Plum Puddings and Paper Moons Read online

  Jack Tar blew till he was giddy and green and the ball had expanded into a globe of indigo and amethyst, crimson, emerald and sunflower yellow. A plastic world of sapphire seas, dusty deserts and juicy jungles, of archipelagos and isthmuses. A paradise for pirates.

  Sweet Suzy and her captain and crew sailed by the Galapagos Islands, the Rock of Gibraltar and Arctic icebergs. They charted a course along latitudes, down longitudes, over the Tropic of Capricorn, under the Tropic of Cancer and across the exotic equator. They sailed north and south and east and west. And when they stepped ashore, they saw wonders such as lily pickers, fire eaters, chimney sweepers, and tigers’ teeth and tails and toes.

  But by lunchtime, the Pirate Queen and her crew decided that of all the islands, continents and countries, home was best and they set sail for the Kingdom of Silk, at Cameron’s Creek, Australia.

  ‘When are we doing the dancing and singing, Nasty Nellie?’ Sinbad reminded the Pirate Queen.

  ‘When Barnacle Ben returns from his voyage to the unknown.’

  ‘I thought he was coming back early today,’ said Jack Tar, shading his eyes with his hand, straining to see Barnacle Ben’s Bedford sailing over the horizon.

  ‘So he was, so he was. But a pirate’s life be ruled by the to-ings and fro-ings of the tides and by the four strong winds. And not even the Queen of Pirates has power over them, me hearties. Now, weigh anchor, trim the sails and steer us through the heads.’

  Jack Tar and Sinbad took an oar each. Dodging man-eating sharks and monstrous squid, they rowed to the rickety jetty and moored Sweet Suzy in the safe harbour of the Kingdom of Silk.

  Once their feet touched land, Perry and Blue went to fetch Annie from her studio and Nell waited while Layla and Griffin dressed themselves. When Layla picked up her journal she remembered the rewritten wish and opened the page to show Nell.

  ‘Look, Nell,’ she said. ‘Look what I wrote in my journal. Griff and me thought it up this morning.’

  Nell read everything Layla had written, the large print and the fine. Here and there she smiled and at the end she sighed a little.

  ‘It’s a lovely wish,’ she said, ‘but you know none of us can stay forever, no matter how much we want to.’

  Then, before anyone had time to feel too sad, she said in her best buccaneer’s voice, ‘Right, now I be going to the galley to sample a sardine or two. Who be coming with me?’

  3. The Buccaneers’ Banquet

  When pirates speak of sardines, they don’t mean the sort that come in cans with tiny keys to wind open their lids. They mean fresh ones with gills and scales and fins and tails.

  For lunch, Perry, Griffin and Layla dusted the fish’s silver skins with flour. Nell fried them quick and crunchy and golden, and served them with chunks of Annie’s crusty bread, squeezings of lemony oil, sprigs of dill, salad greens and sun-warmed cherry-cheeked tomatoes from her garden. There were tiny glass dishes, pinch-pots, piled high with flakes of soft white sea salt for scattering.

  Perry Angel wondered if sardines grew up to be whales. He sometimes wished he could meet a whale. In dreams his wish came true. These dreams were always blue and filled with strangely beautiful music. Whale songs. In his dreams Perry could understand what the whales were singing about. They were singing to their children, telling them which way to go and calling them home. Sometimes when Nell was talking to him, Perry thought she sounded like the whales in his dreams.

  Layla shut her eyes while she was eating and thought she heard the sea, though it was more than a hundred kilometres away. When she told the others, Nell said, ‘You see, that’s why pirates have such good hearing, because they eat a lot of sardines.’

  Perry wondered if Nell had been a pirate before she became a grandmother because she seemed to know so much about them.

  For dessert there were rum balls. Rum is a nasty-tasting drink which burns your throat and makes your legs wobbly. It is a pirate’s next favourite thing after treasure and sardines. But, like the black moustaches Griffin and Layla had worn and the tattoo on Perry’s arm, Auntie Ruby’s Rum Balls were fakes. They didn’t have even a splash of rum in them, on account of Nell’s plan to sing sea shanties and dance the sailor’s hornpipe when Ben got home.

  ‘Too much rum makes pirates forget the words and the tune and most other things as well,’ she explained, ‘and sometimes they get so wobbly they fall overboard.’

  Auntie Ruby hadn’t made the rum balls. Nell had. Because Ruby was Nell’s auntie and she died when Nell was a young girl. It was only the recipe and the bluebird plate the rum balls were on that were Auntie Ruby’s. She’d written the recipe in pencil on the back of a used envelope, especially for Nell. The front of the envelope had a stamp with a picture of a queen on it. Not the Pirate Queen, the Queen of England, when she was very young. It was a blue stamp and it cost a shilling which is old money for ten cents. The apron Nell was wearing when she cooked the buccaneers’ banquet also had a picture of the Queen of England on it. Nell had a lot of aprons, but this one was her favourite, even though Her Majesty was slightly faded.

  ‘Long ago, before Her Majesty was born,’ said Nell, wiping a dribble of sardine juice off the queen’s nose, ‘pirates sailed the seas of England.’ Nell believed there were lessons to be learned in everything including buccaneers’ banquets, royal aprons and hand-me-down recipes.

  4. Cake Talk

  Almost all the recipes pasted into Nell’s spiral-bound cookery book with flour-and-water glue were hand-me-downs. Most had been handwritten by the people who had given them to Nell. Often the writing was faded and the paper yellowed. Nell thought of these recipes as pieces of other people’s lives, given away like slices of Armenian Love Cake with a cup of tea. Or rag patches on a quilt from wedding gowns or naming-day layettes with buttons and bows from birthday frocks. Tiny treasures to keep forever. Nell knew most of them by heart, but she sometimes read her recipe book the way other people might read a novel. Sometimes she laughed as she read. Sometimes she cried.

  Of all the Silks, it was Amber who loved Nell’s recipe book best and Nell had promised it would be hers some day. Amber had already started her own collection of recipes.

  Amber came right in the middle of the Rainbow Girls. Scarlet was special because she came first. Next came Indigo and Violet. Just being twins made them special. Saffron was special now Tishkin was gone, because she was the youngest of Ben and Annie Silk’s five daughters. Griffin’s specialness came from being a boy, the only boy in the family until Perry Angel arrived. But Perry hadn’t come from the quiet dark inside Annie, like all the others. He came on the ten-thirty express. So Griffin stayed special and Perry was special too, each in his very own way. And baby Tishkin, who was born before the daisies bloomed and left without a goodbye, still held a special place in everyone’s heart.

  Amongst all this specialness, Amber might have felt ordinary. True, she was the only one in the family whose hair grew in copper coils as tiny and tight as the springs inside ballpoint pens. And not one of the other Rainbow Girls had fairy dust on her nose. But although these things made Amber different she sometimes wondered if they made her special.

  Nell could have told Amber it doesn’t matter where you come in the family or what you look like, it’s the things you do and say and what you are like on the inside that matters. But Amber didn’t ask Nell or anyone else. Instead she cooked, because a cake could say all the things she couldn’t.

  Amber discovered this when Elsie’s Bert died. Elsie was Mrs Rasmussen who looked after the post office and Herbert was her husband. He was tall and thin and was called Bert for short. He went fishing in the creek a lot while Elsie stayed in the post office. She sold balls of parcel string and books of stamps and took your money for the electricity bill and put your letters in a tiny black box with a door and a silver key if you didn’t have a proper letterbox.

  Elsie’s heart was broken when her Bert died. She and Amber had known each other from when Amber was small enough to fit on the par
cel scales. But even so, Amber couldn’t tell Elsie how sad she felt about Bert. Instead she made an Armenian Love Cake in a heart-shaped pan. She put it in her bicycle basket in Nell’s white cake tin with the blue lid and cornflowers painted on the front and rode to the post office. It was past closing time, so Amber walked around the back to where Elsie lived. When Elsie opened the door Amber took the lid off the tin so she could see the cake. Then the crickets sang on the soft green banks of the creek at the bottom of the garden. Elsie and Amber said nothing to each other and quietly remembered Bert-for-short in his striped braces and his tartan cap with his bamboo fishing pole and home-made feather flies and his loud, scratchy breathing.

  At last Elsie said, ‘Did you make it?’

  Amber nodded.

  ‘Thank you, Amber, it’s a lovely sorry cake,’ Elsie said.

  After Elsie’s cake, Amber began to make sorry cakes, thank-you cakes, cheer-up cakes, goodbye cakes, get-well cakes, welcome cakes and I-love-you cakes. It seemed almost magical that the person receiving the cake knew exactly what Amber wanted to say. It was cake language. But sometimes Amber made just-because cakes. She made them for fun because people couldn’t work out what they meant, no matter how good they were at cake language.

  Even when Amber wasn’t cooking she was thinking about cooking.

  On that warm and wishful afternoon when the captain and crew of Sweet Suzy feasted on finny, scaly, gilly, taily, salty sea sardines, Amber was over the hills and far away at high school with her Rainbow sisters. Her maths teacher filled the blackboard with adding-ups and taking-aways and her classmates copied sums and wrote answers into their exercise books. But Amber wrote a list of ingredients, because Nell had promised that on Saturday they would start their Christmas cooking.

  5. The Plum-Pudding Planetarium

  On Friday morning before school Layla packed her pyjamas and toothbrush and her Wish Pony with the removable saddle and brushable tail into her pink backpack. She planned to walk home with Griffin after school and spend the night at the Kingdom of Silk so she could help with the Christmas cooking from the very beginning. Mrs Elliott walked to the gate with Layla and passed her a plastic shopping bag.

  ‘Give those to Nell Silk,’ she said, ‘and tell her they’re for making stars.’

  Six months before, Layla had told her mother that Nell wanted to make stars for Christmas decorations.

  ‘Nell says it’s a shame milk bottles don’t have foil lids on them anymore.’

  ‘Tell Mrs Silk tart tins might do,’ said Mrs Elliott.

  ‘But Nell makes the old-fashioned kind of tarts you cook in metal tins,’ said Layla.

  ‘I should have known,’ said Mrs Elliott in a very quiet voice with no ups and downs in it.

  ‘Yes you should have, Mum,’ Layla said, ‘Nell’s an old-fashioned kind of lady. She’s a bit like our nana was, only magic.’

  Mrs Elliott sighed and began to think of Layla’s nana and of other old-fashioned things. She remembered sitting on the floor with her mother and sisters, surrounded by mountains of shiny milk-bottle lids, some silver, others red, green or blue, their mother poking holes with a knitting needle and passing the caps to her girls, Louisa, Katrina and Caroline. She and her sisters threaded the lids onto lengths of wool. Mrs Elliott remembered the scent of a real Christmas tree, of wishing for a piebald pony and of still feeling happy when she got a home-made rag doll and a book instead.

  The Saturday after she had remembered all these things, Mrs Caroline Elliott did something surprising. She went to the bakery and bought six jam tarts: three raspberry and three lemon. The next week she did the same, and the week after, and the week after. Mrs Elliott bought six jam tarts every Saturday for six months even though she didn’t care for the taste of jam tarts at all.

  On that Friday morning in December, when Layla looked into the plastic shopping bag, her eyes shone as brightly as the dozens of empty jam-tart tins she saw there. She flung her arms around her mother’s neck and kissed her. Mrs Elliott waved Layla goodbye and because it was the season of wishfulness, she wished for a moment that she was going to the Kingdom of Silk with her daughter that afternoon, to sit on the floor and make stars.

  It was really Scarlet’s turn to make breakfast that Saturday, but she had a part-time job at Mr Kadri’s Colour Patch Café and had to start early. So Nell made pancakes and served them warm with poached apricots, cinnamon, brown sugar and vanilla yoghurt.

  Tart-tin stars were not the only stars made in Nell’s kitchen that day. There were buttery shortbread ones too, sprinkled with vanilla sugar. Amber weighed and mixed the ingredients, Griffin rolled the dough, Perry cut it with a star-shaped cutter, Layla sprinkled the stars with sugar and Annie put them in the oven to cook.

  While the golden shortbreads cooled on wire racks, it was time to start making the plum puddings. Twelve squares of cloth were spread out on the bench to wrap twelve Christmas puddings.

  ‘Why do you make so many, Nell?’ asked Layla.

  ‘I make enough to go around, some for seconds, some for afters and the rest for leftovers,’ said Nell, measuring the raisins, sultanas, currants, figs and plums and fat red cherries.

  ‘What Nell really means is she makes leftovers on purpose,’ said Annie, laughing.

  ‘Who gets them all?’ asked Layla.

  ‘Well there’s Mr Jenkins,’ said Nell.

  ‘Mr Jenkins gets a small one all to himself,’ said Annie.

  ‘He loves plum pudding,’ said Nell. ‘It reminds him of his Mrs Jenkins. She used to make them for him when she was alive.’

  ‘And the Meals-on-Wheels ladies, Nell,’ Annie said, but Nell was still thinking about Mr Jenkins all alone on Christmas Day frying slices of pudding in brandy and butter and missing his Juliette.

  ‘They deliver pieces of Nell’s pudding to the senior citizens of Cameron’s Creek,’ explained Annie. ‘And then there’s Melody. You remember Melody, don’t you Layla?’

  Layla nodded. Melody was the social worker who brought Perry to the Kingdom of Silk.

  ‘Nell sends a plum-pudding package to Melody in the post. I think she shares it with children who don’t have families to stay with at Christmas time, doesn’t she, Nell?’

  But Nell didn’t hear a word. After she’d finished thinking about Mr Jenkins, she thought about Perry Angel’s other mother who lived in a city by the sea, far away from Cameron’s Creek. She wondered if Sunday Lee would have pudding on Christmas Day and someone to share it with. Then her thoughts went to Elsie-from-the-post-office and to Miss Cherry and her small scruffy dog. Nell’s heart was gently squeezed and she wished everyone was as lucky as she was and could eat pudding with people they loved.

  Christmas cooking is fun, but it is also hard work, so Perry Angel made a cubby house with tea-towel walls and a table roof. He crawled inside and lay on the rag rug with Blue, thinking about leftovers. On his seven-year journey to find the Kingdom of Silk, Perry had never met anyone who liked leftovers. Leftovers were things like cold peas, grey potatoes, stale bread and baby boys left on the steps of welfare offices. Nobody wanted them. But then Perry met Nell, and Nell said the world was a better place because of leftovers.

  Above him, Amber added eggs, breadcrumbs, sugar, spices and flour to the mountain of moist fruit. Annie, Indigo and Violet wrapped the cooled shortbreads in cellophane parcels tied with red ribbon and sang a song about a baby and a drummer boy. Nell waterproofed the cloths with flour and water and filled them with pudding mixture. Then she lowered them carefully into boiling water in pots the size of witches’ cauldrons and clouds of steam billowed into the rafters.

  ‘Look!’ said Saffron. ‘It’s dragon’s breath!’ And the children turned their sticky faces upwards. Even Perry crawled out to have a look.

  After the puddings came Florentines; biscuits made of chopped cherries, honey, butter, cream and almond splinters, so thin you could almost see through them, like the stained-glass windows in Saint Benedict’s Church. While the children me
asured, melted and mixed and licked wooden spoons, the Christmas dragon hid in one of the cauldrons and breathed his cinnamon-scented breath into the heavenlies.

  Then Ben came into the kitchen.

  ‘Anyone ready for lunch?’

  Ben had made pizza in his mud-brick oven near the dam. The Cox’s Orange Pippin shaded the table set with jugs of icy home-made cordial, baskets of biscuits which weren’t quite the right shape and platters of pizza slices.

  After they had eaten, the children lay down, dreamy and drowsy, in the lap of the earth with beetles, bugs and butterflies. Nell leaned her back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes. But Saffron, who had been thinking about the dragon in the kitchen, said, ‘Tell us about magic, Nell. Please.’

  And Nell agreed, because magic was one of her favourite topics.

  ‘We’re all born with magic in us,’ she said. ‘A child’s magic is so powerful it sometimes rubs off on grown-up people. When that happens, they re-discover their own leftover magic and all kinds of remarkable things happen. Their limpy legs grow stronger and they don’t need as many naps. The words of long-forgotten songs and stories come back into their heads. Sometimes they compose completely new tunes and whistle them on red buses in the mornings when they’re going to the library to borrow books about interesting topics like magic puddings or very hungry caterpillars. And on cold, dark, dismal days they see fire-breathing dragons and knights in shining armour, where once they saw only clouds. People like this laugh loudly and often, and they smile more, because they’ve discovered the marvellous secret that leftover magic is a cure for gloominess and loneliness and …’

  ‘Boringness?’ asked Layla.

  But Nell had put herself to sleep. So Violet and Indigo went inside and came back with old magazines, scraps of wallpaper, paint, scissors and glue. Layla fetched her bag of jam-tart tins and while Nell slept, the children made Chinese lanterns, tart-tin stars and a paper chain that was longer than forever. Then they climbed into the tree house and wrapped the chain around the appled boughs and tied stars and lanterns among the leaves with tinsel threads. They cheered when it was done, and Nell woke up and said it was the best Christmas tree she’d ever seen.