Hens Dancing by Raffaella Barker Page B

with pink sequin lips, matching ostrich-feather tutu and tiara. She is thrilled, loves the camera and bats her eyelashes and claps whenever it is pointed at her. The boys and I leave her at the centre of a ring of people all vying for her smile, and head off to pick strawberries. It is jam-making season, and having positively decided not to do any of this apron-string stuff now I am a single mother, was faintly appalled to find Felix in the larder this morning, matching jars to lids.
    â€˜What are you doing that for?’
    â€˜There isn’t any jam left, so we’ll have to make some today.’
    I try to get him to see sense. ‘But we’re about to go away to Cornwall, to have our summer holiday; we don’t need to bother with jam-making.’
    Felix gazes at the larder wall.
    â€˜We should bother. We need jam,’ he says firmly. Increasingly, Felix is taking over the running of the household. Am not quite sure who his role model is, but am determined that he shall be mine.
    The strawberry field is empty of pickers but full of flamboyant scarecrows. The farmer is a big fan ofB-movies, and every strawberry season he adorns his field with mannequins in nylon bikinis and skimpy dresses from charity shops. Giles runs ahead, but stops short at the entrance.
    â€˜Look, Mum,’ he yells, ‘they’ve hung one.’ The gate is guarded by a mannequin dangling on a rope from a vast oak tree, this one clad more in the style of a Brueghel peasant than Raquel Welch.
    â€˜I like the wedding one, she must have kept the birds away. I’m going to pick near her.’ Giles grabs a punnet and makes his way towards the centre of the field where a fabulous blonde is positioned, with a vast confection of transparent polythene on her head and trailing down her back. Despite her green bikini, there is no question that she is a bride, and I make a mental note to tell the handbag gang to come down and photograph their wedding collection here instead of in my bathroom. Ten pounds of strawberries later we are home, and to my relief the recipe book says, ‘Leave to steep in sugar for twenty-four hours.’
    Miles the photographer is on a ladder outside the bathroom window, looking in at The Beauty in the bath with a handful of chicks he has scooped out of their run. There is no handbag visible in this shot, and when I mention this oversight, Miles rolls his eyes and says kindly, ‘The product has a voice, you know, it kind of speaks through this sort of set-up.’
    What a nonce, as Giles would say.
    July 22nd
    Jam-making commences at dawn. Utterly forgot the steeping strawberries yesterday, so have committed cardinal sin of leaving them lying around for two days. Kitchen quickly begins to resemble Willie Wonka’s factory, with bubbling pink mess on the Aga and ruby droplets on small saucers and indeed the floor. Felix is not helping. He is lying in bed reading the
Beano
and is no longer my role model. Am scraping old labels off jars with my fingernails and listening to a practical pig-keeping report on
Farming Today,
when there is an ominous gushing sound followed by billowing black smoke. The Aga hotplate vanishes beneath a black mass, like sticky volcano lava, as more and more syrupy jam froths out of the pan.
    â€˜Bastard, bloody, sodding jam. God, I hate the Aga. Why is this happening? What do I do?’ Wailing and weeping self-pitying tears, I wage war on my strawberry jam.
    July 23rd
    Ten jars, and it has set, and is delicious. Aga still thick with incinerated jam. David arrives for house-sitting instructions and is clearly impressed. Felix is not: ‘Lastyear’s was better,’ he insists at teatime. No time to argue though, I must pack for the longed-for holiday.
    July 25th
    Have arrived in Cornwall after gruelling two-day journey in the car, including sleepless night at Welcome Break hotel on the M4. My mother, who refuses to sit in the front, has kept her eyes shut