Wish Upon a Star

by Trisha Ashley

  Although there are several variations on the same theme as Eccles cakes, there’s nothing else quite as delicious as a proper one, made with thin, flaky, crisp pastry and stuffed full of juicy currants. If you’ve never tasted the real thing, follow my recipe and be amazed!

  The kitchen air smelled so good it could have been cut up and sold by the slice, and I munched on a warm Eccles cake as I wrote. When Ma came down she said she was becoming accustomed to waking to the smell of baking, because even if I don’t cook first thing, I still pop some kind of loaf into the bread maker the night before and she can smell that.

  ‘You’re like a sort of culinary Pied Piper, luring me into the kitchen. Just as well I took to elastic-waisted trousers and baggy tops years ago,’ she remarked, deciding to try one of each pastry for breakfast. ‘I’m sure otherwise I’d be exploding out of my clothes like the Incredible Hulk.’

  ‘I think I already am,’ I said ruefully.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, you look about the same as when you got here,’ she assured me. ‘I expect those long walks in the afternoons with the buggy and Toto are keeping it down a bit.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, I must be getting fitter even if not thinner, because apart from Primrose Hill, which is more of a grassy bump than anything, there weren’t really that many nearby open spaces to tempt you to have long walks in London. Stella says she misses the zoo, but that’s all. It’s a pity the little one at Southport closed down.’

  Chloe hadn’t rung me to warn of any pestilential disease laying the local children low, so mid-morning Stella and I went to the Mother and Toddler group at the old vicarage for the first time, and I felt a bit nervous, not really knowing anyone.

  It was held in the drawing room, which was vast enough to hold most of the footage of Ma’s cottage, and had lots of toys for the little ones to play with scattered over its acreage.

  There were nine or ten other mothers there and the children ranged in age from tiny babies upwards. Stella was the oldest, but she was by no means the biggest. In fact, she looked worryingly fragile next to some of those sturdy, rosy-cheeked toddlers …

  Chloe introduced me to everyone, though of course I knew several of them slightly already from my shopping expeditions into the village, like Poppy, who was married to Felix Hemmings, proprietor of Marked Pages, and Tansy Poole from Cinderella’s Slippers, and many others by sight. They all made me very welcome, anyway, though I immediately forgot several of their names. I don’t think the warmth of the welcome was entirely due to the three cake boxes I’d put down on the coffee table …

  ‘I’ve already told everyone about Stella’s Stars and the fundraising,’ Chloe said. ‘We’ve decided to think up some ways to raise money.’

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ I said gratefully.

  ‘I know Raffy’s got some ideas, too,’ she said. ‘He’s going to come and see you again soon to discuss them, so perhaps we’d better see what he suggests first and then fit our fundraising around it?’

  ‘Or we could just have a jumble sale in the village hall; that’s always good,’ someone suggested, and they all seemed keen on that idea. Poppy, who was also a member of the parish council, said she would find out what day the hall was free in June, to give everyone time to get their jumble together.

  That was a great start, but I hoped Chloe was right about Raffy having come up with a plan, because time seemed to be galloping by and I still had so much money to raise.

  ‘Cally’s kindly brought us some Eccles cakes she’s made, to have with our coffee,’ Chloe announced.

  ‘Yes, I’m writing an article on the differences between the traditional Eccles cake, Chorley cakes and Sad cakes for my next “Cake Diaries”,’ I explained, ‘and I thought perhaps you could tell me which you prefer?’

  ‘Oooh, lovely, a taste test,’ said a tall, attractive dark girl who I think was called Zoë … or maybe her friend was called Zoë and she was called Rachel? It was one way or the other.

  ‘I did mention that Cally is a well-known cookery writer, didn’t I? She writes the “Tea & Cake” page in Sweet Home magazine, and “The Cake Diaries” for a Sunday supplement,’ Chloe said, and several of them said they got the magazine, even if they hadn’t seen my pieces in the Sunday paper.

  A tall, grim and alarmingly Mrs Danvers figure in a black apron brought in a tray of coffee to have with my cakes, and left without saying anything, her rat-trap mouth firmly shut, though I heard Chloe thank her and call her Maria, so she must be some kind of housekeeper.

  Once everyone was munching on Eccles cakes the conversation turned to nice local places to visit with children and they told me about the new nature reserve that had been created on the site of a former mill, and how the Victorian mill manager’s house was being turned into a museum.

  ‘Oh, yes, the vicar mentioned that when he was telling me about how everyone in the village always came together to fight for a good cause,’ I recalled.

  ‘They were going to build a retail park on the site, but we were all against that, so in the end it was sold to a charity, Force for Nature. Luckily there was a huge anonymous donation, so already they’ve put up an eco-friendly wooden café and information centre and boardwalks around the site,’ Poppy said.

  ‘Now they’re starting to convert the mill owner’s house to how it would have been in Victorian times,’ Chloe put in. ‘There’s a courtyard with some outbuildings at the back, where I think they might have a couple of craft workshops eventually, or something like that.’

  ‘I’ll have to take Stella out there; it sounds lovely,’ I said.

  ‘We have an annual teddy bears’ picnic, and we’ve decided to have that there this year,’ the tall, dark girl said, then nudged her friend. ‘Rachel, Betty Boo’s put an entire Duplo figure in her mouth.’

  ‘She’s got a mouth like a letterbox, that child,’ Rachel said with a long-suffering sigh, going over and casually hooking it out again. ‘She doesn’t get it from me.’

  Betty Boo roared loudly for five minutes, then stopped suddenly and crawled off towards something else. I hoped it was larger than the plastic figure.

  Stella tired after a bit and came and sat quietly on my lap, thumb in mouth, so I carried her home, glad I’d taken the car because of carrying the cake boxes. They were now much lighter, containing only the odd crumb.

  ‘Did you enjoy that?’ I asked her.

  She nodded. ‘I liked all the toys, especially the pink castle. Could I have one of those, Mummy?’

  ‘Do you want a Barbie doll to go with it?’ I asked cautiously, because she’d never shown any interest in dolls to date, and I’d hoped if she was going to start, it wouldn’t be with something so strangely mutant-looking and unnatural, so it was a relief when she shook her head so the fine silvery-gold curls danced.

  ‘No, I want it for all my families,’ she explained.

  ‘It’s pretty big, so you could certainly fit them all in. Do you want it more than that tree house we saw?’ I asked. ‘Or the camper van?’

  She pondered. ‘Not more …’ she said finally. ‘The same.’

  ‘You could ask Santa if he’d bring you one, when we get a bit nearer to Christmas,’ I suggested. ‘I expect he’ll feel you deserve a big present after we’ve been to America to get you made better, so you never know.’

  I emailed Jago when I got home and told him the verdict on the cakes: Eccles cake was definitely favourite, Chorley cake was all right, but Sad cake was a bit more shortcakey, so that fingers of it would go well for elevenses with a cup of coffee. That could be my next recipe on the ‘Tea & Cake’ agenda – more crossover of my two different regular columns.

  He emailed back and said maybe biscuits like garibaldi would make a good follow-up article, because it was only one step from an Eccles cake to a garibaldi really, when you thought about it.

  That was a great idea! It’s so wonderful having someone on the same wavelength that I can bounce baking ideas off, because it’s clearly going to sp
ark all kinds of useful things.

  Celia came over on the Wednesday for another fundraising discussion, though without Will, since he had to deliver one of his larger sculptures, a group of driftwood birds on a sea-smoothed log, to a customer.

  Stella was in her room with the door open so I could see her playing on the carpet with her fuzzy ginger cat family and I could just hear the murmur of her voice as she talked to them, too. She looked up long enough to wave at Celia, before vanishing back into her game.

  She kept an eye on Stella while I went to make coffee and fetch in some Sad cake, which I’d made into bar shapes this time, rather than rounds. ‘See what you think of these.’

  ‘Are they fattening?’ she asked, picking one up.

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, taking a great bite before unrolling her ideas.

  The Crafty Celia circles had taken the fundraising bit between their teeth and were planning all kinds of events. They were all up for a sponsored Knitathon, to start off with, producing as many squares of an afghan blanket as possible in a day.

  ‘That sounds like a lot of knitting.’

  ‘It’s going to be crochet really, only “Crochetathon” didn’t really sound right. Afterwards we’ll sew all the squares into blankets and sell them to raise money, too,’ she explained. ‘Then we’ll have a selling exhibition of craftwork in the coach house in summer, maybe combined with a garden party. We could lure people in with the promise of coffee and cakes, with entrance to the exhibition included in the admission charge.’

  ‘I could make the cakes for that,’ I said. ‘Oh, Celia, you and Will have already done so much more than all the rest of my friends put together.’

  ‘Will says if you have a fundraising auction, you can have one of his bird sculptures as a lot.’

  ‘He is so kind. Chloe Lyon said the vicar had some ideas and was coming to see me again to discuss them,’ I said. ‘She’s the vicar’s wife, did I say? It’s very odd, because her grandfather is a self-professed warlock and runs the Museum of Witchcraft.’

  ‘Really? It seems a rather odd village altogether,’ Celia said. She’d usually come over to visit me when I’d been up here staying with Ma, and so had got to know it a bit.

  ‘It is – but in a good way. Everyone has been very nice to me, considering how Ma has always kept to herself, though that seems to have been an Almond family habit, so I expect they’re used to it.’

  ‘From what you’ve told me, the Almonds all sounded a bit Cold Comfort Farm,’ she said frankly.

  ‘Yes, and I think they had their own version of “something nasty in the woodshed” too, that they didn’t talk about, but no one will tell me what it is. Mind you, it must have been so long ago that not many people know what it was, anyway.’

  ‘Martha seems to be getting about a bit more than she used to, though, from the sound of it,’ Celia said.

  I considered it. ‘She is a bit, though even now she rarely goes into the village for shopping. However, she does like the bookshop, Marked Pages, and she’ll go in the Spar if she’s run out of anything vital, like tea or whisky. You know, I have to buy huge amounts of granulated sugar when I do the supermarket shop, because when Hal is here, he brews up endless mugs of sweet tea for them both.’

  ‘Is that the gardener you mentioned, who seemed to be here a lot?’

  ‘Yes, he’s a bit of a fixture now. He’s really the under-gardener up at Winter’s End, so he’s moonlighting when he does Ma’s garden.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a romance?’

  ‘Well … he’s not bad-looking, I suppose, in a morose older Indiana Jones sort of way, and he’s pretty fit,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Ma doesn’t seem to mind having him around either. He comes and goes, and hangs out in the new shed she had put up behind the studio … But no, I haven’t really seen any sign of romance, and when I sort of prodded her about him, she said they were just good friends.’

  ‘Then that’s probably all they are,’ Celia said, and went back to the vital matter of the fundraising. ‘Did you see there have been a few more donations to the site? Nothing big, though.’

  ‘Apart from you and Will, I don’t think anyone else is fundraising at the moment. Certainly no one we knew in London.’

  ‘Well, you know what it’s like with that crowd: they’ll be on to the latest trendy charitable cause, preferably something involving a fashion show or a party,’ she said.

  ‘You were the only real friend I made down there.’

  ‘And vice versa. Well, except for Will, of course.’

  ‘He’s not so much a friend as a soul mate.’

  She gave a happy sigh. ‘I know, I was so lucky to meet him and I love living in Southport. The Crafty Celia classes in the coach house gallery are going really well, and of course Will has his studio and gallery upstairs and customers can use the outside staircase, so it’s all worked out really well. If I’m not in the coach house I’m in the attic workshops in the house, so there’s always one of us around for the dogs and cats, too.’

  ‘That Mother and Toddler group I went to on Monday have promised to hold a jumble sale in June.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you said on the phone – and I want to hear all about this Jago you kept mentioning, too. Jago is a weird name. Very Poldark.’

  ‘Poldark?’

  ‘Some novels set in Cornwall I read years ago: I think there was a TV series too.’

  ‘He is Cornish by descent – his surname’s Tremayne. But his parents are both academics and he was mainly brought up in Oxford.’

  ‘He sounds really nice – you obviously clicked straight away.’

  ‘I do feel like I’ve always known him,’ I admitted, ‘but not in a romantic way, just a friendly one, and I’m sure that’s how he sees me, too. I mean, I really haven’t got enough time or spare emotion to invest in a romance until Stella has had her operation and is on the road to recovery.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Jago was jilted and I’m sure he isn’t over his ex yet: we have that in common too.’

  ‘Except that you were totally over your ex ages ago,’ she said.

  ‘Jago’s ex rang him up out of the blue the other day and I think she wants him back. I hope she doesn’t succeed, but it’s quite selfish of me because I love being able to talk cake with him and I’m sure she’d persuade him to go back to London.’

  ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t manage it, then,’ Celia said, and then we got out the notebooks and discussed plane tickets and Googled budget hotels in Boston. We’d need a room for a few days before Stella went in for her operation, but once she was in hospital, I didn’t suppose I would be anywhere except by her bedside for a lot of the time …

  We found one through the hospital’s helpful website eventually, situated nearby, which looked the best option.

  ‘Ma is going to go with us, which is good, but I feel I’d really like a trained nurse on the plane with us too, just in case …’

  ‘I’m sure Stella would be fine,’ Celia said. ‘Didn’t your consultant say that if there is no radical decline in her condition by autumn, the journey shouldn’t be a problem?’

  ‘Yes, but even so …’ I said stubbornly, and then sighed. ‘I suppose it’s out of the question anyway, because it would be extra expense.’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better just concentrate on raising the twenty thousand for the moment, and see what suggestions the vicar makes,’ she said. ‘If he comes up with some brilliant ones, we can see about finding a nurse to go out with you then. Meanwhile I’ll get Will on to sorting out the flights and hotel reservations because they really need to be booked soon.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I’d been putting it off, though I’m not sure why. The operation was booked, after all, and I’d go through hell and high water to get Stella there.

  Chapter 12: Fruitful

  Chorley cakes look a little like a flat, thin Eccles cake, but are less sweet and simpler to make, basically consisting of a layer of currants s
pread between two thin rounds of plain shortcrust pastry. Traditionally they were eaten buttered on top and with a slice of Crumbly Lancashire cheese on the side.

  Cally Weston: ‘Tea & Cake’

  You know, I could be mining this seam for ever, it’s so fruitful (pun intended). It was great being able to bounce ideas off Jago by way of texts, calls and emails, too, but as Thursday approached I found myself looking forward to actually seeing him again.

  Stella was, too, and after the hospital check-up, when they were quite pleased with her and said she’d put on a tiny bit more weight, it was a toss-up which of us was the most eager to go to the Happy Macaroon. So we were quite disappointed to find only David in the shop when we arrived, serving a customer.

  But then I caught sight of a tray of iced gingerbread stars on the glass counter, with a sign saying that all proceeds from their sale would go to the Stella’s Stars fund, to send a local little girl to America for a life-saving operation!

  ‘They’re Jago’s idea,’ David explained when his customer had left and Stella had wandered off to the other glass counter to show the gingerbread pigs to the mummy penguin she’d brought with her.

  ‘A pound each and all the money goes into the Stella’s Stars box here. We’ve already sold over a hundred and they’re going like hot cakes. Or maybe that should be hot biscuits,’ he added with a grin.

  ‘That’s so amazing of you both,’ I said gratefully, so moved by this act of kindness that tears came to my eyes.

  ‘Jago’s an amazingly nice guy, with a heart soft as butter. He was really broken up when his fiancée dumped him, though actually, we all thought she was poison anyway,’ he confided. ‘None of his friends want to see him hurt like that again,’ he added, which I took to be a friendly warning.

  ‘Yes, he told me about his fiancée, and since mine dumped me, too, we have that in common. I hope we’ll become good friends, because that’s all I have time for when my time is so taken up with getting Stella well again.’