Summer Fruit

In the summer when the farm was bursting with cherries, strawberries, raspberries, black currants, red currants and plums my father used to bring boxes of fruit into the kitchen, so my mother was obliged to do something with it. She made huge saucepans of jam, using the same jam jars over and over again. This was not jam that you would recognise, nice, thick, spreadable jam, but rather thin, runny, over sweet jam that soaked into the bread, as long as you hadn’t spread too much margarine or butter on it, in which case it slid off onto the plate.  

“I make the jam runny” she said “to stop your father eating half a pot full on one slice of bread.”