in the map of our daughter’s growing up that located something truly significant. As we left, we took a picture of Pat and Rob on the steps of their home; they looked as content as it is possible to be.
In the years since, it was perfectly usual to hear from Pat once in a while - an email arrived, and was replied to, and its reply not necessarily forthcoming. It didn’t matter. Pat could do small talk and distant contact, but she much preferred big talk and in person. An email before Christmas - bright and very Pat - was replied to; we had distant thoughts of a revisit before the year is out, the latest in an annual line of ‘we-really-must, it’s-been-too-long’ exchanges that were meant, yet everyday life ran away from.
A few years ago, I told Pat that the mulberry she forced on a reluctant chicken-hungry me not only turned my mind to the need to grow them, but cemented our desire for a smallholding adventure, which in turn led to me writing which in turn led to me leaving that landscape assessment work behind, and in a very straight line to being here right now, writing here.
This weekend, just past midnight, late and wired-tired in the middle of a writing retreat weekend, I checked my emails to find one from Pat. Only it wasn’t written by Pat: it was from her children.
She had been ill, the end was peaceful, surrounded by loved ones and flowers from her garden. I guess that’s as good as it gets for any of us.
Pat has been almost constantly in my mind since I heard, coming and going in intensity. She didn’t seem the sort who could die, she seemed too good to be taken, and peculiarly, while it was almost enough to know that she and her warmth and kindness existed without actually seeing her, I miss her presence on this spinning rock as much as if I’d seen her only the other day.
Cherry clafoutis
When we got to Pat and Rob’s that first time, there was a daub, a blanquette and many creamy potatoes awaiting, and a clafoutis appeared if not on the first night, then the second. Today, with the early cherries, I made a clafoutis with Pat in my mind. We ate it in the mid-afternoon, with the weather unable to make up its mind whether to shine or pour.
An oven raging hotter than an Aquitane summer, brisk brief whisking and not too much flour are the crucial to a fine clafoutis. Sour cream cooks better than creme fraiche, but creme fraiche is more Pat, so creme fraiche I used: it didn’t whisk in properly but it didn’t matter.
Serves 6
35g plain flour
40g almond flour
pinch of salt
½ tsp vanilla extract
230ml whole milk
120ml sour cream
2 large eggs
40g caster sugar
350g cherries, stones removed
20g unsalted butter cut into small cubes
Heat the oven to 230°C/gas 8.
Butter a round baking dish of around 25cm diameter3 - or 28 x 20cm if rectangular.
Sieve the flours and salt into a large bowl and stir in the vanilla extract and half the milk. Whisk into a smooth batter. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking as you go; whisk in the caster sugar, the rest of the milk and the sour cream until just smooth.
Spread the cherries in the baking dish, pour in the batter and dot the cubes of butter across the top. Place the dish into the oven and cook for 20-25 minutes until it is plump, golden and with a little wibble still. Remove from the oven and, after allowing it to cool a little, serve warm with double cream.
The photos here are from her garden in spring
I used my much-loved Netherton prospector pan
So sorry to hear about Pat’s passing. I felt as though I knew her from the beautiful way you had portrayed her through your writing.
Moved to tears by this. I'm so sorry, but what lovely memories. This is our legacy, I think; if one person feels like this when I am gone, that will have been a life well-lived.