I can’t recall why my mother bought me The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden when I was in 7th grade, if she ever said. I do recall coming into my blue bedroom and seeing it lying on my rumpled, darker blue bed, among castoff clothing and school papers and other books. The cover art fascinated me, with its genderless poker face peering up at me, full of a secret. I once read that the actress, Demi Moore, had named her oldest daughter after this author, and I’ve always been curious as to why and how books show up for people, and make such a lasting impression.
For me, personally, this book figured into my imaginings for a story of my own that I wrote in college, with its equally languid title, “Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour” from a line in the poem, “Ode to Indolence” by John Keats. In Rumer Godden’s story, greengages are the litter of heaven; in mine, hedgeapples appear, but they are rough and inedible, more of a nuisance than a treasure. My story drew upon the coming of age theme of The Greengage Summer, and my prose, with its own secret, was as awkward as my adolescence, for all of the same reasons. It was long in length, but not quite balanced at its center, and ranging into directions both silly and sinister, which is how our first forays into adulthood can feel.
Rumer Godden wrote many books set in India, but this one takes place in France, and while I read it, I felt as if I had been introduced to a vintage of wine that had been hidden away for adults, until I had slipped into the bottle itself to become infused and a little intoxicated, breathing in the semi-autobiographical story that was not written for children, but about children, which I still was. The first few paragraphs, below, is what I would call Exposition by Immersion, and I hope you enjoy it as we feel the weight of summer roll away behind us, and down a grassy hill:
“On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did. Hester of course was quite unabashed; Will— though he was called Willmouse then— Willmouse and Vicky were too small to reach any but the lowest branches, but they found fruit fallen in the grass; we were all strictly forbidden to climb the trees.
"The garden at Les Oeillets was divided into three; first the terrace and gravelled garden round the house; then, separated by a low box hedge, the wilderness with its statues and old paths; and between the wilderness and the river, the orchard with its high walls. In the end wall a blue door led to the river bank.
"The orchard seemed to us immense and perhaps it was, for there were seven alleys of greengage trees alone; between them, even in that blazing summer, dew lay all day in the long grass. The trees were old, twisted, covered in lichen and moss, but I shall never forget the fruit. In the hotel dining room Mauricette built it into marvelous pyramids on dessert plates laid with vine leaves. “Reines Claudes” she would say to teach us its name as she put our particular plate down, but we were too full to eat. In the orchard we had not even to pick the fruit, it fell off the trees into our hands.
"The greengages had a pale blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet. Coming from the streets and small front gardens of Southstone, we had not been let loose in an orchard before; it was no wonder we ate too much.
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| photo credit: found on Goodreads review by Hana |
"'Summer sickness,' said Mademoiselle Zizi.
“'Indigestion,' said Madame Corbet.
"I do not know which it was but ever afterwards, in our family we called that the greengage summer.
“'You are the one who should write this,' I told Joss. 'It happened chiefly to you.' But Joss shut that out as she always shuts out things, or shuts them in so that no one can guess.
“'You are the one who likes words,' said Joss. 'Besides'— and she paused— 'it happened as much to you.'
I did not answer that. I am grown up now— or almost grown up— 'and we still can’t get over it!' said Joss.
'Most people don’t have… that… in thirty or forty years,' I said in defense.
'Most people don’t have it at all,' said Joss.
"If I stop what I am doing for a moment, or in any time when I am quiet, in those cracks in the night that have been with me ever since when I cannot sleep and thoughts seep in, I am back; I can smell the Les Oeillets smells of hot dust and cool plaster walls, of jasmine and box leaves in the sun, of dew in the long grass; the smell that filled the house and garden of Monsieur Armand’s cooking and the house’s own smell of damp linen, or furniture polish, and always, a little, of drains. I can hear the sounds that seem to belong only to Les Oeillets: the patter of poplar trees along the courtyard wall, of a tap running in the kitchen mixed with the sound of high French voices, of the thump of Rex’s tail and another thump of someone washing clothes on the river bank; of barges puffing upstream and Mauricette’s toneless singing— she always sang through her nose; of Toinette and Nicole’s quick loud French as they talked to each other out of the upstair’s windows; of the faint noise of the town and, near, the plop of a fish or of a greengage falling.”
To read Keats’s “Ode to Indolence” stroll over here:
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