The garden of my childhood home in North London backed onto an abandoned piece of land which we referred to as ‘The Lottie’. Long before my parents moved there in the early 1960’s, it had been used by local residents as an allotment and, for my brother and I, it was an exciting wilderness beyond the tamed confines of our garden. With ruined greenhouses, abandoned beehives and overgrown shrubberies it was the perfect place to act out adventure games and in which to secrete ourselves during games of hide and seek. I discovered early on that one area of undergrowth was not what it first appeared to be. Hiding from my brother and some friends one day I pushed myself further back into the thicket to avoid detection, but instantly gave away my location as I yelped out in pain. I had backed into a gooseberry bush and spent the next five minutes carefully extricating myself in an attempt to avoid any more scratches and pricks from its fearsome thorns.

The gooseberry patch had merged with a stand of raspberry canes on one side and several blackcurrants on the other, while wilding brambles threaded their way between them all. Once we had learned to beware of the gooseberry, me and my brother would often be found there on summer mornings gorging on the soft fruit, the musky scent of raspberry and blackcurrant foliage all around and sticky juice running down our chins and staining our fingers and clothes. When I started cooking in earnest I would head down there to pick fruit to make raspberry buns, a blackcurrant crumble or to fill a meringue nest or Victoria sponge cake. Eventually this abandoned piece of real estate was bought by the neighbouring tennis club and the site cleared to make space for more courts, but I have never forgotten the scratch and sniff of fruit picking on a hot summer’s day, like finding buried treasure in the undergrowth.