Blackberry Picking

'Stains upon the Tongue'

It’s been a bumper year for blackberries in the UK. On Hampstead Heath, near where we live, we’ve actually been picking the berries for over a month now, the record heat over the summer having ripened the fruit so early that scientists are concerned there won’t be enough food for the birds in the autumn. Animals, sadly, don’t have freezers so they can’t preserve the surplus crop out there now.

Brambles grow wild all over the Heath. The bushes nearest the park’s entrances and beside its main paved thoroughfares are plucked bare within hours of ripening, but those who venture off the beaten track can find wondrously rich pickings. Scratched by thorns and stung by nettles, we have braved the biting insects in the late afternoon and the comment by some officious walker passing by that there should be ‘no industrial picking on Hampstead Heath’ to come back with hard-earned boxes of the luscious, caviar-like jewels and with mouths and fingers stained like ravenous hyenas. Sorbets, crumbles, breakfast cereal toppings – we’ve eaten blackberries every which way and given them as gifts, the products of our labour.

When I was a child, blackberry picking was a late summer ritual, just before we returned for the new school year. We would head out to the North Downs in Surrey, the chalky ridge south of London, and scramble up the rolling hills dotted with bramble bushes and scampered over by rabbits. A family picnic on our tartan rug, maybe a quick fly of the kite if there was enough of a breeze, and then the serious business of picking, everyone pitching in according to our differing abilities: my mother with huge gushes of enthusiasm, my father always doggedly determined and the kids sometimes distracted by the need to play pirates or spies and probably eating as many berries as we collected. The day always ended with a visit to my father’s friend who had a pool in his garden in Guildford. We would dive in excitedly, washing off the sticky stains and scratches of our work.

Our other main blackberry picking location was in Berkshire, around the village where my aunt and cousins lived. This time, picking was not a family group activity, but, rather, the chance to go alone on an adventure with my slightly older cousin. She and I collected vast quantities of the black treasure from the hedgerows, twice as much as we declared to our parents on our return. Half the berries, then, were officially stored in the fridge; the other half we hid behind the sofa. At midnight, we got up in the dark and crawled into the narrow space between the sofa and the sitting-room wall to sit huddled over the bowl of berries between us, gobbling the unseen fruit in the darkness with whispered giggles. In the morning, we pulled out the bowl to discover that what was left was covered, in Seamus Heaney’s words, with a ‘rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache’. Had our midnight feast in the dark been full of mould?

Driving through parts of England at the moment, one is surprised by the sudden appearance of national flags everywhere. Like the bumper crop of blackberries, there’s a bumper eruption of the red-and-white St George’s crosses, fluttering from lampposts and hanging over highways from road bridges. If it were a royal jubilee or a world cup football tournament when the country was rallying behind the national team, then these flags would seem upbeat and joyful, a riot of colour to provoke a riot of good cheer. But instead, since they follow the hate-filled protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers and the call from the far-right leader Nigel Farage to deport all refugees, they are chilling. Echoing the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s, flag after flag have a cumulative, depressing effect, corrupting like a ‘rat-grey fungus’ the national joy normally associated with banners and bunting. The flags are turning innocence into guilt, inclusive welcome into intimidation.

Seamus Heaney captured the ambiguous boundary between innocence and guilt, beauty and corruption, in his poem ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Inevitably I have been recalling it to myself as I’ve been trampling through thorns and stinging nettles on the Heath to reach the inky-black plunder. I thought, in these late summer days of fruitfulness and decay and national malaise, it was worth quoting it here in full.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.