Winter Luxury Pie
Row One - Baby Blue Hubbard to Hong Kong Long Dong
For the best part of two hundred years the women in my family have run farms. We’re a late, great, matriarchal agricultural dynasty. Grandma was the last of the doyennes, what with my father not really cutting it in the gender stakes, and myself not having much of a realm to preside over. But the fun stops here, I’m the last – not because I’ll never have children, simply because after this there will be nothing more to bequeath. I was raised principally as a farmer, but allowed out on odd days to go to school. My parents, traditional and untraditional in equal measure, made it clear that a woman’s place was running the family business, for which I didn’t need too many brains. Just enough, perhaps. And so I was spared the indignities of home-schooling inflicted with great and sedulous care on my two brothers. Da and Ma both had a fixation with education, which ran against a somewhat inauspicious legacy. Family tradition, after all, has it that F A R M spells ‘work’. Jer, the youngest of us, could speak Greek and Latin by the age of five, and solve quadratic equations in about the time it took him to blink. He’d answer in Urdu, and not particularly to show off, simply because that was what he usually counted in. He still has a phenomenal memory, particularly for statistics. He’s like a walking Harper’s Index when he gets going. Aged eight he came third in the National Spelling Bee, devastating my Da who assumed he’d walk it – and he in fact might have, his failure at the final hurdle being primarily the fault of the announcer, who struggled with aphaeresis, unintentionally pronouncing the word as though it were in the plural – Jer misunderstood, and rushed in with an entirely correct spelling of aphaereses. He was inconsolable when it was called wrong. Being the only person present who realized the reason for his mistake, he protested in vain. He’s never really recovered from these years, even though he left home and didn’t return to the farm until my parents had gone. He hardly ever washes, and has worn the