Tomato

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It was about the middle of May this year that I found myself in Lidl's store, north of the vegetable counters, wondering about tomatoes, totally disenchanted with the offerings in Lidl, Asda, Sainsbury's, Tesco's, Dunne's and all the other stores I tried.
Not one of them offers good tomatoes! OK for other things, like peppers, lettuce, beetroot and an amazing range of vegetables and fruit - a few minutes on the website of one of these stores enabled me to compile the list below..

cherries, plums, avocadas, celery, spring onions, cucumber, beetroot, radish, cress, grapes, apples, lemons, oranges of all sorts, mangos, melons, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, kiwi fruit, pomegranites, mushrooms, onions, peas, beans, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, leeks, parsnips, courgettes, curly kale, aubergines, bean sprouts, sweetcorn, spinach, buttermut squash (whatever this is). There are items that I have never tried and probably never will!

What a great the variety of vegetables and fruit - but never a good tomato! All with skin, a s much as 1/4 inch thick. Not a real tomato.

As I stood with a packet of tomato seed in my hand my mind wandered back to the garden of the Commercial Hotel, Ardglass, where my grandparents kept a half-acre garden full of great produce, served up in meticulous meals prepared for family and hotel guests, cared for by an old fellow that my grandfather took in off the streets. One of those homeless men that drifted round the countryside in those days. I'm talking of the 1930's and '40s.
Today Willie would be offered sheltered accommodation by the local council - even a small flat. There was nothing like that in the 1930's and '40's.
A vagrant in the countryside lived and slept wherever fate washedhim up, and Willie was lucky in meeting Joe Mulheron, given shelter in a disused stable and settling in on a hayloft, and earning his keep by looking after the garden. He became a permanent resdent, part of the family and hotel workers, with a bed of old blankets and sheets made from flour bags sewn together by my grandmother, meticulously laundered as occasion required.

Willie Hamill was a gnarled, twisted little stick of a man, who slept on a platform over disused stables - given accommodation by Grandfather Joe Mulheron.
Willie was a meticulous gardener, growing things difficult to find in Asda or Sainsbury's: loganberries, and green gooseberries for eating or hard red gooseberries for bottling and jam making.
When we children landed in from Belfast each summer and peeped over the high stone wall that encircled the garden, he would catch sight of us and bellow out, "Are young OShees back down here to bother me!"
We were indeed, for he guarded the garden with iron determination, and never let children in unless accompanied by an adult.
He was however a kindly man, as we realised each evening when he held his hands before the oil lamp on the kitchen table and twisted them in shapes that were projected on the whitewashed walls, magical rabbits that waggled their ears, birds that flew with flapping wings.
We could never work out how he did it. Magical pictures before television, before even electricity, which only came in about 1944: a single white bulb, 40 watt, suspended in the middle of the kitchen ceiling and looked at with awe. It was a great advance, but it killed Willie's white-washed walls picture show,

One day, in the summer of 1943 I think, when I was ten or eleven, I escaped from Willie's guardianship. He was probably having an afternoon nap on a hot day, and I leverd myself over the garden wall and roamed through the wonders of the garden - the gooseberry bushes covered with fishing net to protect from the birds, each long spindly arm of strawberry plants weighed down by a stone so it would take an independednt root, great floweriong bushes of red and black currents, and