Prologue
Christmas: longer ago than I care to remember
There’s so much about my childhood that I can’t help but see through a happy, rose-tinted haze, and it looks rosier the older I get. I happen to be sixty-five, by the way, the same age as Madonna, which I enjoy telling people. What I’m trying to say is that when I was little, I knew I was one of the luckiest girls on earth. Not only were my parents madly in love, and not only did we live in the prettiest village in the Cotswolds, but I was fortunate enough to be born the eldest daughter of absolutely the best gingerbread baker in the northern hemisphere, possibly the universe.
I can’t attest to her Victoria sponges or her spotted dick or shortbread fingers; Mum had one recipe and one recipe only, her gingerbread. And I’m not talking about a batch of biscuity men rustled up every now and again to satisfy my sweet tooth either. That would be thinking far too small for Mum who every December could be found working away at our cottage’s kitchen table, spicing and kneading, rolling and cutting, cooling and icing, industriously assembling her famous gingerbread cottages. Attached to her mixing arm, you could bet your baubles, there I’d be, her gingerbread village’s Chief Spoon Licker.
I can still see the scene now, as clear as day, that Christmas after Granny died, when Mum suddenly stopped in her stirring in our sugar-scented kitchen, glanced at my baby sister, Lydia, asleep in her Moses basket, and announced with eyes both absent and urgent, ‘I should write it down for you. Quick, Margi!’ She snapped doughy fingers and sent me to fetch a felt tip.
(That’s Margi pronounced with a ‘g’, as in Margate, and not with a ‘j’ like margarine! I shortened it myself when I was five, rebelling against the association with Great Aunt Margaret who’d tell me if I kept eating gingerbread, I’d end up toothless like her and, laughing, she’d take out her dentures and scare me.)
So I, young Margi, had leaned over the floury tabletop watching Mum jotting down her recipe on a fresh page sacrificed from my colouring book. I watched the formula appear in her loopy handwriting, listening as she spoke the words, rendered exotic and homely at the same time, and so closely associated with my mother in my brain’s pathways they’ll never disentangle: demerara, cinnamon, fiery ginger, nutmeg, star anise, cloves, candied orange, angelica.
When she was done, I watched her re-cap my green felt tip, now greasy with butter, and slip the paper inside herMrs Beaton– a wedding present she told me she’d never once read – and that’s where her precious gingerbread spell would live for years, until it became mine. I hadn’t understood it was a bequest at the time. A gift and a burden.
On days like that the village women would spill in through our (always unlocked) cottage door and Mum would greet them with a busy nod, her hands shoved in the mixing bowl.
‘Plain flour, Mrs Frost. Two bags,’ Mrs Cooper, the school dinner lady renowned amongst us kids for her generosity with the pink custard, would announce.
‘And I’ve butter,’ Mrs Jonson might add, struggling to shove the pram ferrying her chubby twins over the doorstep.
The woman us kids wrote off as ‘Old Widow Davies’ (it makes me gulp now to think she was probably only in her early seventies at the time) would step inside and lay down her offering of icing sugar or marzipan and she’d fill the kettle and light the gas ring like she felt thoroughly at home, which of course she did. Everyone did. There was always someone dropping round looking for a cuppa and a chat, no matter the time of year, and Mum always welcomed them like family.
Sometimes the younger village mothers would tell Mum apologetically that they’d brought nothing that day, but could they still help, and Mum would only smile and hand them an apron.
This was how it always went. Whole armies of Wheaton village women encamped in our kitchen all through Advent, bringing what provisions they could from their pantries, letting their kids toddle around and interfere with the Lego houses and gardens I loved making back then. Every one of the women offered up their time and their housekeeping money for the cause. All to help Mum turn her gingerbread village display dreams into a reality.
Standing by her side, I picked up all her special techniques. How to achieve different shades of gingerbread by using only caster sugar (when pale stuff was needed), or adding a patiently dropped dollop of black treacle for a glorious dark bronze bake, or folding in cocoa powder for a sweetly moreish golden-brown colour.
She demonstrated her rolling know-how too, always getting an even thickness by using the hardwood spacers Dad rustled up in his woodworking shed, and I learned how to prevent patches of dough clinging to pins by rolling it between two sheets of parchment or by using Mum’s home-made dusting bags – little pouches of cornflour made from a new cotton hankie tied with an elastic band (these always put me in mind of a powder puff and produced just as satisfactory a cloud of floaty white when you vigorously banged two together above your head).
I wasn’t so much of a nuisance in the kitchen that I didn’t pick up Mum’s cutting-out techniques. The women worked off templates made to scale on tracing paper (again, that was Dad’s handiwork) whilst I had the job of cutting the rectangular gingerbread supports which, once glued inside with royal icing, would stop our biscuit buildings collapsing in on themselves.
Over time I mastered her methods with the sugar-paste piping bag which Mum wielded with the speed of an old hand used to perfectly repeating lacy patterns of dots and dashes, drops and scallops, loops and fleur-de-lys, or lavishly thick beaded snail’s trails like snowdrifts, all adding charming snowy details to her little houses in miniature.
While they worked, the women would share stories – whispering the ones I wasn’t supposed to overhear but always strained my ears extra hard for – and some would break away to feed babies, and the radio played big band Christmas hits interspersed with blasts of Frank and Nancy Sinatra, The Monkees, and Sandy Shaw, and we’d bop along as the rolling pinsshush shushedacross the surface of glossy dough, and everyone’s cheeks pinked from the heat and the Christmas sherry – concealed from no one in particular – sloshing in Mum’s best china teacups, turning our little spot on the very edge of sleepy old Wheaton village into the laughter-filled, oven-warmed heart of the community.
Then, come the middle of December, a walking procession would leave our cottage, slow and careful on icy pavements sparkling under the street lights, a stream of locals transporting cottages, school buildings and shops, churchyard and gardens, the old forge and stables, every inch of our village recreated in iced gingerbread and decorated with boiled sweets, strawberry bootlaces, chocolate buttons, candied fruit and glacé cherries, and I’d skip alongside Dad, dragging Biscuits the dachshund beside me, all the way down the high street, enjoying the commotion at the windows where the other children pressed their faces or at front doors where the old ladies waved as we, the celebrated bakers, made our way to Wheaton Village Hall.
The hall was where our world in miniature took shape, laid out on trestle tables pushed together and covered in every white linen cloth the women could muster, and old Mr Paxton, the school caretaker, would be busy digging out his red suit and cotton wool beard, preparing the grotto corner for the little ones.
For the next two weeks, the whole of the Cotswolds would descend on Mum’s gingerbread grotto, lit by fairy lights and candles for extra magic. They’d queue right down the high street to get in and pay a shilling for tea from the hall’s big silver urn and another for a gift from Santa’s pack, and everyone, literally everyone, would be exchanging festive greetings and chatting happily.
The spare money raised by Mum’s adventures in baking would go to whoever needed it around the village. She was the sort of woman who always knew when so-and-so’s eldest had gone through yet another pair of school shoes, or when there was an overdue grocery account at the village stores or a milkman’s bill needing paying off urgently. She’d never see anyone struggling. That was my mum.Ismy mum. These days, she’s all about helping at the stray dog sanctuary in Mijas rather than making cookie model villages. Well, helping strays and lying by the pool with Dad and one of his jugs of sangria – so strong it’s more a general anaesthetic than a cocktail.
Back then, though, she was the heart of Wheaton; at least that’s how I remember it. Back when Christmas was still small and special and full of nothing but simple joy, when snow fell every winter and stayed until the snowdrops emerged, and the only thing us gingerbread grotto recruits had to worry about was where the next gumdrops and candy canes were coming from for next year’s (bigger, better) display, and the next year’s and the next, back when the prospect of all those future Christmases in my cosy unspoiled Wheaton village spread out ahead of me like a wonderful promise.
Chapter One
Friday 1 December: Tin-Rattling
The car horn makes me jump as the four-by-four slams to a stop immediately in front of my collecting spot at the Wheaton primary school gate, almost sending me spinning with its wing mirror.
I bite down the impulse to shout at the frowning father in the driving seat, telling myself that wouldn’t be the best start to my morning of tin-shaking on the village high street. So I call him some very un-festive names under my breath and step back so he can throw open doors and bundle his tiny, uniform-clad kids out of their car seats. One of them’s crying, and the other is on the verge. Nevertheless, he hustles them in through the school gates.
I hold out my tin to him as he huffs his way back to his idling car, but without even looking at it, he’s gone, leaving me coughing in his exhaust fumes.
Izz, our committee treasurer and my best friend, was impressed when I first suggested a bit of school-run cash collecting to boost our gingerbread grotto ingredients fund. Flour, sugar, butter and spices have doubled in price this winter, even at the wholesalers, so we need to raise some serious funds or the gingerbread village will turn out tiny this year.
