Читать книгу Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger - Nigel Slater - Страница 29

I played in the garden mostly, away from the road and the big boys with their plastic footballs that stung my legs. ‘I’d rather you played where I can see you,’ warned Mother, so that suited me fine. Long borders ran either side of the lawn, white rhododendrons, pink- and saffron-coloured azaleas, purple Michaelmas daisies and, in deepest summer, dahlias, spiky ones as big as a dinner plate, maroon and white and gaudy yellow. In one corner was an apple tree, not ours, but most of it overhung our garden, so that come late August its fruit fell into the mauve and white phloxes below.

If I stood on tiptoe I could just reach the apples hanging on the lower twigs, flat-topped apples, pale green and rose like Turkish delight, with snow-white flesh that had ripples of pink running through it. They tasted of strawberries but smelled of the scented phlox that grew underneath them. I could reach these apples, unlike the fruit of the three trees in our garden whose branches were, even on tiptoes, just out of reach. I could get to the glue bands my father put round their trunks though, and used to peel off the flies and wasps they trapped, pulling them by their wings until their bodies came apart.

Uncle Reg used to come round once a week, on a Thursday evening, bringing with him a white paper bag of Cadbury’s Flakes, Aztecs, Milky Ways, tubes of Rolo, Munchies, Mintolas and Refreshers and thin black-and-white bars of Caramac. A tall handsome man with sunken cheeks, a slightly hooked nose and shaking hands, the whites of his eyes shot with red veins. He wore a long, grey mackintosh and smelled of something that was both sour and sweet.

Over the summer Uncle Reg came less and less often, his bags of sweets getting bigger with each visit. Sometimes he would bring flowers for my mother. Then one day he stopped coming altogether. I heard my mother on the phone telling someone that he had died. I never saw the lovely Uncle Reg or his sweets again.

There was no limit to how many of next door’s apples I was allowed to eat. So I just kept eating them throughout the summer. The largest always fell first, right down through the pink-eyed flowers on their tall stems. At first, I would stretch down into the flowers to pick up the apples until one day I got stung by a wasp hiding in the half-eaten side underneath. Another time there was a maggot jerking its way through the flesh, which I might have missed and eaten if it hadn’t been for its tiny dot of a black head. From then on I went in foot first, turning each fruit over with my toe, inspecting for anything that might sting or wriggle.