The Gingerbread Woman

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

LOVE TO READ?

LOVE GREAT SALES?

GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS

DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

The Gingerbread Woman

A Novel

Jennifer Johnston

For Pat, the treasure,

with much love

Der Frühling will kommen

der Frühling meine Freud’;

nun mach’ich mich fertig,

zum Wandern bereit.

Spring is on its way

Springtime — my delight!

Now I shall make ready

To begin my travels …

Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock)

Wilhelm Müller (1794-1824),

set to music by Franz Schubert

My mother makes jam.

Seasonal jam.

Raspberry, blackberry and apple, loganberry, marrow and ginger, golden crab-apple jelly and, of course, marmalade.

Not a million miles from here – just down the road, in fact, across the railway line and turn right.

Five minutes’ walk.

She makes other things too: shortbread biscuits, sponge cakes, rich fruit cake, brandy snaps … could go on for ever, but where’s the point. I’m sure you get the message.

There is no one left in the house now for whom to make jam, but she continues to do it as she has always done. And we, her four children, mark the seasons, winter, spring, summer, autumn, by our dogged and grateful acceptance of the jewel-coloured jars that she packs neatly into cardboard boxes and hands to us as we leave her house after our brief familial visits.

‘The jam, dear,’ she will say. ‘Don’t forget the raspberry jam. I know the children like it even if you don’t.’

She is right, of course. The children love it; and they love the sponge cakes filled with rich chocolate cream and the gingerbread men.

‘Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.’

They think she’s slightly dotty when she says that to them. They prefer deadly war games or other adventures on their computer screens to stories about foxes and silly little gingerbread men.

I have to admit that I love the gingerbread men too; their slightly cinnamon taste and their chewy texture. She knows this, remembers it from long ago, and though I don’t have any children for her to indulge, she indulges this childishness in me happily. None of us have to worry about her yet; she is hale and hearty and fully in control of her life and, she thinks, of ours. We let her think that, but in reality we get on with what we have to do and don’t run to her as we used to with the grown-up equivalents of cut knees and broken hearts.

I didn’t choose to live round the corner from her, in the way that I do; my little house was left to me by an aunt and though I haven’t spent much time in it, except for recent months, I have never mustered up the energy to sell it. It has become a sort of repository for my bits and pieces – old clothes, childhood’s books that I could never bear to give to my nephews and nieces, other oddments that I have collected on my travels – and at this moment I have become a temporary part of this consoling mess.