Vicki Feaver

Every year you said it wasn’t worth the trouble – you’d better things to do with your time – and it made you furious when the jars were sold at the church fête for less than the cost of the sugar.

And every year you drove into the lanes around Calverton to search for the wild trees whose apples looked as red and as sweet as cherries, and tasted...

After Pierre Bonnard

The woman’s cupboard, she’s stocked with jellies, chutneys, pickled limes

and bottles of blue-skinned plums that just to look at is to taste

their sweet green flesh. Inset in the wall, the inside’s painted the red of petals –

poppies, geraniums – of dream blood. When she opens the white door

it’s like opening herself. Among jars of...