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Summers were longer then, and warmer. Winters were colder, the crack of ice on puddles, the bite of wind, rattling the windows, the coziness of making a cubby under the clothes-horse in front of the fire. Dad watching football, Mum with her knitting.

We lived with Mum's mother on a 1/4 acre block with a garden full of fruit trees. Two cherries that hung thick with fruit at Christmas time. My sister and I would pick them in pairs and hang them over our ears. On Christmas day the kitchen was hot and loud and full of aunties cooking chickens and preparing salads and the back yard was full of uncles drinking beer and cousins chasing each other under the abundant cherry trees, around the blooming, brilliant hydrangeas, past the trestle tables laden with nuts and fresh fruit.

The garden was a vital part of my childhood. Always something to do. Water running down the brick path from the tap. Blossoms like pink snow drifting on the breeze in spring. One winter the apricot tree was struck by lightning and split clean in half. It still grew, though, still gave us fruit. One autumn, Dad built us a cubby in the nectarine tree.

As cubbies go, it wasn't the most fabulous. It didn't have a door or windows, it didn't even have walls it was just a platform built in the fork of the tree but it was big enough for us. For me and my sister and our friends.

That cubby was spy headquarters, it was a space ship and a desert island, it was a grocery shop and a fairy castle, most of all, it was a pirate ship. We sailed on high seas of imagination all winter and through storms of blossom in the spring. We watched the nectarines form, tiny green blips in the spring that swelled and grew every day. Urged by curiosity we picked some before they were ripe and dug our nails into them, pulled apart the hard green of their flesh to reveal the soft stone in the middle, the tiny heart of their seed. We ate them in the summer, our bounty.

Autumn came and the leaves curled like yellow fish and fell to the ground and the pirates caught them for food. Better than that, though were the apples of Nana's wonderful Jonathan tree.

We'd been given pocket knives for Christmas and we tied them with string for harpoons, arcing them down into fallen apples and hauling them back up to our ship, the dog a circling shark.

Nothing ever tasted better than Nana's apples. You had to eat them with a knife because they were always full of codlin worms, but that didn't matter. We cut the wormy bits out and fed them to the dog and ate the apples all sweet and crisp with the cold nights in them. Nothing was ever more jolly or more wonderful than that ship and a part of me will always be there.

Somehow years passed and Nana passed on and I grew up and I got my own 1/4 acre block. I planted trees on it but no apple I've ever eaten has been able to match the sweetness and tartness of Nana's Johnnies. One autumn it occurred to me that if the new owners cared for that tree, they would be pruning and they might give me a cutting so that I could grow one of my own. And that if they didn't care for that tree then they wouldn't mind if I came and took a few cuttings of my own. So I wrote them a letter and asked.

They phoned me up. I was so excited. I could be a pirate again. I could taste those apples again. Only it wasn't going to happen. They'd cut the tree down. They'd cut it down and concreted over it so that they could park their truck there and the yard and the trees and all of that life was gone now.

Years pass and I'm in a different house with different trees. Growing my own. Still remembering, but that's all it can ever be. A secret place in my mind where a garden grows. A memory of childhood.

Learn more about this author, Amanda Le Bas De Plumetot.
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