APRIL 2021: ALMOST FORGETTING THE PIE

The day, the salt-sprayed and wide-beached day, has arrived. My wife and I are going to take her mother to check on her caravan in Cleethorpes and make preparations for the next Great Unlocking, which will happen in May and which will mean she can have, at the age of 92, yet another season in the sun. 2020’s brief sojourn by the water was like a half-eaten sandwich that you have to leave on the plate because the café has suddenly been declared bankrupt and they’re putting the chairs on the tables and turning the menus into paper aeroplanes and launching them around the kitchen.

She is part of what we’ve learned to call, in these tortured times, our bubble; she comes every Sunday for her Sunday dinner and praises my Yorkshire puddings but the talk inevitably turns to the weather in Cleethorpes and sometimes, between the Yorkshires and the main course, my wife will check her phone and read out the temperatures and wind speeds and predicted precipitation in Cleethorpes and even if it’s freezing cold and blowing a gale my mother-in-law will say ‘Aye, but it’ll be lovely in front of that van’ and I’ll go and mash the potatoes. We are planning our trip and we’re wondering about going for fish and chips and eating them in the caravan but my mother-in-law says ‘It’s OK, I’ll make a pie’ and my heart leaps at the thought of one of her wonderful meat and tatie pies. With mushy peas, of course. You’ve got to do it properly.

We pack the car with the curtains and blankets my mother-in-law brought home in October 2020, after her last Covid-curtailed season. We put coats and hats and scarves in while at the same time hoping we won’t need them. It strikes me forcibly that this is almost the first time I’ve been to the coast since I started writing this book about the coast; I’m more excited than I can admit to anybody for fear of looking foolish but it’s a bit like a cookbook writer must feel when they’ve been banned from the pantry for a while and they’re finally allowed in.

We check the weather and it looks like it’s going to be a freshly unwrapped day of the kind you might need wrapping up in. We set off and the coast is waiting to welcome us. We drive down a hill and turn a corner and we remark that the daffodils that brightened up the verge have gone over. There’s a real sense that the world is turning. Just one more thing: spring is here and rattling towards summer. Come on: there are pies to be eaten and strolls to be strolled. There is silence in the car as we all project ourselves towards that sacred and liminal space where the tide meets the sand and they both meet your toes.

Suddenly my mother-in-law, from her nest on the back seat surrounded by bags and the little packet of biscuits she brings just in case, says, rhetorically, ‘Have I brought the pie?’ She fishes in the bag next to her that we all think the pie is in. It isn’t there. We pull into a side street next to the River Dearne; oddly, it’s only about half a mile from our house and I’ve lived in this village all my life but I’ve never been on this particular side street before. We look in the bag and in the boot but it’s a fact. We’re pieless. Crust almighty!

My wife turns round and we drive back; it strikes me, not for the first time as I piece this book together in these most extraordinary of years, that everything rings with metaphor even more than usual. We set off; we turn back. We lock down; we are unlocked. We advance a little; we retreat. People are allowed in the house then people are not allowed in the house. We think we have a pie but we do not have a pie.

We park outside mother-in-law’s house and she goes in and then returns bearing the pie triumphantly as though it is part of the Crown Jewels like the sceptre and the orb. We put it on the back seat next to her so that now we have two precious passengers.

The route is simple and it is made up of lines like the back of my hand. It ends with the road down to the caravan. The sky is wide and welcoming and even the clouds seem to have been glued together with light. There’s a bridge over the Trent that we call the Halfway Bridge even though it’s not really halfway. My mother-in-law keeps an eye out for apple blossom and we speculate about the trees we’ll see near the caravan; last year the lockdown must have been good for blossom because we harvested bag after bag of apples from the trees in the scrubland between the sand and the Fitties Bungalows where we occasionally saw a homeless man living in a tent. My mother-in-law would lean forward precariously, trying to hook one more fruit with her stick. Once, in the evening, when we were bringing her home for a few days, we saw some deer like nervous and uncertain shadows; they seem to have been etched on the air and now whenever we go to the caravan or return from the caravan we look for the deer and we never see them. But, if everything is metaphor, then maybe seeing them once is enough and the rest is just resonance and humming.

Suddenly we can smell the fish fingers and we know we’re nearly there. And we pass Grimsby Town’s ground, Blundell Park, and we know we’re even more nearly there. And we pass the leisure centre and the light railway and we turn down into the camp. We’re there. We’re here. We’ve got a pie.