One of the great joys of boyhood must be scrumping apples. There is just something so delightfully naughty about it, even though – certainly in my case – you nearly always ended up with a ‘cooker’ which was sour as a pint of vinegar!
In the village, one of the easiest locations for this activity was at the back of the cricket club’s small wooden pavilion. Here, a wooden fence marked the garden boundary of a large house – and it was overhung by one or two branches of a Bramley apple tree, heavy with fruit. The tallish fence gave most of the cover you needed, so there was little risk of being seen, although it was possible to look over the top.