Greengage Summer

Greengage blossom still clinging on in spite the teeth of today's winds. I hope it hangs on to give us another lovely summer crop of sweet gages. In my experience, best eaten anytime or for dessert, but too sweet for cooking.

Rumer Godden wrote Greengage Summer, published in the UK in 1958 [published in the US under the title Loss of Innocence] and filmed in 1961 starring Kenneth More and Susannah York. The story of a young girl's transition into womanhood, an early rites of passage film. Many of Rumer's books had an innocence that spoke to the heart.

She was born in Sussex where I now live, she set some of her books along the south coast and others in India, where she lived for a number of years. She had an enquiring mind, and particularly she enquired into and studied the religions of the world. The title of her biography 'A House with Four Rooms' gives an insight into this side of her, it comes from one of her favourite Indian proverbs: "Everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."
Good enough for me.