As I write, with the weather on the turn and summer lapsing away like grief, as Emily Dickinson put it, there are daily consolatory inspections of the potager after school to check on the pumpkin patch. This autumn there are a dozen jolly giant squashes ripening, an increase of about 600 per cent on my first feeble attempts last year, which grew scarcely large enough to decorate a small side table and necessitated a trip to the supermarket in order to carve lanterns.
I had promised the children a Halloween party, as trick-or-treating in our sparsely-populated Norfolk village – where retired couples draw their curtains at 4 p.m. – would be a dispiriting experience. Around 20 children came in fancy dress and played games like apple bobbing and eating a sticky bun suspended from a string with their hands behind their backs. They ate their way through a gruesome menu of “vampire repellent” (garlic bread) with “Frankenstein fingers” (sausages) followed by a pudding of “pus and blood clots” (a strawberry jelly and a lime milk jelly scrambled together), then danced to a Halloween disco and toasted marshmallows over the firepit.
