A few months later, we moved from Liverpool to the Vale of Aylesbury to start a new life. Part of the new life was to be able to spend much more time wandering about the countryside, as I had in my youth. Come the first early autumn I noticed in the hedgerows amongst the usual Blackthorns and Hawthorns another odd-looking tree, one hanging heavy with a plum-like fruit. They were somewhat larger than the Sloes on the Blackthorns. However deadly a fruit might look I can never resist the urge to put one in my mouth. And anyway there was no serpent up the branches trying to tempt me, so what could the harm be? Just one bite and I knew it was the same fruit that had been used in the dessert in that dark and dreary hotel. A Damson. And there were thousands of them on this tree. It only took a few minutes for me to fill my haversack to the brim.
These initial ones were stewed. They went well with my morning bowl of porridge. A crumble was baked on the Sunday. Over the following two or three weeks I came across numerous more of these Damson trees, in the hedge-rows across the Vale of Aylesbury. And nobody else seemed bothered about harvesting this abundant and free wild fruit. The usual types would be out picking Blackberries, but they would all pass the Damsons by. Did they not know what they were missing, or was my palate markedly different to my fellow ramblers and bramblers? The rest of my family did not particularly share my need for a daily intake of Damsons.
But it wasn’t just the taste of the Damson, it was the look of the fruit, its blush of pectin on the dark purple skin; the way they hung together in clumps on the bough, almost like bunches of large black grapes.
Over the coming year I would mark with a cross on my six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps of the Vale, whenever I came across a Damson tree. The dozens soon climbed into scores and it was not long before there was a gross of these trees marked on my maps. Far more fruit than even a legion of Drummonds could get through.
Then as I was out walking early one September morning I came across a whole field of them. The trees had been planted purposefully in rows – an orchard of Damson trees. But half the trees were dead or dying. And on those still living the fruit was being left to rot. Further on in my morning walk I came across more of these orchards, all in the same state of neglect. This led me to believe that at some point in the not too distant past there must have been a thriving demand for this prince amongst the plum family.
This was all back in the 1980s when there was no Google to type the word Damson into and learn all there was to know and much else beside about the fruit that so fired my passions. Around that time, when I was not off coercing Echo & The Bunnymen or locked in a recording studio with Jimmy Cauty, I would be spending my working time in the Aylesbury library writing and researching. It was here that I learnt the name of the Damson comes from the name of the city of Damascus, the ancient and modern capital of Syria. That it is believed it was around this city, over 2,000 years ago, that man started to hybridise various types of plums and wild cherries to arrive at this smallish, dark and packed-with-flavour fruit. The biblical story of Saul, on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians, falling to the ground after being blinded by the light and his epiphany and conversion was one that had held a grip on my imagination over the years. I had often wondered when my own road to Damascus epiphany would happen, if not a full-blown conversion of some sort. And when it did, what changes would it make to me? And would I have to change my name like Saul did to Paul or Cassius to Muhammad?
Sitting in the hushed library, my mind was often in a state of being highly inflamed. This could be in regard to planning the Ocean Rain tour, or concerning strategies that The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu might take, or writing my half of the Bad Wisdom books. But back to Damsons. In the extensive local history shelves of the library I learnt the cultivation of the Damson was once a large-scale local industry, an industry confined to only a few parishes of the Vale of Aylesbury and nowhere else in the British Isles. It had begun to flourish when the Victorian railway builders connected the Vale with other regions of the country. But the industry declined rapidly after the Second World War. Once we could get bananas and oranges and all sorts of other exotic fruits from around the globe, it seemed we lost our palate for the many locally grown seasonal fruit.
Since then the fruit in those orchards had been left to, if not wither on the vine, rot on the branch.
But further reading revealed even stranger reasons for its decline. It seemed this fruit was not only cultivated for its taste but the skins produced a dye highly prized in Luton by the hatters and milliners. You did know that Luton was the hat-making capital of the Empire and the local football team are called the Hatters? If not you should have done, and anyway you know now. But it was not just the milliners of Luton who prized the dye made from Damson skins. Through the 1930s, as Hitler was gearing up the Third Reich, he could not get enough of the Damson skins to dye the uniforms of the Luftwaffe. To think those Heinkels were manned by men wearing uniforms dyed by Damsons grown in the Vale of Aylesbury, as they flew over to drop their not-so-gentle bombs.
No wonder the local farmers gave up on their Damson orchards when the rumours of their very special war effort started to spread. They attempted to spread a counterrumour, that the uniforms of our very own Royal Air Force were dyed using their patriotic Damsons, but the damage had already been done. Anything connected to the Damsons was connected with supporting the enemy. In fact Damsons were the enemy within.
But as the orchards were left to die another feral population of Damson trees started to spread and take root along the hedgerows that criss-crossed the Vale.
In early ’93 I moved into a small and in-need-of-repair farmhouse. From its south-facing windows I had a magnificent view across the Vale. Surrounding the house were five black-barked trees of little account. Useful to string my washing line between, and that was about it. But in those three or four weeks between the pure white of the Black-thorn blossom and the blushed pink of the Hawthorn blossom exploding down the local hedgerows, these five dark trees burst forth with their large and delicate white blossoms. It took the appearance of this blossom for me to recognise these five trees to be Damsons.
It was the appearance of the blossom in my garden which caused my imagination to start tearing in too many directions all at the same time. In my fevered mind it was all beginning to make sense. Because I had never ventured forth on the road to Damascus seeking any sort of epiphany or even full-blown conversion, Damascus had sent out her envoys to track me down and get me. So over the past 1,947 years since Saul fell to the road blinded by the light, those fruit-bearing trees had been heading west. Century by century they were getting closer to me, arriving at the Vale 170 years before me. And even after they were left to die as traitors in their orchards before I was born, they had started their feral march along the hedgerows until they got to this small white farmhouse on a hillside. Five of them forming a guard around the building, waiting for me to come. And once I entered the house, like a lobster into a pot, they would ensure there was no escape for me. Those five wild Damson trees provided me with all the Damsons I could use. There was a large freezer in my workshop, whose only job was to house my year’s supply of frozen Damsons. And then there were the shelves of jars containing Damson jam and the demijohns of Damson brandy. And the handwritten book that I kept to collect all the recipes that I could find that used Damsons in some way – it had the flippant title of ‘Damsons