Thermal Benefits of a Sole-based Diet
Warm evening air wrapped itself like a suspiciously gaseous blanket around the collection of chattering bodies. Fully-fed, partially burned and barely awake, they sat around the remnants of a fire pit and contemplated various matters of import; these ranged from how best to avoid conversing with their companions, right the way to what they should all spend the evening chatting about. These kinds of polarising opinions are often rife in large gatherings, and are a brilliant reason as to why they should, at all costs, be avoided.
Principal among the camp of the incessant chatters was Gerald, or Uncle Gerald as his nieces and nephews knew him. Any silence was worth filling with words according to him, and it didn't matter at all whether those words were of interest to anyone, even the speaker themselves. Such was the origin of such exciting conversational stimuli as "It's like I said before: I was born on a Wednesday afternoon" and "Do you still think the lemonade is perfectly fine?". When taken out of context, such phrases have the propensity to sound like challenges or threats, but that does nothing to diminish their banality in the moment.
On the other end of the spectrum, mere feet but also a whole world away, was Aunty Beryl. Aunty Beryl's firm life view was that if something was worth saying it would already have been said, and therefore to offer anything now was to scrape the bottom of the social barrel. With such great orators and philosophers occupying the bus seats of human history, surely there would be nothing that they, as squalid family barbecue attendees, could add to the important discourse on a tired summer evening. The tranquillity of sunset, therefore, should be all the conversation they could justify, and quite enough for anyone.
It's fair to conclude from this that Uncle Gerald and Aunty Beryl often struggled to find a middle ground, with Gerald making every offer he could think of and Beryl responding to none of them. It would be utterly unfair to conclude, but also entirely correct to state, that they were perfectly happily married regardless. In fact, it was in celebration of that marriage lasting for thirty years that they, and those members of their family who were unable to think of an excuse in time, were gathered around the fire pit on that summer evening.
Scattered sporadically around the circle were proponents of conversation styles that bridged the entire gulf between Gerald and Beryl, from the grunt-first-complain-second teenage contingent, whose enjoyment of chatter would depend on the average age of their audience, to the youth who tried to match the words per minute of their uncle, to the heads of the family, grandma Sadie and grandpa Hector.
The venerated elders sat in their own niche when it came to social interaction. Smiling away merrily at the mere presence of company, laughing at the antics of the children whether innocent or malicious, and seemingly able to produce sweets from the void behind the stars, the grandparents would engage happily in any conversation or silence that came their way. What really got them going, however, was telling stories of the past.
Sometimes these stories would begin, quite unsolicited, during the course of a discussion about something important, for instance, where the children were last seen or if that audible cracking sound was coming from their toilet. On these occasions, detailed narrations of life events bearing tangential-to-no relevance to the topic at hand were seen as something of an unwelcome distraction. This is despite their compelling three act structure and heavy use of rose tinting. On most occasions, however, the stories were requested. This was when grandma and grandpa could really get into their stride and indulge in some long-form half-truths for the rest of the family.
Sitting in shelter from the light of a sun that had had quite enough of heights for one day, Grandma Sadie's ears were pricked by the sound of an impressionable voice.
"Do you like open fires Grandma Sadie?" asked Little Hubert, who was in the middle of jabbing at the ashes with his mother's umbrella. He couldn't waste a moment, because she was sure to notice soon.
"Oh! Yes, very much so." she said.
"Do you ever cook on them?" he enquired further, laying the groundwork for a later request regarding marshmallows and a late bedtime.
"All the time, my darling! All the time. Why, in my younger days I pretty well invented the notion."
"It sounds like there's a story in that!" announced Uncle Gerald, spying a rich vein of potential speech. Aunty Beryl made her objection to such needless recollection of events abundantly clear, in the only way she knew how; stoicism. "Oh don't be like that, my love!" laughed Gerald, immediately recognising the shift in her silence from relaxed to disapproving.
"There's a story there, alright." confirmed Grandpa Hector, preventing a one-sided row of deafening silence. "It just doesn't relate much to the real world."
Grandma Sadie laughed, and waved off the notion of her speaking anything but the Gospel truth.
"Go on, tell us the story!" pleaded Hubert, with agreeable grunts and 'yeah's coming from the other speech enthusiasts. Even among the cadre of silence fans, there were no major complaints. Whilst they would, obviously, have preferred for no effort to be wasted in speaking words that would affect nothing, at least a story unknown to many listeners would impart something new, however trivial.
With a smile and chuckle Grandma Sadie shuffled forward a little in her deeply reclined camping chair, so that she could sit up straighter and become the orator they all wished for her to be. A vast waterfall of crumbs from the day's rolls and biscuits cascaded from her clothing as she did, and the ants nearby, watching from a position of safety beneath the old watering can, knew that they would all eat like royalty that night.
"I suppose this tale began back in the seventies, when your grandpa and I hadn't been married for long. We'd just moved into our house on Venutian Avenue, which was going cheap on account of how the street name made your mouth feel. Do you remember that house, Gloria?" Sadie asked her daughter. Gloria’s eyes, which would otherwise have fallen on the umbrella and fire interaction happening on the lower levels, rose to meet her mother’s. Another victory for little Hubert.
"No." she said, with confusion written into every line on her face.
"That'll be because she wasn't born yet." Grandpa Hector clarified. "We didn't have a child out of wedlock."
"We didn't have central heating either!" Sadie segued smoothly, ever the expert storyteller. "It was a cold March that one. Oh, yes, a very cold March. It was so cold that I had to eat my shoes to keep warm."
"Why are you telling them that?" pleaded Hector with aggrieved shock. "Of course you didn't eat your bloody shoes!"
"Yes I did! It was frosty and bitter, and the only way to take off the edge was with a good mouthful of leather and eyelets."
"You've never eaten a shoe in your life."
"I've eaten many a shoe! Shoes without number have passed between these lips and into my gullet when the grasping hands of winter sought to steal my precious degrees." defied Sadie, her eyes wide with fervent insistence that she had, indeed, become the cobbler’s bane during the cold nights of her past.
"I admit to being a little confused as to how eating a shoe would help in that situation, Sadie." Gerald said. He looked down at his own sandals and tried to picture them on a bed of rice. It didn't seem entirely appetising, especially after that incident with the dog's mess the previous Tuesday.
“The same way that a cup of cocoa or a soup would help! There was nothing else to eat that would keep me as warm as a shoe. A broth would have been fine, but we needed to save that for our tea. Food was in short supply because back in those days; there wasn't as much available and no-one could really be bothered to walk around all the shops getting it. That's why we had the fruit and veg wagon that rolled around every morning to give you your three a day. Back then we couldn’t spare five a day, you see. Now, that wagon eventually became the ice cream van, when grocers were commanded to remain static.”
“But… shoes?”
Grandma made a tutting sound. It was the same one she used whenever one of the younger generations was somehow failing to grasp a self-evident truth.
"They're like a warm, leathery broth, or a hearty Sunday roast that's been in both the oven and the tanning vats a little too long." explained the grandmother, earnestly. "Gives you a good source of heat right in the belly, to warm up those cold bones."
"I can't account for what she got up to of a night when I was sleeping, but I can ruddy well assure you that I never ate any footwear." declared Grandpa Hector, crossing his arms in defiance. He'd not worked his fingers to the bone for their family over the years just to have his reputation besmirched by accusations of loafer lunching. "I've never heard you spouting this shoe rot before in my life!"
"That's because I kept it a secret from you. Couldn't have you worried about me being too cold all those nights, could I?"
"Worried about you being cold? We were famously sweating every night! The house was next to the old incineration plant; we were topping summer highs in winter!"
"Ah, but we spent some days away on our holidays. And visiting old Maggie and Jim Silhouette over Christmas. It was cold then."
"And you ate your shoes on our Christmas visit to Maggie and Jim? On the occasion that you just said was a cold March night? We must have been staying there rather a long time, or been very late. Did you eat one of the few pairs of shoes we would have taken with us?"
"Aye, I did just that." confirmed Sadie, glossing over Hector’s other complaints with expert ignorance. "I got my teeth into the high heels we brought for line dances, dinners with more than four people, and walks along the more precarious cliff edges. You should always dress to impress on a cliff, just in case you fall off and the coroners need to identify you as devilishly fashionable.
“So anyway, every night we were there I'd sneak downstairs past the stairgate, down the noisy, creaky corridor, grip the wobbly, rattly banister, and creep into the draughty dusty porch."
"Where the shoes slept?" interrupted little Hubert, now using the charred, ashen stump of umbrella to stain the trousers of unsuspecting cousin Julia.
"Exactly there!" confirmed Grandma Sadie, eyes twinkling with pride at the narrative memory of her progeny's progeny. "I'd creep in there and chow down on chewy panels, crunchy eyelets and even a little bit of tongue as a treat, just to get some of the frost off my chest and the blizzard out of my soul."
"Every night?!" challenged Grandpa Hector whose tone revealed that he was having none of it.
"Every night."
"We took two pairs of shoes each! And both of mine came back."
"Oh, yes. There was obviously a need for the arts of the spy to be employed in this exercise. My tracks had to be covered, or our hosts would think me terribly rude for accusing them of keeping a cold home. Luckily, back then, the shoeman did his rounds of the streets every morning, picking up used shells and dropping off some gold-topped heels. I put in an order with him each morning for a next-day fresh pair. 'Another pair of black soft-toes?' he'd say, and I'd tell him 'Yes please, sir. I just can't get enough' and he'd look at me all askance, like I was a woman who doesn't need a new pair of sensible shoes every morning, which, of course, I normally wouldn't. But if he'd known I was eating them then he'd have understood."
"No-one would understand anything about this, you old coot."
"Is this still the story about liking an open fire" asked Riley, Julia's sister, who was yet to feel the touch of the ashen brolly.
"Yes. You see I concluded that while shoes were great to warm the belly, they'd be even better hot. Cooked, you know?"
"Why is that the part that needs a check for understanding?"
"Because." Sadie clarified.
"If we accept, for the moment, that everyone here understands the notion of cooking making things hot, which I feel is a reasonable assumption," started Gerald, sticking to his verbose principles, "then are we to understand you began heating shoes during your clandestine feasts?"
"While creeping ever-closer to bankruptcy from your arrangement with the shoeman." added Aunty Gemma, who was, for the sake of clarity, something of a centrist when it came to conversational policy. It was enough to steer Sadie back off course. "Oh, they weren't expensive back then. This was in the golden age of roving cobblery, after the end of rationing but before the tax deterrents were hiked up. All the papers called it the rise of con-shoe-merism."
Beryl frowned, deep in contemplation at what she was hearing. Having studied both historical and contemporary shoe-law, covering taxation, subsidies, fair use and geopolitical impact (none), the introduction of tax deterrents was new to her. There were the levies raised to cover leather subsidies, and some heavy import duties applied to foreign soles in order to keep the domestic market safe, but no taxes to keep shoe sales down in and of themselves. Quite to the contrary, there were huge pushes in the late 1980s to make the public buy more footwear, most notably of all the 'Bared Feet Are Snared Feet' campaign, raising awareness of the dangers of trapping unshod toes in drains and the like. Satanists, in particular, were targeted by the blockbuster release of 'The Devil Wears Prada'.
Whilst this huge body of counter-evidence would have provided a bounty of follow-up questions in the mind of a lesser stoic, Beryl could not excuse idle chatter just for her own elucidation. Even the elucidation of the entire family scarcely made the endeavour any more worthwhile. One family's confusion as to historical shoe tax was a trifle, less than a footnote, compared to the speeches and ideas of the greats. She would not break her silence for it.
Grandpa Hector gave Sadie a withering look, which was, as ever, taken to be her cue to continue.
"I also had a bit of cash squirrelled away in my glasses case, from selling my spare thoughts to strangers in the cafe." she added. To this, at least, Hector nodded, much to the shock of the cynical many.
"Aye, she did that a lot in those days. Kept her out of trouble while I worked in the glass mines." he corroborated.
"You don't mine for glass."
"True. That's why we had to work so hard. Always prospecting and digging, never finding a good vein. But that's not the point. The fact is that my glass mining days and Sadie's thought sales at the cafe are grounded in reality, unlike most of the nonsense soppy old Sadie here's spouting." he said. Sadie poked her tongue out at him.
"I used to get a shilling for a quick nonsense thought, 'How do wasps keep their yellow jackets so clean' and the like. Two shillings for a rumination on current affairs, and a guinea and halfpence for a consideration on how much veg was left in the kitchen. For some reason, our grocery schedule was ever so popular down the cafe, so it became a real earner for us." she said, sharing an affable shrug of mutual, long-term confusion with Grandpa Hector. "Anyway, it meant that I had both the motive and the means to buy daily shoes without anybody else's notice, thus providing the supply for my hot shoes idea.
"I had all of the daytime to scope out how my aims might be best achieved. The sitting room hearth was the most obvious choice, being huge and open. We used to sit in front of it and chat away our evenings," Sadie relayed, to the particular approval of the conversational demographic, "but often, by the time of my overnight wanderings, it had already burned out."
"You presumably would also have just huddled around it for heat, instead of cramming footwear into your mouth, if it had still been burning." speculated Riley.
Sadie pondered this.
"I suppose I could have done, but shoe chewing really is more effective than any fire for personal warming." claimed the grandmother in response, without citing any sources at all. This was of particular interest to great aunt Helen, who had made a career of studying both home insulation and heating solutions for governments around the world, and the effects of consuming all kinds of apparel on the human body. The comparison of the merits of each method of thermal regulation, as offered by Sadie, were fascinating if true, but, it pained her to admit, the whole concept was entirely new to her. No studies had been performed on the core temperature of subjects who were already cold when eating a shoe, however, so the claims couldn't be explicitly ruled out right away. She decided to cogitate a little more and form a robust line of questioning before raising any queries, objections or complaints to Sadie.
"So the hearth was ruled out, but the next best option was to be found in the kitchen. They had a charming little kitchen there, full of little clay ornaments on shelves and windowsills and display cabinets. You remember the clay figures, don't you Hector?" Hector nodded, wearily. "They were little replicas of famous post-office masters and mistresses from the village they lived in, Everscrook. Everscrook is such a lovely place, and it has a very strong tradition with delivered post. They pride themselves, each and every one, on having a letterbox in each home, and always getting letters to the right person by writing the address and name on the envelope." Everyone was grateful for the explanation of how post works. "Naturally as a calf popping out of pregnant cow, Everscrook had a strong and proud line of post office primarchs to support this mail-affinity, hence why the little kitchen was so very much filled with ornaments in their honour."
"How many did they have?" asked Hubert, filling the ashen brolly with pond water. He was preparing for a devastating coup de grace against Uncle Gerald's ugly t-shirt.
"Too many to count." laughed Sadie, at nothing more than interaction with her grandchild. "I would hazard a guess at something like four hundred."
Uncle Gerald spat out his fizzy blue drink in shock at the number. It boded well for the reaction Hubert would get from his pond water gambit.
“Four hundred post masters…”
“Yes, only four hundred.” Sadie lamented, shaking her head with vicarious sadness. “The sparsity of Maggie and Jim’s collection was a plight all-too-common among the collectors of Everscrook. The little figures never were made in large enough quantities to satisfy everyone, so typically you’d only ever see a partial collection, a particular person’s favourites; unless you visited the post museum in the village centre, of course. My, the days and nights we spent there.” She smiled, looking wistfully into the sky for a second. Grandpa Hector could not be reached for a cynical comment, because he too was reminiscing. Gerald and Beryl shared a glance, which was peak communication for the pair of them, and then looked back to the grandparents.
“But why were there so many? How far back into history did these figures go, the dark ages?”
“Ha! There was no post back then, you silly goose! No they go back to the end of the Victorian Era. And as to why there are so many, well, it’s a competitive and stressful field. Can you imagine being singly accountable for every letter in a village of over forty people? It’d be enough to drive anyone around the bend a little, let alone with the weight of such a heritage and pride on your shoulders. There were coups, there were votes of no confidence, there were resignations, there were retirements, and there were even, if I recall correctly, splinter factions of the post office set up that prioritised different delivery routes.”
“Remember Jim telling us about the Cul-De-Sac Representation Post Office? The ones who’d only serve through roads once all the dead-ends were done? Apparently their routes were so inefficient, on account of having to re-tread every major road three or four times before actually putting letters through the doors, that their rounds ran for a full twenty four hours. They were pioneers.” Grandpa Hector chuckled. Sadie placed her hand excitedly on his.
“Of course! We didn’t stop discussing it for weeks. But anyway, under the watchful sentry of a few hundred letter aficionados I stole into the kitchen and toyed with the instruments of gastronomy for a solution to my problem. I fired up the stove, stuffing a pair of Maggie’s oven-gloves in for kindling, poured a little water into a pot, and got it to boiling with a set of heels inside. Jim and Maggie had a pair of steel tongs hanging up just over the serving hatch; both of them were for serving things, so it made sense to keep them together. Their handles were made of the purest ivory, and inlaid with designs of some of the more famous letterboxes from the village. I recall that they fit perfectly into the crook of your hand, so when you were serving things with them you really had control and comfort. I think Maggie won them in a knife-fight outside the British Legion…”
“Yeah, we’ve all heard the stories of Maggie’s blade-lust about the town.” Cousin Julia said, speaking the words that everyone was thinking. Every time they got together it was another tale of skilful fencing and deft slashes from Maggie and, to be frank, they were bored half to death of them.
“Of course you have. They’re some of my favourite memories!” laughed Sadie, lost for a moment in recollections of blood, bandages and joyful smiles. Every time she saw a first aid kit, or jammed a carving knife into a watermelon, she was lost in nostalgia. “… sorry, I was in my own head there. Anyway, I grabbed these tongs and spent near enough an hour hunched over that boiling pot, letting the steam drive into my sinuses while I poked, stirred and squeezed my shoes. At the end of it all it was terribly humid in the kitchen, so I had to open all the windows and mash a loaf of bread into the carpet. By the time I was done with that, the shoes were ready to eat. It was better than a cold shoe, for sure, but the method was imperfect. The biggest problem was that it would make the coal run out too quickly, and we needed that to make toast of a morning.”
“They didn't have a coal-fired oven, you loon! It was coal for the boiler and a gas bottle for the cooker!" protested Hector, his voice cracking and squeaking with indignant amazement.
"Well I used to put coal in it." Sadie pouted.
"No bloody wonder it was always so dirty!"
Grandma Sadie shrugged and pursed her lips, unwilling to spend any more time on the topic.
“Anyway, boiling was out of the window for that reason and because it made the shoes too soggy. An open flame was going to be the only way to really get that crispy edging that makes a moccasin or plimsoll delicious. Now, starting fires in the house wasn’t allowed. Your grandpa wouldn't stand for it on account of the time he burned down the staircase.”
Eyes were narrowed in the direction of Grandpa Hector, who turned a deeper shade of red than his vein-crowded cheeks generally adopted.
“It’s embarrassing enough to burn down your own stairs, but someone else’s? That’s hard to laugh off as an innocent mistake.” he said, in defence of his ultra-conservative fire-safety policy.
“How-“
“It was a silly trip with a lighter and a barrel of engine oil.” he said hurriedly, cutting off the question before humiliation could really set in.
“But why did you have those upstairs to-“
“The normal reasons.”
Uncle Gerald, despite his firm belief that all words should be spoken at all times, could recognise when a topic should be dropped. Eventually. He nodded.
“So as we said, house fires were right out, which only left the outdoors as a potential solution. This was before the days of barbecues, chimineas, or burning down your neighbour’s fence line, so I had to improvise my own solution to the burning question, as it were.” Sadie chuckled to herself, employing her trademark brand of low-impact, wholesome humour to keep listener interested. “Now, Maggie and Jim’s garden wasn’t a huge affair. It was probably half the size of this one, but with more bushes, bigger flowerbeds, grander ornaments, that sort of thing. In short, there was no room to swing a large sack full of spare post master or post mistress figurines. It happened a lot anyway though, because they need some severe airing every single day to avoid clay-rot.”
Cousin Julia puzzled over the nature of clay-rot while Little Hubert started to gradually decant pond water onto Uncle Gerald. It a slow process, but it was good, honest work.
“So there I crept the following night, into that crowded and overgrown jungle, nestling myself among the sack-ravaged foliage and broken limbs, with a single wax candle and Jim’s bag of tree pruning waste. He always kept it under shelter so that the clouds wouldn’t judge him for his crimes, which meant that it was lovely and dry, the perfect kindling for a cooking fire. With only the light of my candle by which to work, I hollowed out a space at the bottom of a particularly thorny pyracantha. Some would argue that I should have chosen a softer hedge, such as their pillow plant, but when one is indulging in such clandestine exploitation of their hosts’ kindness it seems only right, only penitent, to choose a bush of thorns that might punish you as you work.”
Aunt Beryl shifted a little uncomfortably at the uncharacteristically zealous contrition on display from Sadie. She didn’t often admit to any major wrongdoing, nor did she show guilt for many minor infractions, so to wilfully choose laceration by the needle-thorns of a pyracantha was a level of self-flagellation that none had expected.
“You made your fire inside a-… oh, you daft old bat!” cried Grandpa Hector, arriving at several conclusions which evaded the rest of the gathered party.
“I couldn’t have anyone seeing the flames from the house, could I!” she protested in return. “Imagine with Jim and Maggie would have said if they’d caught me.”
“I can remember with complete clarity what they did say when they saw the aftermath.”
“No getting ahead of ourselves.” Sadie cautioned, raising a finger to her husband to secure silence. He acquiesced, but indulged in some meaningful looks towards the rest of the party all the same. A few of them had already guessed where this sordid affair was going.
“Now, as a young girl I had been one of the guides. We went camping an awful lot back then; just us, a heavy canvas sheet to use as a tent, a few tin camping pots that served as both cooking and dining equipment, and some beans for sustenance. A dozen of us would be crowded underneath our pitched shelter each night, swapping ghost stories or counting stones or doing one of our other classic camping games. And outside of the tent, each time, was a fire pit of stones, sticks, ashes and cooking pots. So, as you will surmise, I had a lot of experience in building fires. I gathered some of the more flame-resistant rocks from next-door’s rockery, cleared myself a patch on the ground underneath the pyracantha we’ve already mentioned-“
“The penitent pyracantha?” asked Little Hubert, gathering some of the sharper pieces of gravel for a final hidden trap inside Aunt Beryl’s shoes.
“Yes! The penitent pyracantha.”
“It’ll be a pyro-cantha soon.” grumbled Grandpa Hector. Sadie slapped him on the leg; a warning against spoilers.
“Arranging my rocks in a circle like Guide Mistress Ethyl always taught us, and building a small tent of thin sticks, I put my candle into the centre to get my cooking fire underway. The twigs and dry leaves took even more quickly than I’d anticipated, throwing a bright light like sunrise against the underside of the pyracantha. I remember it turning the berries from a deep orange into the burnished gold of a morning sky. For a time, at least. They turned black rather soon after, but we’ll get to it in a minute.
“With my fire getting going, I took the high heels from my handbag and ran a purloined staking cane through one of them, so that I could toast it on the fire like a marshmallow or sausage. It started off relatively well, and I saw steam coming from between the seams where the leather was drying and crisping up nicely, but it seemed that the flames were saying bums to my intentions. My fire building skills were obviously far better than I had realised, and the blaze continued to grow ever larger, pushing me further and further back from my sub-hedge cubby hole until I was on the garden path, and rather without a paddle if you’ll excuse my metaphors mixing in such a flagrant manner.”
Some sounds of forgiveness were grunted here and there around the circle.
“It was around this time that the shoe was approaching done, but I also noticed that there were glowing embers and infant flames starting to take around the underside of the pyracantha. The berries now glowed of their own accord, an orange of conflagration rather than of skin. In a few short seconds thereafter the whole lower canopy had caught, and the bush was alight like that which spoke to Moses.”
“And what did this one tell you? That you’re a coot and an arsonist?” asked Grandpa Hector. “Jim and Maggie were beside themselves when they saw that their hedge had burned down mysteriously overnight.”
“I’m getting to that!” Sadie snapped, irked that her narrative agency was being robbed by the impatience of her lifelong companion. She’d have thought he’d have more respect and understanding of the cadence of her tales by now, but perhaps there was no teaching an old dog old tricks. “When I saw that fire reaching the height of the first floor windows I decided that something really needed to be done about it, and that tasting my new cuisine could wait. So I headed back inside, turned on the shower, and pointed it out of the window. I think Jim may have awoken and questioned my nocturnal washing routine, but I told him that you’d wet the bed and I needed to get cleaned up. That threw him off the scent.”
“I thought he was looking at me oddly the next morning.” Grandpa Hector confessed, alarmingly calm at this revelation.
“The shower didn’t work quickly, but it did work well. I managed to save everything from the hydrangea onwards, and protected the house itself from becoming an extension of my outdoor stove. With that victory over human’s oldest foe, fire, secured, I headed back outside, camped out by the smouldering embers of what used to be Maggie’s prized roses, and got to work eating a fired heel. Oh, but the taste was smoky and rich! The texture was crispy without being powdery or brittle, and it had the lingering scent of a cobbler’s smile. It was incredibly satisfying to eat, compared to boiled or raw leather, and my belly was filled with the raging fires of a winter hearth. Sitting there, in the soggy, ashy puddle of conflagrated foliage, I finally felt warm for the first night that March.
“As Grandpa has said, somewhat prematurely, Maggie and Jim weren’t best pleased when they saw my night’s work. I managed to avoid suspicion by lying through my teeth, and blaming the whole affair on a fox with behaviour issues. Given the state of their bins every week, they bought the cover story without question, and set fox traps down that same night. Never did catch Mrs Fox, of course, because her business was never in the rear garden at all, but, if I recall correctly, the obsession with stopping the vulpine arsonist consumed them until they day they both perished.” Sadie beamed, once again lost in the golden light of precious memories.
“Anyway, some years later I saw a neighbour of ours cooking on a fire pit outside their own house. Theirs was far more advanced than my own, employing a metal cooking grill and not being inside a secondary fire risk, but I knew then and there that they must have seen me that night, somehow, and taken a leaf out of my book. That’s how I invented outdoor cooking.” she finished, folding her hands in her lap and smiling down at Little Hubert. It was around this time that Hubert’s many sabotages were finally noticed, and attentions shifted away from the Sadie’s invention. All attentions except for Aunt Beryl’s, of course. Even the sharp pains in her feet when putting her shoes back on couldn’t distract her. She’d felt so sure that ancient human, the hunter gatherer nomad, must have cooked under the stars in the days before permanent structures were ever erected. But Sadie wasn’t a known liar, so perhaps fire really had been used exclusively under cover of cave, rocky outcropping or forest canopy in the days before Sadie and Hector’s cold March holiday to Maggie and Jim’s. This was an archaeological discovery of some note; one which might have implications for all of the historical community’s understanding of human development. She pondered how best such a revelation might be phrased to the relevant authorities. Amidst the hubbub of chastisement, pond-ruined clothing, and ashen brollies, Beryl felt the fulfilment of a true reason to break her thirty years of hard silence, and it was all thanks to Grandma Sadie.
Principal among the camp of the incessant chatters was Gerald, or Uncle Gerald as his nieces and nephews knew him. Any silence was worth filling with words according to him, and it didn't matter at all whether those words were of interest to anyone, even the speaker themselves. Such was the origin of such exciting conversational stimuli as "It's like I said before: I was born on a Wednesday afternoon" and "Do you still think the lemonade is perfectly fine?". When taken out of context, such phrases have the propensity to sound like challenges or threats, but that does nothing to diminish their banality in the moment.
On the other end of the spectrum, mere feet but also a whole world away, was Aunty Beryl. Aunty Beryl's firm life view was that if something was worth saying it would already have been said, and therefore to offer anything now was to scrape the bottom of the social barrel. With such great orators and philosophers occupying the bus seats of human history, surely there would be nothing that they, as squalid family barbecue attendees, could add to the important discourse on a tired summer evening. The tranquillity of sunset, therefore, should be all the conversation they could justify, and quite enough for anyone.
It's fair to conclude from this that Uncle Gerald and Aunty Beryl often struggled to find a middle ground, with Gerald making every offer he could think of and Beryl responding to none of them. It would be utterly unfair to conclude, but also entirely correct to state, that they were perfectly happily married regardless. In fact, it was in celebration of that marriage lasting for thirty years that they, and those members of their family who were unable to think of an excuse in time, were gathered around the fire pit on that summer evening.
Scattered sporadically around the circle were proponents of conversation styles that bridged the entire gulf between Gerald and Beryl, from the grunt-first-complain-second teenage contingent, whose enjoyment of chatter would depend on the average age of their audience, to the youth who tried to match the words per minute of their uncle, to the heads of the family, grandma Sadie and grandpa Hector.
The venerated elders sat in their own niche when it came to social interaction. Smiling away merrily at the mere presence of company, laughing at the antics of the children whether innocent or malicious, and seemingly able to produce sweets from the void behind the stars, the grandparents would engage happily in any conversation or silence that came their way. What really got them going, however, was telling stories of the past.
Sometimes these stories would begin, quite unsolicited, during the course of a discussion about something important, for instance, where the children were last seen or if that audible cracking sound was coming from their toilet. On these occasions, detailed narrations of life events bearing tangential-to-no relevance to the topic at hand were seen as something of an unwelcome distraction. This is despite their compelling three act structure and heavy use of rose tinting. On most occasions, however, the stories were requested. This was when grandma and grandpa could really get into their stride and indulge in some long-form half-truths for the rest of the family.
Sitting in shelter from the light of a sun that had had quite enough of heights for one day, Grandma Sadie's ears were pricked by the sound of an impressionable voice.
"Do you like open fires Grandma Sadie?" asked Little Hubert, who was in the middle of jabbing at the ashes with his mother's umbrella. He couldn't waste a moment, because she was sure to notice soon.
"Oh! Yes, very much so." she said.
"Do you ever cook on them?" he enquired further, laying the groundwork for a later request regarding marshmallows and a late bedtime.
"All the time, my darling! All the time. Why, in my younger days I pretty well invented the notion."
"It sounds like there's a story in that!" announced Uncle Gerald, spying a rich vein of potential speech. Aunty Beryl made her objection to such needless recollection of events abundantly clear, in the only way she knew how; stoicism. "Oh don't be like that, my love!" laughed Gerald, immediately recognising the shift in her silence from relaxed to disapproving.
"There's a story there, alright." confirmed Grandpa Hector, preventing a one-sided row of deafening silence. "It just doesn't relate much to the real world."
Grandma Sadie laughed, and waved off the notion of her speaking anything but the Gospel truth.
"Go on, tell us the story!" pleaded Hubert, with agreeable grunts and 'yeah's coming from the other speech enthusiasts. Even among the cadre of silence fans, there were no major complaints. Whilst they would, obviously, have preferred for no effort to be wasted in speaking words that would affect nothing, at least a story unknown to many listeners would impart something new, however trivial.
With a smile and chuckle Grandma Sadie shuffled forward a little in her deeply reclined camping chair, so that she could sit up straighter and become the orator they all wished for her to be. A vast waterfall of crumbs from the day's rolls and biscuits cascaded from her clothing as she did, and the ants nearby, watching from a position of safety beneath the old watering can, knew that they would all eat like royalty that night.
"I suppose this tale began back in the seventies, when your grandpa and I hadn't been married for long. We'd just moved into our house on Venutian Avenue, which was going cheap on account of how the street name made your mouth feel. Do you remember that house, Gloria?" Sadie asked her daughter. Gloria’s eyes, which would otherwise have fallen on the umbrella and fire interaction happening on the lower levels, rose to meet her mother’s. Another victory for little Hubert.
"No." she said, with confusion written into every line on her face.
"That'll be because she wasn't born yet." Grandpa Hector clarified. "We didn't have a child out of wedlock."
"We didn't have central heating either!" Sadie segued smoothly, ever the expert storyteller. "It was a cold March that one. Oh, yes, a very cold March. It was so cold that I had to eat my shoes to keep warm."
"Why are you telling them that?" pleaded Hector with aggrieved shock. "Of course you didn't eat your bloody shoes!"
"Yes I did! It was frosty and bitter, and the only way to take off the edge was with a good mouthful of leather and eyelets."
"You've never eaten a shoe in your life."
"I've eaten many a shoe! Shoes without number have passed between these lips and into my gullet when the grasping hands of winter sought to steal my precious degrees." defied Sadie, her eyes wide with fervent insistence that she had, indeed, become the cobbler’s bane during the cold nights of her past.
"I admit to being a little confused as to how eating a shoe would help in that situation, Sadie." Gerald said. He looked down at his own sandals and tried to picture them on a bed of rice. It didn't seem entirely appetising, especially after that incident with the dog's mess the previous Tuesday.
“The same way that a cup of cocoa or a soup would help! There was nothing else to eat that would keep me as warm as a shoe. A broth would have been fine, but we needed to save that for our tea. Food was in short supply because back in those days; there wasn't as much available and no-one could really be bothered to walk around all the shops getting it. That's why we had the fruit and veg wagon that rolled around every morning to give you your three a day. Back then we couldn’t spare five a day, you see. Now, that wagon eventually became the ice cream van, when grocers were commanded to remain static.”
“But… shoes?”
Grandma made a tutting sound. It was the same one she used whenever one of the younger generations was somehow failing to grasp a self-evident truth.
"They're like a warm, leathery broth, or a hearty Sunday roast that's been in both the oven and the tanning vats a little too long." explained the grandmother, earnestly. "Gives you a good source of heat right in the belly, to warm up those cold bones."
"I can't account for what she got up to of a night when I was sleeping, but I can ruddy well assure you that I never ate any footwear." declared Grandpa Hector, crossing his arms in defiance. He'd not worked his fingers to the bone for their family over the years just to have his reputation besmirched by accusations of loafer lunching. "I've never heard you spouting this shoe rot before in my life!"
"That's because I kept it a secret from you. Couldn't have you worried about me being too cold all those nights, could I?"
"Worried about you being cold? We were famously sweating every night! The house was next to the old incineration plant; we were topping summer highs in winter!"
"Ah, but we spent some days away on our holidays. And visiting old Maggie and Jim Silhouette over Christmas. It was cold then."
"And you ate your shoes on our Christmas visit to Maggie and Jim? On the occasion that you just said was a cold March night? We must have been staying there rather a long time, or been very late. Did you eat one of the few pairs of shoes we would have taken with us?"
"Aye, I did just that." confirmed Sadie, glossing over Hector’s other complaints with expert ignorance. "I got my teeth into the high heels we brought for line dances, dinners with more than four people, and walks along the more precarious cliff edges. You should always dress to impress on a cliff, just in case you fall off and the coroners need to identify you as devilishly fashionable.
“So anyway, every night we were there I'd sneak downstairs past the stairgate, down the noisy, creaky corridor, grip the wobbly, rattly banister, and creep into the draughty dusty porch."
"Where the shoes slept?" interrupted little Hubert, now using the charred, ashen stump of umbrella to stain the trousers of unsuspecting cousin Julia.
"Exactly there!" confirmed Grandma Sadie, eyes twinkling with pride at the narrative memory of her progeny's progeny. "I'd creep in there and chow down on chewy panels, crunchy eyelets and even a little bit of tongue as a treat, just to get some of the frost off my chest and the blizzard out of my soul."
"Every night?!" challenged Grandpa Hector whose tone revealed that he was having none of it.
"Every night."
"We took two pairs of shoes each! And both of mine came back."
"Oh, yes. There was obviously a need for the arts of the spy to be employed in this exercise. My tracks had to be covered, or our hosts would think me terribly rude for accusing them of keeping a cold home. Luckily, back then, the shoeman did his rounds of the streets every morning, picking up used shells and dropping off some gold-topped heels. I put in an order with him each morning for a next-day fresh pair. 'Another pair of black soft-toes?' he'd say, and I'd tell him 'Yes please, sir. I just can't get enough' and he'd look at me all askance, like I was a woman who doesn't need a new pair of sensible shoes every morning, which, of course, I normally wouldn't. But if he'd known I was eating them then he'd have understood."
"No-one would understand anything about this, you old coot."
"Is this still the story about liking an open fire" asked Riley, Julia's sister, who was yet to feel the touch of the ashen brolly.
"Yes. You see I concluded that while shoes were great to warm the belly, they'd be even better hot. Cooked, you know?"
"Why is that the part that needs a check for understanding?"
"Because." Sadie clarified.
"If we accept, for the moment, that everyone here understands the notion of cooking making things hot, which I feel is a reasonable assumption," started Gerald, sticking to his verbose principles, "then are we to understand you began heating shoes during your clandestine feasts?"
"While creeping ever-closer to bankruptcy from your arrangement with the shoeman." added Aunty Gemma, who was, for the sake of clarity, something of a centrist when it came to conversational policy. It was enough to steer Sadie back off course. "Oh, they weren't expensive back then. This was in the golden age of roving cobblery, after the end of rationing but before the tax deterrents were hiked up. All the papers called it the rise of con-shoe-merism."
Beryl frowned, deep in contemplation at what she was hearing. Having studied both historical and contemporary shoe-law, covering taxation, subsidies, fair use and geopolitical impact (none), the introduction of tax deterrents was new to her. There were the levies raised to cover leather subsidies, and some heavy import duties applied to foreign soles in order to keep the domestic market safe, but no taxes to keep shoe sales down in and of themselves. Quite to the contrary, there were huge pushes in the late 1980s to make the public buy more footwear, most notably of all the 'Bared Feet Are Snared Feet' campaign, raising awareness of the dangers of trapping unshod toes in drains and the like. Satanists, in particular, were targeted by the blockbuster release of 'The Devil Wears Prada'.
Whilst this huge body of counter-evidence would have provided a bounty of follow-up questions in the mind of a lesser stoic, Beryl could not excuse idle chatter just for her own elucidation. Even the elucidation of the entire family scarcely made the endeavour any more worthwhile. One family's confusion as to historical shoe tax was a trifle, less than a footnote, compared to the speeches and ideas of the greats. She would not break her silence for it.
Grandpa Hector gave Sadie a withering look, which was, as ever, taken to be her cue to continue.
"I also had a bit of cash squirrelled away in my glasses case, from selling my spare thoughts to strangers in the cafe." she added. To this, at least, Hector nodded, much to the shock of the cynical many.
"Aye, she did that a lot in those days. Kept her out of trouble while I worked in the glass mines." he corroborated.
"You don't mine for glass."
"True. That's why we had to work so hard. Always prospecting and digging, never finding a good vein. But that's not the point. The fact is that my glass mining days and Sadie's thought sales at the cafe are grounded in reality, unlike most of the nonsense soppy old Sadie here's spouting." he said. Sadie poked her tongue out at him.
"I used to get a shilling for a quick nonsense thought, 'How do wasps keep their yellow jackets so clean' and the like. Two shillings for a rumination on current affairs, and a guinea and halfpence for a consideration on how much veg was left in the kitchen. For some reason, our grocery schedule was ever so popular down the cafe, so it became a real earner for us." she said, sharing an affable shrug of mutual, long-term confusion with Grandpa Hector. "Anyway, it meant that I had both the motive and the means to buy daily shoes without anybody else's notice, thus providing the supply for my hot shoes idea.
"I had all of the daytime to scope out how my aims might be best achieved. The sitting room hearth was the most obvious choice, being huge and open. We used to sit in front of it and chat away our evenings," Sadie relayed, to the particular approval of the conversational demographic, "but often, by the time of my overnight wanderings, it had already burned out."
"You presumably would also have just huddled around it for heat, instead of cramming footwear into your mouth, if it had still been burning." speculated Riley.
Sadie pondered this.
"I suppose I could have done, but shoe chewing really is more effective than any fire for personal warming." claimed the grandmother in response, without citing any sources at all. This was of particular interest to great aunt Helen, who had made a career of studying both home insulation and heating solutions for governments around the world, and the effects of consuming all kinds of apparel on the human body. The comparison of the merits of each method of thermal regulation, as offered by Sadie, were fascinating if true, but, it pained her to admit, the whole concept was entirely new to her. No studies had been performed on the core temperature of subjects who were already cold when eating a shoe, however, so the claims couldn't be explicitly ruled out right away. She decided to cogitate a little more and form a robust line of questioning before raising any queries, objections or complaints to Sadie.
"So the hearth was ruled out, but the next best option was to be found in the kitchen. They had a charming little kitchen there, full of little clay ornaments on shelves and windowsills and display cabinets. You remember the clay figures, don't you Hector?" Hector nodded, wearily. "They were little replicas of famous post-office masters and mistresses from the village they lived in, Everscrook. Everscrook is such a lovely place, and it has a very strong tradition with delivered post. They pride themselves, each and every one, on having a letterbox in each home, and always getting letters to the right person by writing the address and name on the envelope." Everyone was grateful for the explanation of how post works. "Naturally as a calf popping out of pregnant cow, Everscrook had a strong and proud line of post office primarchs to support this mail-affinity, hence why the little kitchen was so very much filled with ornaments in their honour."
"How many did they have?" asked Hubert, filling the ashen brolly with pond water. He was preparing for a devastating coup de grace against Uncle Gerald's ugly t-shirt.
"Too many to count." laughed Sadie, at nothing more than interaction with her grandchild. "I would hazard a guess at something like four hundred."
Uncle Gerald spat out his fizzy blue drink in shock at the number. It boded well for the reaction Hubert would get from his pond water gambit.
“Four hundred post masters…”
“Yes, only four hundred.” Sadie lamented, shaking her head with vicarious sadness. “The sparsity of Maggie and Jim’s collection was a plight all-too-common among the collectors of Everscrook. The little figures never were made in large enough quantities to satisfy everyone, so typically you’d only ever see a partial collection, a particular person’s favourites; unless you visited the post museum in the village centre, of course. My, the days and nights we spent there.” She smiled, looking wistfully into the sky for a second. Grandpa Hector could not be reached for a cynical comment, because he too was reminiscing. Gerald and Beryl shared a glance, which was peak communication for the pair of them, and then looked back to the grandparents.
“But why were there so many? How far back into history did these figures go, the dark ages?”
“Ha! There was no post back then, you silly goose! No they go back to the end of the Victorian Era. And as to why there are so many, well, it’s a competitive and stressful field. Can you imagine being singly accountable for every letter in a village of over forty people? It’d be enough to drive anyone around the bend a little, let alone with the weight of such a heritage and pride on your shoulders. There were coups, there were votes of no confidence, there were resignations, there were retirements, and there were even, if I recall correctly, splinter factions of the post office set up that prioritised different delivery routes.”
“Remember Jim telling us about the Cul-De-Sac Representation Post Office? The ones who’d only serve through roads once all the dead-ends were done? Apparently their routes were so inefficient, on account of having to re-tread every major road three or four times before actually putting letters through the doors, that their rounds ran for a full twenty four hours. They were pioneers.” Grandpa Hector chuckled. Sadie placed her hand excitedly on his.
“Of course! We didn’t stop discussing it for weeks. But anyway, under the watchful sentry of a few hundred letter aficionados I stole into the kitchen and toyed with the instruments of gastronomy for a solution to my problem. I fired up the stove, stuffing a pair of Maggie’s oven-gloves in for kindling, poured a little water into a pot, and got it to boiling with a set of heels inside. Jim and Maggie had a pair of steel tongs hanging up just over the serving hatch; both of them were for serving things, so it made sense to keep them together. Their handles were made of the purest ivory, and inlaid with designs of some of the more famous letterboxes from the village. I recall that they fit perfectly into the crook of your hand, so when you were serving things with them you really had control and comfort. I think Maggie won them in a knife-fight outside the British Legion…”
“Yeah, we’ve all heard the stories of Maggie’s blade-lust about the town.” Cousin Julia said, speaking the words that everyone was thinking. Every time they got together it was another tale of skilful fencing and deft slashes from Maggie and, to be frank, they were bored half to death of them.
“Of course you have. They’re some of my favourite memories!” laughed Sadie, lost for a moment in recollections of blood, bandages and joyful smiles. Every time she saw a first aid kit, or jammed a carving knife into a watermelon, she was lost in nostalgia. “… sorry, I was in my own head there. Anyway, I grabbed these tongs and spent near enough an hour hunched over that boiling pot, letting the steam drive into my sinuses while I poked, stirred and squeezed my shoes. At the end of it all it was terribly humid in the kitchen, so I had to open all the windows and mash a loaf of bread into the carpet. By the time I was done with that, the shoes were ready to eat. It was better than a cold shoe, for sure, but the method was imperfect. The biggest problem was that it would make the coal run out too quickly, and we needed that to make toast of a morning.”
“They didn't have a coal-fired oven, you loon! It was coal for the boiler and a gas bottle for the cooker!" protested Hector, his voice cracking and squeaking with indignant amazement.
"Well I used to put coal in it." Sadie pouted.
"No bloody wonder it was always so dirty!"
Grandma Sadie shrugged and pursed her lips, unwilling to spend any more time on the topic.
“Anyway, boiling was out of the window for that reason and because it made the shoes too soggy. An open flame was going to be the only way to really get that crispy edging that makes a moccasin or plimsoll delicious. Now, starting fires in the house wasn’t allowed. Your grandpa wouldn't stand for it on account of the time he burned down the staircase.”
Eyes were narrowed in the direction of Grandpa Hector, who turned a deeper shade of red than his vein-crowded cheeks generally adopted.
“It’s embarrassing enough to burn down your own stairs, but someone else’s? That’s hard to laugh off as an innocent mistake.” he said, in defence of his ultra-conservative fire-safety policy.
“How-“
“It was a silly trip with a lighter and a barrel of engine oil.” he said hurriedly, cutting off the question before humiliation could really set in.
“But why did you have those upstairs to-“
“The normal reasons.”
Uncle Gerald, despite his firm belief that all words should be spoken at all times, could recognise when a topic should be dropped. Eventually. He nodded.
“So as we said, house fires were right out, which only left the outdoors as a potential solution. This was before the days of barbecues, chimineas, or burning down your neighbour’s fence line, so I had to improvise my own solution to the burning question, as it were.” Sadie chuckled to herself, employing her trademark brand of low-impact, wholesome humour to keep listener interested. “Now, Maggie and Jim’s garden wasn’t a huge affair. It was probably half the size of this one, but with more bushes, bigger flowerbeds, grander ornaments, that sort of thing. In short, there was no room to swing a large sack full of spare post master or post mistress figurines. It happened a lot anyway though, because they need some severe airing every single day to avoid clay-rot.”
Cousin Julia puzzled over the nature of clay-rot while Little Hubert started to gradually decant pond water onto Uncle Gerald. It a slow process, but it was good, honest work.
“So there I crept the following night, into that crowded and overgrown jungle, nestling myself among the sack-ravaged foliage and broken limbs, with a single wax candle and Jim’s bag of tree pruning waste. He always kept it under shelter so that the clouds wouldn’t judge him for his crimes, which meant that it was lovely and dry, the perfect kindling for a cooking fire. With only the light of my candle by which to work, I hollowed out a space at the bottom of a particularly thorny pyracantha. Some would argue that I should have chosen a softer hedge, such as their pillow plant, but when one is indulging in such clandestine exploitation of their hosts’ kindness it seems only right, only penitent, to choose a bush of thorns that might punish you as you work.”
Aunt Beryl shifted a little uncomfortably at the uncharacteristically zealous contrition on display from Sadie. She didn’t often admit to any major wrongdoing, nor did she show guilt for many minor infractions, so to wilfully choose laceration by the needle-thorns of a pyracantha was a level of self-flagellation that none had expected.
“You made your fire inside a-… oh, you daft old bat!” cried Grandpa Hector, arriving at several conclusions which evaded the rest of the gathered party.
“I couldn’t have anyone seeing the flames from the house, could I!” she protested in return. “Imagine with Jim and Maggie would have said if they’d caught me.”
“I can remember with complete clarity what they did say when they saw the aftermath.”
“No getting ahead of ourselves.” Sadie cautioned, raising a finger to her husband to secure silence. He acquiesced, but indulged in some meaningful looks towards the rest of the party all the same. A few of them had already guessed where this sordid affair was going.
“Now, as a young girl I had been one of the guides. We went camping an awful lot back then; just us, a heavy canvas sheet to use as a tent, a few tin camping pots that served as both cooking and dining equipment, and some beans for sustenance. A dozen of us would be crowded underneath our pitched shelter each night, swapping ghost stories or counting stones or doing one of our other classic camping games. And outside of the tent, each time, was a fire pit of stones, sticks, ashes and cooking pots. So, as you will surmise, I had a lot of experience in building fires. I gathered some of the more flame-resistant rocks from next-door’s rockery, cleared myself a patch on the ground underneath the pyracantha we’ve already mentioned-“
“The penitent pyracantha?” asked Little Hubert, gathering some of the sharper pieces of gravel for a final hidden trap inside Aunt Beryl’s shoes.
“Yes! The penitent pyracantha.”
“It’ll be a pyro-cantha soon.” grumbled Grandpa Hector. Sadie slapped him on the leg; a warning against spoilers.
“Arranging my rocks in a circle like Guide Mistress Ethyl always taught us, and building a small tent of thin sticks, I put my candle into the centre to get my cooking fire underway. The twigs and dry leaves took even more quickly than I’d anticipated, throwing a bright light like sunrise against the underside of the pyracantha. I remember it turning the berries from a deep orange into the burnished gold of a morning sky. For a time, at least. They turned black rather soon after, but we’ll get to it in a minute.
“With my fire getting going, I took the high heels from my handbag and ran a purloined staking cane through one of them, so that I could toast it on the fire like a marshmallow or sausage. It started off relatively well, and I saw steam coming from between the seams where the leather was drying and crisping up nicely, but it seemed that the flames were saying bums to my intentions. My fire building skills were obviously far better than I had realised, and the blaze continued to grow ever larger, pushing me further and further back from my sub-hedge cubby hole until I was on the garden path, and rather without a paddle if you’ll excuse my metaphors mixing in such a flagrant manner.”
Some sounds of forgiveness were grunted here and there around the circle.
“It was around this time that the shoe was approaching done, but I also noticed that there were glowing embers and infant flames starting to take around the underside of the pyracantha. The berries now glowed of their own accord, an orange of conflagration rather than of skin. In a few short seconds thereafter the whole lower canopy had caught, and the bush was alight like that which spoke to Moses.”
“And what did this one tell you? That you’re a coot and an arsonist?” asked Grandpa Hector. “Jim and Maggie were beside themselves when they saw that their hedge had burned down mysteriously overnight.”
“I’m getting to that!” Sadie snapped, irked that her narrative agency was being robbed by the impatience of her lifelong companion. She’d have thought he’d have more respect and understanding of the cadence of her tales by now, but perhaps there was no teaching an old dog old tricks. “When I saw that fire reaching the height of the first floor windows I decided that something really needed to be done about it, and that tasting my new cuisine could wait. So I headed back inside, turned on the shower, and pointed it out of the window. I think Jim may have awoken and questioned my nocturnal washing routine, but I told him that you’d wet the bed and I needed to get cleaned up. That threw him off the scent.”
“I thought he was looking at me oddly the next morning.” Grandpa Hector confessed, alarmingly calm at this revelation.
“The shower didn’t work quickly, but it did work well. I managed to save everything from the hydrangea onwards, and protected the house itself from becoming an extension of my outdoor stove. With that victory over human’s oldest foe, fire, secured, I headed back outside, camped out by the smouldering embers of what used to be Maggie’s prized roses, and got to work eating a fired heel. Oh, but the taste was smoky and rich! The texture was crispy without being powdery or brittle, and it had the lingering scent of a cobbler’s smile. It was incredibly satisfying to eat, compared to boiled or raw leather, and my belly was filled with the raging fires of a winter hearth. Sitting there, in the soggy, ashy puddle of conflagrated foliage, I finally felt warm for the first night that March.
“As Grandpa has said, somewhat prematurely, Maggie and Jim weren’t best pleased when they saw my night’s work. I managed to avoid suspicion by lying through my teeth, and blaming the whole affair on a fox with behaviour issues. Given the state of their bins every week, they bought the cover story without question, and set fox traps down that same night. Never did catch Mrs Fox, of course, because her business was never in the rear garden at all, but, if I recall correctly, the obsession with stopping the vulpine arsonist consumed them until they day they both perished.” Sadie beamed, once again lost in the golden light of precious memories.
“Anyway, some years later I saw a neighbour of ours cooking on a fire pit outside their own house. Theirs was far more advanced than my own, employing a metal cooking grill and not being inside a secondary fire risk, but I knew then and there that they must have seen me that night, somehow, and taken a leaf out of my book. That’s how I invented outdoor cooking.” she finished, folding her hands in her lap and smiling down at Little Hubert. It was around this time that Hubert’s many sabotages were finally noticed, and attentions shifted away from the Sadie’s invention. All attentions except for Aunt Beryl’s, of course. Even the sharp pains in her feet when putting her shoes back on couldn’t distract her. She’d felt so sure that ancient human, the hunter gatherer nomad, must have cooked under the stars in the days before permanent structures were ever erected. But Sadie wasn’t a known liar, so perhaps fire really had been used exclusively under cover of cave, rocky outcropping or forest canopy in the days before Sadie and Hector’s cold March holiday to Maggie and Jim’s. This was an archaeological discovery of some note; one which might have implications for all of the historical community’s understanding of human development. She pondered how best such a revelation might be phrased to the relevant authorities. Amidst the hubbub of chastisement, pond-ruined clothing, and ashen brollies, Beryl felt the fulfilment of a true reason to break her thirty years of hard silence, and it was all thanks to Grandma Sadie.