A.N.: The more I write of this story the more I like writing it! I should probably also state that this story is in no way sponsored by River Cottage cookbooks! I just have a few of them and they seem like the thing Edmond's family would have in their house, you know?
How We Live Now
03
Whoever said kids were lazy never met Daisy, Isaac and Piper. They passed their time by surviving: They were determined to live, and between the three of them their willpower would've been astonishing to anyone who didn't know what they had already endured.
Four a.m. was always damp and bitter no matter the time of year but six o'clock in late September was worse, every muscle aching and every bruise and healing bug-bite demanding attention with the birds singing riotously in the trees and Jet's warm wet nose startling her from sleep as he whined, wanting to get out and pee. The others grumbled but climbed out of the cocoon of blankets, of each other, and followed her lead by dressing, pulling their hair into ponytails and it was luxury to put on old jeans and sweaters that wouldn't get ruined, thick socks without a hint of their blood or blister-pus and Wellington boots, arming themselves with tools from the potting-shed, and before they entertained the idea of breakfast they had been out into Edmond's garden examining the contents of the raised beds and the greenhouse and sectioning off the small patches they would leave for seeds for next year, and filling the wheelbarrow with potatoes from the field while Piper dashed about filling a wicker basket with bilberries - she said Daisy might know them as huckleberries, from Huckleberry Finn - blackberries, watercress from the running river and more sweet chestnuts than they knew what to do with and they found the fishing gear and a hint of Isaac's old enthusiasm ghosted across his face at the thought of fresh fish, and he found the snares Edmond had set for the rabbits they had caught so long ago.
Somehow Jet managed to corral six skinny, scatter-brained hens who had been loose in the meadow, and it was the highlight of their return, after Isaac of course, that Piper was reunited with her girls. With their nests in the barn but left to roam, organic and free-range and all that, the girls had been left to their own devices. None of the other animals remained in the barn but the Army must've forgotten about the girls before they disappeared and so, there they were - Hazel and Petal and Daphne and Penelope and Lily and Scary Spice. Did this mean the Army had recently left the farm, if the girls were still going strong? Isaac just sighed that Nature found a way and scattered some feed and the mealworms Piper said were like Ferrero Rocher to them and there was no sign of a cockerel so they had to assume any eggs they were laying weren't fertilised and were fine to eat. If they were cooked they wouldn't get salmonella, right? The first few eggs they found and cooked had vibrant orange yolks and Isaac said the girls had probably been finding and eating baby rats, which made Piper crinkle her nose the same way her brother sometimes did but the eggs were rich and delicious and the scrambled-eggs they had that day were vivid orange and the best thing Daisy had eaten since the poached pink trout on their Perfect Day.
They found the root-cellar where in olden times they used to store potatoes and carrots and parsnips and turnips and Swedes and onions and garlic, and apples. There were eating-apples and an old gnarled Bramley-apple tree which meant they were cooking apples, and the eating-apples were ready and some had already fallen off the branches but the cooking-apples weren't ready yet, and they laughed so hard they cried and their stomachs hurt when Piper bit into a plum and got half a maggot for the protein. They filled buckets with plums and sorted through them, Isaac saying that the unblemished ones would be safe to eat because it meant the flies hadn't gotten to them, and there were some bags of jam sugar in the garage which meant they could make their own jam if they could find Mum's recipe. There was even a well-established fig tree and Isaac said those were the best for fibre, even better than rhubarb, just don't eat too many in one go, he had grinned, or they'd have the adverse effect and the plumbing was dubious in the house at best.
Even if he wasn't with them in body yet, in spirit Edmond was there, as eldest brother he had ensured his siblings were provided for before they'd ever realised war was so imminent, before the idea of their separation had ever entered into their worst nightmares: he had planted beets and bulb fennel and cauliflower and broccoli, peas and spinach, carrots and parsnips and tomatoes and cabbages, onions and garlic and zucchini and eggplant and squashes. The Army guys had to be sore to leave this all behind, but Isaac wondered aloud if they had even bothered to look in on the gardens. He said they were lucky to have had steady, gentle rains and not harsh sun then dramatic storms, or the plants would've been in as good a condition as the humans were. But, like all the nature Daisy had seen, where Man was floundering Nature thrived.
Piper sighed that David Attenborough would be happy: when Man thrived, Nature suffered. Without electricity and generators and cars and the council's vicious hedge-trimmers and pollutants - they didn't count nuclear radiation because, well, war couldn't last forever, nobody wanted mutually-assured destruction for the sake of making a point - Daisy had seen with her own eyes how Nature was celebrating.
Isaac and Piper knew exactly what to do to look after the plants, harvesting the crops that had been left to thrive without interference. Ironically, Isaac said, it was probably the best year Edmond had ever had for harvesting. They had learned from watching and helping Edmond, who had watched a television-programme called Gardeners' World avidly and attended an agricultural sixth-form college nearby to sit his A-Levels and definitely had green fingers, not just the thumb.
All three of them had become used to the aching muscles and the backbreaking work of meticulously tending to crops, had picked up things on the farms to add to the siblings' already considerable knowledge and Piper was gathering up lavender as a bug-deterrent and Isaac donned a funny hat with a veil to take a peek at Aunt Penn's beehives - honey was medicinal as well as delicious and as soon as the tube of ointment ran out they would be wishing for more jars of the stuff, which was a natural antibiotic. They had to harvest as much as they could before they bound the hives shut for the winter to protect the honeybees, and they spent nearly a week harvesting and jarring honey, while Piper hauled wicker basketfuls of crab-apples and hazelnuts home and spent her evenings peeling them and looking through cookbooks to find crab-apple recipes.
Daisy, who had always sucked at Math, was put in charge by unanimous unspoken agreement of planning the food rationing. Armed with a pencil and one of Aunt Penn's notepads she sat at the kitchen table while Piper brewed spiced apple tea and Isaac had gone fishing because it was cold and drizzly and perfect for fishing, and catalogued everything they had, down to the last tin of anchovies and cinnamon sticks. Aunt Penn had an old set of weighing-scales with brass weights that looked like chess-pieces and Daisy filled a few hours figuring out how long the sacks of rice and oats and pasta would last, dividing each sack by the grams in a single ration times four - always counting in Edmond - trying to figure out how many weeks or months they could make everything last. The sums hurt her head and Daisy knew she should apologise to her Math teachers over the years but could they have at least taught her something useful? She wondered why they didn't teach budgeting, cooking and wartime survival skills. They might be living off plain boiled pasta and rice but it would be something and Piper was already planning to cook some onions and red bell-peppers over the fire to put on their jacket-potatoes cooked in the embers, and she thought maybe if they cooked the jars of passata with onions and fresh zucchini - she called them courgettes - and eggplants - aubergines - they could make everything go further and jar and seal the lot so they'd have stuff to eat over winter. Because Aunt Penn had a habit of selling her honey and homemade chutneys and jams for the benefit of the church at the village fête every June, there were boxes of unused, clean jam-jars in the garage and they just had to figure out how to sterilise the jars before they used them because Mummy usually cooked them in the Aga first but Sally usually helped her with the jars while they chatted in the evenings over a glass of red wine.
And maybe if they stored the rest of the vegetables in the coldest part of the garage in airtight Tupperware they might last until winter, when they'd really need fresh vegetables. Daisy doubted it but didn't think it would hurt to try and there were only so many fresh vegetables three scrawny kids could eat anyway but it seemed criminal and selfish to waste anything now, and when their bodies grew too exhausted to move they each grabbed armfuls of Aunt Penn's cookbooks and sat at the kitchen-table searching out recipes for soups, stews and casseroles.
Piper asked, did curried rabbit sound good?
She bookmarked a recipe for a chunky winter vegetable soup with tarragon - Piper said that was growing in the garden - and another for fish chowder she figured they could adapt if Isaac continued to bring home fish. She had also found a recipe and they had everything but the lemon to cook trout en papillote with chunks of potato and slices of fresh fennel and any vegetables they wanted all wrapped up in greaseproof paper - Aunt Penn had two unopened boxes from Costco in the cupboard along with Ziploc bags, cling-film and two boxes of 200 metres of tinfoil - but Daisy figured they weren't used to full meals yet and would probably get sick if they suddenly produced a gourmet dinner.
Still, Piper had put the potatoes in the embers of the fire in the living-room and had cut up an onion and a red pepper and runner-beans and sighed that she wished they had some butter, but Daisy left her to it, with her apple tea and Mary Berry cookbooks full of owl post-it notes and the memory of better days and helped Isaac set up the old grill in the yard to cook the trout on rather than fry fish inside where they were sleeping, and Jet didn't seem to mind that his dinner consisted of dry dog-food and the heads of two fish, and Isaac was clearly impressed that Daisy helped clean, gut and fillet the fish, though her hands shimmered with fish-scales for days no matter how many potatoes she pulled from the soil and how often she scrubbed her hands with a nail-brush.
Sitting at the table felt like a luxury, but they learned the lesson quickly that in the shorter days of approaching autumn, they were best to eat their main meal early rather than waste the candles they didn't have to spare, and by the time they had all eaten their way through a baked potato with Piper's fried onions and slightly-charred red bell-peppers and their portion of the two trout, they were too exhausted to keep their eyes open, falling asleep on the couches again, cuddled up together. It was called the living-room, after all.
It was monumental that Daisy's entire world now revolved around food: Where to find it, how to cook it, and if not, how to store it, and how best to make sure it lasted. It seemed stupid even to her to want to be thin when everyone else was starving; for a girl who concerted all her considerable will-power into not eating, everything about every waking hour became about food. And food had somehow become inexplicably intertwined with Edmond and home and Piper and Isaac and survival and their Perfect Day and the lambing-barn and the summer before everything happened when she was coaxed to try fire-toasted marshmallows and such exotic cuisine as fried rabbit with spaghetti hoops and fresh pink trout which was more delicious than anything else in the world, and the ache in her bones and the alien sense of satisfaction from tending to the earth and Edmond's garden as she learned beekeeping and jam-making and how to preserve French beans and jar tomatoes and make jam was wonderful.
Without saying it aloud they all acknowledged that sometime between now and the last time they had seen each other, all three of them had become adults. Gone were the happy-go-lucky whimsical days of fishing and swimming and prancing about across the common amid the curious cows while Piper wove daisy-chains and the boys played tug-of-war with Jet: They were memories.
In days, through necessity and their willpower alone, they became Farmers. They were up at what Isaac called 'sparrow fart' and traipsing with eyes still half-closed in the dawn light to let Jet out and scatter some feed and see if the girls had laid any eggs, check the snares for rabbits and water the plants because the days were still warm and they hadn't had much rain, except at seven p.m. one day that lasted until the water-butt filled again and the buckets they laid out in the yard especially at the first rumble of storm-clouds. Isaac was diligent in planting autumn crops, guessing at the date of the first frost, because they would need winter vegetables and it seemed to distract Isaac from his dark thoughts and anxiety about Edmond when he was sowing seeds and setting aside potatoes to grow from in trash-bags full of soil; and all three of them were out in Edmond's garden every day, bringing in the harvest. They used whatever fresh vegetables couldn't be kept and Piper found a huge jug of Costco olive-oil she thought they could use to roast and then jar peppers, but Isaac thought they were a different kind of pepper and anyway, jarring cooked tomatoes would be more useful because Mum always had jars of tinned tomatoes in the cupboard and they used tomatoes as a base for practically everything. They spent an afternoon just shelling peas, because they could be dried and then added to soups and stews, and Isaac had told them that the Aga was powered by fire not gas and so it was lit and maintained and they made use of the kitchen as well as the living-room now and sometimes Jet would stay with Daisy in the kitchen, guarding the door and keeping warm by the range, and Isaac was confident they would snare a rabbit soon, and maybe if he could figure out how, they could trap a few instead of snaring and killing them outright because then they could breed them and have baby bunny stew and Piper threw an onion at him for that but it was a sensible idea, Daisy told him, because the meat they got from the chickens wouldn't last long if they stopped laying and they had to be eaten, but they were still young chickens, only just having started laying this spring, so Isaac thought they had a little while yet.
They needed firewood to maintain the stove and Isaac recovered Edmond's yellow wood-axe from the lambing-barn and they each got stronger taking their turn to chop firewood, stacking it in the utility-room as high as they could, and when that was full, under the lean-to built against the greenhouse with a tarpaulin over it to protect it from the elements. Edmond had made splitting logs seem effortless; she could have watched his arm-muscles ripple for hours, but it was a different thing trying to do it herself when Daisy had no experience and even less muscle, though it got easier as the weeks went on.
The Aga running off firewood changed a lot for them, and so did the discovery that Aunt Penn's investment in solar panels and a secure power supply gave them enough power to flush the toilets and even plug in the immersion stick-blender that opened up Daisy's soup-making world exponentially. Aunt Penn was an expert, after all; why wouldn't she have made precautions in the event of global crises that wiped out the power-grids on a national level? They spent an afternoon figuring out how the solar panels and the closed circuit system worked and with a torch in his mouth, Isaac clambered up to find the fuse-box in the high cupboard in the utility-room, and disconnected most of the rooms, leaving only the kitchen and the downstairs cloak-room powered, because all they truly needed was a flushing toilet and enough power for Daisy to blend the day's soup if they wanted, though Daisy was reluctant to use the appliances, and anyway, they had no bread to toast and they boiled water just fine on the Aga. Isaac, who was better with the tinderbox than either Daisy or Piper, and was always up first to let Jet out, had assumed the daily task of lighting the stove. By the time they had returned from their morning chores, the oven was hot and the kitchen deliciously warm, and even if their daily ration of porridge was made with water not milk or better yet cream, they added chunks of softened apple and a pinch of cinnamon and Daisy's favourite was fresh blackberries simmered on the stove until juice started to leak out, and they were learning that hard-work and fresh air built muscle and stamina, and they hadn't yet had a bad night's sleep.
If the girls had laid eggs, Isaac showed his prowess at making omelettes, and with the fruits of Edmond's labours in the garden, and Piper's diligence with the raised bed full of herbs, even Isaac was no longer morally opposed to eating vegetables when they had omelettes full of herbs and peppers and zucchini and shallots and spinach, and sometimes they had Spanish omelette for dinner to change things up, which was finely sliced potatoes and sometimes spring-onions - scallions to Daisy - cooked in the egg and was filling, and Piper adapted a recipe for stuffed peppers with a dusty bag of quinoa Isaac laughed was from Mum's gluten-free phase that had lasted until Sally their au-pair made banana-and-chocolate-chip muffins, and most importantly they had discovered soup. Leek and potato was a solid recipe; but they had a heel of stinky blue cheese leftover and Daisy's first attempt at following a recipe for broccoli-and-Stilton soup was a resounding success on the first truly cold October day and it was thick and creamy and good and the baked-potatoes they had with the soup made it almost seem like they had hot fresh bread with it, and to conserve the potatoes she learned that adding one, grated, to any pot of soup made it thicken if she mashed it a little bit as it cooked, and her favourite soup was a thick one made of red peppers, sweet potatoes, red lentils and onion, chopped up into tiny bits to make blending it up easier so it was thick and kept them going even as they toiled in the rain. She was always dubious about plugging in the stick-blender because she didn't know how long or if the power would last but the results when she produced a pot of vivid-green watercress soup were worth it. They made minestrone using whatever fresh vegetables they had to hand and a handful of pasta and a drizzle of pesto and after covering the pot and leaving it in the cold larder it kept for several days, so they hadn't wasted anything, and it was good to know the larder worked just as well now as it had for the early farmers who had built the house and farmed the land originally and had no concept of electricity or campylobacter virus and salmonella but at least had had access to a market in the village for things like flour and string and candles.
Daisy got bold with cooking. One day, she made potato and pea curry and they had it with a little bit of fluffy rice each and cilantro and it was punchy and flavourful and made a change from what they had been eating and it made use of the spices Piper was dubious about. She also made paprika rice with tomatoes and herbs and roasted butternut squash and the whole dish was the same colour as Piper's hair and made her grin and was pretty good refried for breakfast with an egg after they finished their morning chores.
Piper had discovered Edmond's collection of River Cottage Handbooks, a series of small hardback books devoted to the Veg Patch and Hedgerow foraging and Fish and Preserves and Herbs, handing them to Daisy with such solemn ceremony that Daisy's chest cramped, and one day while Jet followed his nose to a neighbouring farm - armed with Isaac's gun and the promise not to do anything stupid - Daisy made fish stock from scratch. The stock itself was the richest thing she had tasted in ages and warmed her from the belly out to her fingertips and toes, and she made it into a fish stew with potatoes and carrots and onions and herbs and Piper's smile made the hours of hard work worth it, even if it was sad that it seemed like their neighbours had abandoned the farm. It didn't have the same feel as Gatesfield, Piper told her, and Isaac was quiet most of the night because of Piper's innocent observation, and didn't feel like reading The Hobbit aloud as he had the last couple nights.
The next day they'd had fried fish with 'mock-creamed' leeks and peas and fennel and thinly-sliced potatoes poached in a little leftover fish broth, and Daisy had made the fish special by giving it a faint dusting of flour before cooking it in olive-oil, and Isaac said it was almost like fish-and-chips only it was better and Daisy grinned, blushing at the tiny knowing smile on Isaac's face when she started talking excitedly about the dusty lemon-shaped plastic bottle of lemon-juice she had found in a random drawer in the kitchen, and how the lemon-juice brought out the flavour of the fish and the fennel.
Daisy, who had set her astonishing willpower to not eating, had become a foodie. While the rest of the world learned how to starve, she had finally rediscovered her appetite, and a previously-unheard of passion for cooking.
She was keeping Isaac and Piper alive: What could be better than that?
The next day was one of the best in weeks because Piper and Isaac returned from the neighbouring farm, leaping and skipping and laughing as Jet tenderly but sternly shepherded a wraithlike goat and a painfully-slow pig to the barn, two little goat kids in Piper's arms and three piglets in the wheelbarrow Isaac was pushing with a couple of hens and a bag of feed, more piglets squealing and lolloping after Piper and a lamb bleated softly at Isaac's side, bumping his leg. The pig had to weigh five-hundred pounds and Daisy just stared, figuring the Animal Whisperers whose unknown father must've been some kind of pagan nature deity or something must have coaxed and charmed her to the farm with the promises of luxury and long life, because how else could scarecrow-skinny Isaac and a nine-year-old girl have corralled a stubborn five-hundred-pound pig? Isaac said the pig was a sow, and was there anything in Edmond's River Cottage books about butchering pigs and making sausages? Because he'd give his left ear for toad-in-the-hole with gravy, although Daisy didn't know what that was and when Piper explained, Daisy thought an egg-and-flour based batter and sausages were a little beyond their means.
Isaac said the pigs had survived because they ate anything and Piper averted her gaze and Daisy knew not to ask but the piglets were adorable with their dark eyes and curly tails and even if she had liked bacon before Daisy couldn't bear the idea of it when she cuddled a piglet in her arms. It didn't help that on their walk back, as Jet expertly shepherded the abandoned half-starved animals down the lane, Piper had named the piglets (gender regardless) - Flora, Delilah, Maisie, Grace, Arthur, Alfred, Dougal and Mrs Weasley. The mother-goat bleated and had already fallen in love with Piper and the baby goats - kids - were probably the healthiest out of everyone on the farm and so cute and one of them liked Daisy and licked her hand and bumped against her leg and she was given the honour of naming them by Piper who approved of Billie and Beth, and Piper was excited to possibly start making cheese, and Daisy thought about a restaurant near her dad's apartment in Manhattan where the speciality was goat curry, and Isaac crinkled his nose the way he used to, wondering what fresh goat's milk tasted like. They'd find out when they had a proper pot of tea, Daisy said, and she felt like a farmer's wife watching her excited children from the kitchen-door with her apron on and a cup of herb tea warming her hands as they lured the goats and the sow to the barn to find their new home with the hens while Isaac petted Sheba, the lamb Piper said was imperious, and the new hens Lottie and Modest introduced themselves to Piper's girls, the piglets were returned to their mother and Piper wanted Daisy to read Fantastic Mr Fox to them after dinner in front of the fire and Isaac did some of the voices and Piper smiled, glittery-eyed, cuddling clean and tidy Jet and sucked her thumb like she only did when she was content.
A pang shot through Daisy as she let the book fall into her lap, childlike handwriting in the overleaf catching her attention and declaring This book belongs to Edmond, Age 7 but I Stole It, Love from Isaac, 9 years old and elegant handwriting that said I, Mummy, officially and irrevocably bequeath this book to Piper in such a decisive manner Daisy could practically hear her firm-but-fair Aunt's voice in her head, and she could see Aunt Penn's gentle, distracted smile in the firelight as she said it. As the others dozed and the fire died down to embers Daisy sat, tracing seven-year-old Edmond's handwriting, a lump in her throat, nothing to take the edge off the pain of thinking about Edmond, that he had missed the kind of day that felt like before.
He wasn't with them, and nobody said it because they were all thinking it, but truthfully they were all too busy during the daylight hours, and Edmond would make it home when he could.
Daisy was home, and with his brother and sister, and she had to believe that he would think that was enough, that that was…the best thing, next to him being home with them too.
As the days got shorter, they started to heal, physically, and though they were all still brittle and thin they were healthier, and slowly their bodies were changing, skinniness somehow turning into lean muscle, even Isaac's scrawny bird-arms, pushing around wheelbarrows and bending over crops, through trial and error learning to be true farmers, milking a goat and letting the kids learn to forage, and letting the stubborn sow grunt and bask in a pen Isaac spent nearly a week building while the piglets ran amok and Jet gave the humans a look that said, Oh, you expect me to round them up again, do you? Sheba seemed to think she was a sheepdog and followed Jet everywhere, Modest and Lottie turned out to be good layers, and Isaac blushed and said he had identified boys amongst the sow's litter so they should be able to breed them unless there was some kind of, in his words, Targaryen-madness pig-incest problem, and Piper was happy because the kids were girls and Mummy's book on cheese-making says that goat's milk with boy goats nearby affected the taste of the milk and made it more sour and strong but they should have lovely milk from Meg and she seemed used to being milked, but they had a quiet afternoon reflecting on why the animals had been left behind and if the farm had been sequestered like their home and did their neighbours even know the animals had been abandoned?
The animals opened up their world in several ways but it also meant a lot more hard work, tending to them, and Daisy and Isaac and Piper spent several days guiding wheelbarrows to and from their neighbour's farm bringing back fodder and feed for the animals to overwinter them. Moving one bale of hay from their neighbour's barn took a lot of patience, until Isaac found a wheeled flatbed trolley, which made transport easier but they tended to overload it and that caused problems on the way back with things falling off, so it still took just as long to get home but at least they had chaff and grains and pig pellets and their neighbours had apparently been big into making their own goat's milk soap to sell at the village fête and Isaac found a cupboard of it, as well as Persil non-bio powder so they could wash their clothes. One afternoon, Jet corralled Isaac and Daisy to the farmhouse, which had seen better days, but in one of the rooms Piper had discovered a large cat and her two kittens, one ginger and one black as midnight. Isaac said the cats would be good to keep around the farm to hunt rats and a nest was made in one of the wheelbarrows; they made it home before the heavens opened, and Jet welcomed the occupants, letting the kittens stagger unsteadily around and over him and cuddle up to him while Queen Victoria with her pristine white gloves prowled the house, flicking her tail, familiarising herself and deciding she would be Isaac's new caretaker and followed him everywhere. The kittens were named by Isaac, Eyes-in-the-Dark who had big flashing green eyes, and Apricot, whose little face always seemed to be smiling, and who had glommed on to Daisy like she was her real mommy and liked nothing better than curling in Daisy's lap in the evenings, purring softly.
But the cats did earn their keep, and usually they could see a ginger blur or a spot of black fur and Queen Victoria teaching her children how to pounce, and they were satisfied to catch birds and mice and baby rats, as Isaac had guessed, and never came begging for scraps, and they didn't bring gifts back to the kitchen either because what they caught was what they ate. Their mother was a farmyard cat and taught her babies well, possibly she even gave Billie and Beth a few pointers because the goat-kids were taking to foraging too, and were already bleating to be let out before Isaac had his Wellies on to let them out of the barn to run and dick about in the meadow while Jet looked on like a devoted nanny and scented the air for trouble, all the smells of the neighbourhood drifting past his nose.
Their lifestyle had altered drastically from when Daisy first arrived here. Now, they rose with the birds and tended to the animals while the Aga warmed and then returned to have a small breakfast; Daisy did most of the cooking but the others helped, and they learned from each other, and Daisy hunted for eggs while Piper took flight in the woods foraging for treats, and Daisy didn't ask why Isaac felt it necessary to take his gun when he went fishing, but as long as they never heard a shot she wasn't worried, and he stuck to the parts of their river that only locals would know about and were out of the open. And when the weather was too bad to do anything but make sure the animals had feed and water in the barn, they had devoted their mornings to cooking: they learned to preserve vegetables and dried fresh peas and strung up onions like the stereotypical French guy with a striped shirt and sharp moustache, they jarred cooked tomatoes and made chutneys. Early on, before the fruit could turn, they made blackberry-and-apple jam and plum jam and were confident but realistic about the outcomes and they did what they had watched Aunt Penn do for ages with the wrinkle test on a cold saucer and put the jam-jars in the oven to sterilise them and Isaac had to stick his arm in the water-butt until his fingertips pruned because he'd burned his hand on the baking-tray they had used to arrange the jars and they had no running water or ice-packs to soothe the burned skin, but it wasn't major and his palm had a two-inch strip of angry pink skin for days, and it hurt but the Boy Scouts' Handbook said that was a good; if a burn didn't hurt was when they had to worry, and they all learned to take precautions and not dick about around the stove, which became Daisy's domain because she was so diligent and patient and Isaac laughed that she had learned its secrets the way they knew animals. An old stove like an Aga had character and had to be treated with respect; different doors opened and they got different results trying to cook things in different places and Piper wasn't allowed near it when Daisy was cooking on the hobs. Aunt Penn's cookbooks were godsends, and especially Edmond's book called Preserves, and the pantry had soon started to fill with jarred cooked tomatoes, jam and minestrone soup, jarred vegetables for the winter, chutneys and piccalilli, using the ingredients the Army had ignored because they weren't tinned beans and tomato soup and therefore written off as useless.
But necessity was the mother of invention, and three kids with unlimited time and nothing better to do proved to be ingenious.
Proving once again that they were Adults Now, Isaac had spent a good hour every day amongst his other chores building store bins for the onions, red-onions, horseradish, shallots and other root vegetables they had been picking. They couldn't feed an army but they would do well on vegetables over the winter and Isaac had success catching a rabbit but needed to put more thought into traps so they could breed rabbits for meat. One morning when their chores were done, the weather was too pretty not to and they put on hiking-boots and gathered walking-sticks and wicker baskets and went a-foraging like they had been doing it for years. Daisy made wild garlic pesto from pignuts and wild garlic leaves and the last of the parmesan in the refrigerator, and it was pretty good, drizzled on top of the smooth butternut-squash soup Daisy made for dinner a few days later.
They also started thinking ahead because the implications of the girls not laying as many eggs meant winter was on its way and they would soon have limited fresh veg and Isaac spent a lot of time in the greenhouse, and tending to the cabbages and spinach and storing the crops, and they made several trips to the neighbour's farm because they had squashes and rare pumpkins growing and cauliflower and it was a shame to waste it all and Isaac had previously picked Giant Puffballs in the field, which were a type of mushroom and Isaac made them laugh telling a story about how he and Edmond had once scaled a fence to pick a white duck. Isaac was a keen mushroom-forager and had more experience than Piper, who admitted quietly on one of their foraging hikes about Mushroom Night, but Isaac said they weren't dead and that was what mattered, and Mr Bowen their neighbour had been a keen grower of mushrooms - he grew them in a dank corner of an old barn, and Isaac had written an essay on how Mr Bowen's granddad had grown mushrooms in the same way during the War and they got the idea that they could grow mushrooms too, transporting a dead log practically groaning from all of the mushrooms growing on it, back to the house in a wheelbarrow.
Daisy was getting better and better at not just cooking but enjoying what she made for them, and Piper was learning from her, and Isaac had his animals and was happy looking after them while their wood-pixie continued to hone her foraging skills, and Edmond had a Cheeses book and Aunt Penn had a few books on cheese-making and Daisy got the sense that Aunt Penn dove headfirst and fully-committed into projects and hobbies such as jamming, beekeeping and cheese-making with a furious passion and then realised she had three children and an intense career so everything she had invested money in would never pay off because she didn't have the time to enjoy it, but she had left behind a house cluttered with everything her children would need to take up the hobbies themselves, including the memories of her passion and the skills she had unknowingly taught them simply through doing it, and having curious children who consumed knowledge and read more than any kids Daisy had ever met and had liked to sit in the kitchen with a cup of tea watching Mummy in her apron as she made jam while arguing on the phone with Other Experts.
Piper became a caseiculturist - a cheese-maker. If being a child-prodigy shepherdess wasn't her true calling, she could fall back on making the creamiest, softest goat's cheeses ever created. The first ball of cheese was the size of a softball and was soft, crumbly and creamy, slightly tangy and almost sweet all at once, and didn't smell that much of goat at all.
The morning Piper said the first cheese was ready to eat, and she had taste-tested it and it was good,they decided to commemorate the event. After tending to the animals, Isaac went fishing, bringing back one fat pink trout, and Daisy cooked it in a greaseproof-paper parcel with the last of the bell peppers, red-onion, fennel, finely-sliced potatoes, broccoli florets and drizzles of pesto. After dinner, Piper brought out the goat's cheese. They opened a packet of Nairn's oatcakes, and had the cheese with the last of the fresh blackberries from the thatch out by the meadow.
Meg was prolific and was milked twice a day, morning and night; her kids were weaned and enjoyed foraging, but Piper kept milking her and Meg kept producing, and Piper kept making cheese, getting more confident in her success and sometimes adding herbs or rolling the log-shaped cheeses in them or forming small, dainty rounds to mature for more than ten days. She was delighted by her cheese and dedicated to her twice-daily tasks of milking Meg and properly storing the milk until she could make another cheese.
Daisy made chestnut flour. Isaac, a prolific reader just like Edmond and Daisy, told her that in Olden Days chestnut flour was basically poor-man's flour. It was gluten-free and the finished product was a little coarser than what was in the Tupperware tubs but with the staggering quantity of sweet chestnuts Piper had harvested from the trees on their neighbour's farm, all the time and effort put into it - the chestnuts had to be boiled and peeled, then cooled, then grated in a Mouli grater then cooked in the oven and then the flakes had to be blended, and she was glad they had a blender and enough power to finely mill everything into a powder - into flour - rather than resort to the old-school pestle and mortar on the mantelpiece over the Aga. But they had a decent weight of chestnut flour when Daisy was finally finished and considering it had all come from foraging, that was pretty cool, and Piper found a recipe in Edmond's Hedgerow book for chestnut pancakes, and Daisy figured if they used half-chestnut and half regular flour they could make both stretch and still enjoy the novelty of having made chestnut pancakes literally from the hedgerow to the dinner-table.
There were zero food-miles in them and everything was organic! Nuclear detonations may be going off all over the world but in their tiny forgotten postage-stamp of it, they refused pesticides and aggressive farming and disdained battery chickens.
Several nights in a row Daisy saw Piper carefully slide the Mushrooms book from the collection of Edmond's River Cottage books with that serious solemn look on her face that all of the siblings got when they were reading, totally consumed, and one dawn set out with Isaac and a gnarled walking-stick each, a wicker basket and Jet, in search of the meadow by the blackberry patch which was overgrown with mushrooms, and after double- and triple-checking the harvest in Edmond's book and several others from Aunt Penn's library, Daisy made them a creamy chestnut-and-mushroom pie topped with herby mashed potatoes baked in the Aga and it was insanely good, and they lit the candles for a little while that evening and sipped herb tea and Piper played with the kittens while Isaac read Edmond's copy of Pigs & Pork: River Cottage Handbook No. 14 and Daisy sat at the upright piano trying to remember what she had rarely practiced at twelve when she'd had piano lessons, but the music-books weren't too difficult and her fingers seemed to remember even if her brain didn't, and she started from Middle C and found the children's music-theory books and went from there.
When they weren't eating, they were preparing their meals, or preparing food for storing. They had made chutneys and jarred vegetables and the root-cellars were stuffed and Isaac had collected seeds and Daisy was drying wild mushrooms to keep and making mushroom stock for surprisingly rich pasta dishes, or making fish stock with the remains of their dinners, and they all spent a lot of time in the garden, raking the leaves to add to the compost and dividing rhubarb and moving 'tender' plants into the greenhouse, cutting back perennials and dividing herbaceous ones - Isaac had to point out which were which to Daisy, who would've been more at home on Mars than in a working vegetable garden. They spent a good amount of time collecting and organising seeds for the next year, and treating the soil - raking, hoeing and turning it with compost - sowing seeds in the utility-room where it was warmer; they harvested the last of the apples and pears and planted spring cabbages, pruned the climbing roses all over the front of the house, and Isaac found the old push-lawnmower and went around the lawn.
Somehow along the way, they had started not just surviving but enjoying themselves. It was quiet and natural and not obvious, and Daisy never even realised it except when she saw Piper's relaxed smile or the intensity in Isaac's eyes as his glasses flashed in the firelight, his nose in a book, Eyes-in-the-Dark scattering the hotels across the Monopoly board and she caught Piper humming along to the familiar songs Daisy was slowly but steadily teaching herself on the piano. They adjusted to their new lifestyle of farm-work, rising early and going to bed early but as they continued to work and got stronger, they had started not just collapsing with exhaustion after eating dinner like zombies, but enthusiastic about their meal and looking forward to working on a jigsaw puzzle before they changed into their pyjamas and brought out the blankets and pillows and went to bed with the firelight soothing to them and the owls hooting when it wasn't raining, and sometimes when Jet needed to go out, Daisy poured herself an apple tea from the teapot that was always filled with the stuff Piper made and Apricot would cuddle in the crook of her arm, purring loudly, and they would stand in the yard with Isaac staring up at the full bright moon. She knew sometimes he would go outside on clear nights, under the guise of letting Jet out or Queen Victoria in, hoping to see Edmond walking or even limping or dragging himself down the lane that was becoming increasingly overgrown.
He didn't, and the days passing turned into weeks, and they were becoming strong and lean and sometimes saw smoke billowing across the horizon when they walked up Hawk's Hill, as Daisy had renamed it, from the nearest town and even farther afield and slowly the lush greens she associated eternally with English summers faded, turning to eye-catching ochres and scarlet and deep purples, before the first storm blew most of the dead foliage from the branches and they woke to a drearier world of crisp greys and hazy lavenders, fog shrouding the mornings, eerily beautiful and wistful and reminding her of miserable Classic novels she had been reading in the evenings - Wuthering Heights and Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein but Doctor Zhivago was wonderful and War and Peace, The Age of Innocence and Poldark were epic, and Piper giggled at the names of Dickens' characters and Great Expectations was heart-breaking. She read The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows to remember warmth and lazy Perfect Days and to remind herself what it felt to be hopeful, and Piper read the entire Harry Potter series aloud after Isaac finished, finally, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy after The Hobbit and when Daisy had finished reading them Gone With the Wind aloud Isaac had already decided on A Song of Ice and Fire.
Daisy's English teachers would never have guessed that it would take World War III for her to start reading Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Hemingway by choice - and what was more, enjoy them. Her cousins were avid readers, had been home-schooled, and Aunt Penn apparently had earned enough to allow her children to go on book-sprees at the bookstore Waterstones, and there were books stuffed everywhere and Daisy could tell who had chosen the book in the store just by the genre. Aunt Penn had old copies of every Agatha Christie book and Isaac had them crying with laughter as he read out P G Wodehouse's Jeeves books, the shell-shocked diligence of Isaac starting to melt into his characteristic warmth and enthusiasm and humour.
King Lear broke her heart.
The sweetest, saddest story she had read in ages was The BFG; and The Lord of the Flies gave Piper her first nightmares in months.
Every day they waited for Edmond to come home; and every day when he didn't, they bolstered each other with sad half-smiles, and got on with things.