100 Years of Apples: For Day's Cottage and Rosie's Kiss

100 Years of Apples: For Day's Cottage and Rosie's Kiss

I was re-reading Pat Barker's 'The Ghost Road',

But thinking about the apple tree trunks

In our old back garden, how thin they must have been,

When cold-wind planted almost a hundred years ago,

After grand-dad came back from the trenches,

With gran, auntie Kath and my dear old dad,

Scrumping for fruit up in Sapperton,

When a small boy knew nothing of how apple-alchemy

Could slake an autumn-orchard thirst

('Or by a cider-press with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours'),

Or conjure the world of Thomas Hardy and Laurie Lee:

See Bathsheba, Tess, Gabriel Oak, Sergeant Troy,

Granny Wallon, Granny Trill, Cabbage Stalk Charlie and Miss Flynn,

Gathering outside the Woolpack as the sun slips down,

Toasting Day's Cottage with a glass of 'Rosie's Kiss',

A century of apples in a bottled literary narrative:

Mellifluous, eponymous Cotswold cider.