Let’s Go Scrumping.

Hands up if you know what scrumping is? No idea? Well, in England it means stealing apples from an orchard; kids climbing over the fence with a pack full of apples plucked from the trees. The word also pops up in the name Scrumpy, as in a fairly rough apple cider (not the clear, sweet, sparkly muck that often masquerades as cider on the west coast.)

When I was a young geology student in Portsmouth in the ahem… early 80s… the Fawcett Inn in Southsea was the local scrumpy pub. Thirty years later and it’s actually still there, a rarity in these days of mega pub chains, purveying such wonders as Woodfords Wherry and Titanic Plum Porter.

(Correction. Since I posted this, a former geology department class mate from Portsmouth, and a co-conspirator on a number of  fairly boozy field trips, left a comment pointing out that it was actually the Florence pub in Southsea that sold scrumpy, not the Fawectt Inn. He’s absolutely right. My bad. The Flo is also still open. It’s now a self-proclaimed gastro-pub, but a different meaning of gastro to when we were cider-guzzling students. Rather than rewrite the whole piece I’ll leave it be, and point out that the mistake apparently confirms that drinking scrumpy messes with long-term recall.)

Every town in southwest England had a scrumpy pub. Accepted wisdom had it that the scrumpy they sold got rougher and stronger the further southwest you went in England. By the time you hit Devon and Cornwall, it was vaguely apple flavoured wood alcohol that turned grown men blind and mad after one sip. My merry band of geology students all knew that if you wanted to get royally gooned of a night, you had to have a few pints of scrumpy along the way. Once you’d downed those, there was no way back. If you really wanted to cut loose, you’d drink snakebites, half beer half cider, and all civility would vanish.

Anyways, I digress. Back to scrumping apples.

My earliest memory of the word scrumping is from the early 1970s. Every month, an enormously fat man in a sweaty grey suit would turn up at our house to collect my dad’s insurance premium -life insurance I think it was. He was called the Man from the Prudential.

This particular day, we happened to have a box of apples in the porch. I was the one to answer the door when The Man from the Pru rang the bell. After the initial shock of seeing a greasy blimp clutching a receipt book had worn off, I was able to focus long enough to hear the words:

“Someone’s been scrumping then, ‘ave they?”

“What?” I blathered, not having a clue what he was talking about.

“Apples. Someone’s been scrumping apples.”

“No.” I mumbled. From the tone of his voice, scrumping sounded vaguely illicit so best to deny it in the presence of such a large adult.

“Just asking.” Said the whale as he waddled off stuffing the insurance premium in his extra-large wallet.

Later that night my dad explained what scrumping was. It sounded quite fun to me and my school mates. Climb over a wall, nick some apples, and then scarper before anyone caught you. Trouble was, we knew of no orchards anywhere in our hometown. We had smugglers’ tunnels, endless beaches, sports fields and cliffs to climb but no bloody orchards. Our illustrious scrumping career was dead in the water before it even began.

I’d learned a great word though.

PS: we love feedback at Urban Crows nerve center, and my good friend Neil just sent over this great snapshot of his childhood scrumping adventures. Hits the nail on the head.

“We used to nick apples every year from the one tree on the council estate.  The elderly owners were terrorized annually and my gang of scrotes were always too early, hence it was a textbook example of ‘tragedy of the commons’.  Even today there’s a little tingle of excitement when I see a fruit-laden tree anywhere in the world.  We would have stripped it within minutes, like locusts. “