For as for long as I've had teeth, I've had a taste for tangy English damson plums.
Damson jam was the first preserve ever to pass my lips, because it was the only jam my mother Marjorie ever boiled up in our farmhouse kitchen. It’s a miracle that my sister and I made it through to our teens with all our teeth, for Mum was never particularly meticulous at scooping all the stones out of the pot. The reason why Mum made so much damson jam was that damsons were the only fruit trees – aside from a gnarled grapefruit and an obligatory cold-hardy ‘Meyer’ lemon – to flourish on our dairy farm in Onewhero, a small rural settlement 10 minutes up the hill from where the Tuakau Bridge leapfrogs the Waikato River.
In the tiny orchard between our cowshed and chook run were two damson trees. Both were planted in the mid-1960s by my paternal grandmother, Patricia, a fervid green thumb. Grandma could poke a stick into the ground and return to find a fully grown tree, which is pretty much what happened when she bedded in damson suckers from my great-grandmother Ruby’s garden overlooking the wharf at Raglan.
I guess that officially makes me a fourth-generation damson fan.
Despite their lack of care, and a fairly windy situation, my greatgrandmother’s damson suckers were going great guns when my parents took over the farm in 1974, six weeks after I was born. And they continued to crop prolifically throughout my childhood, meaning that damson jam was our family’s staple filling for everything from roly-poly puddings to tarts and sponge cakes.
We also spread damson jam on pikelets and scones, not to mention soft white bread. My sister Brenda and I packed damson sarnies into our school lunchboxes most days, just as our father, Jock, had before us.
When Dad was a lad, damson jam was the marrow in his hollow legs. As a teenager, he ate 16 plum jam sandwiches – half a loaf of liberally buttered white bread – every day. Now in his 70s, he still has a taste for plum jam sandwiches, though these days he endeavours to limit his intake to two wholemeal slices slicked with cholesterol-fighting margarine, and jam made from my damson trees, rather than his own.