The Ship from Simnel Street

Jenny Overton is the author of one of my favourite Christmas stories, The Thirteen Days of Christmas*, which is a humorous retelling of the famous Christmas carol. Overton only wrote four novels for children, before her career as a book editor made her too busy for her own fiction. It’s a great pity she didn’t write more, as her novels are brilliant: well-written, with a love of history, country lore and folk songs running through the stories. Her work has been compared with Antonia Forest’s writing; they shared an ability to create realistic, fleshed-out characters and to make history relevant and exciting to contemporary readers.

Sadly, only The Thirteen Days of Christmas is still in print, but if you can find a copy of The Ship from Simnel Street it will be worth the hunt. I read this slim Young Adult novel earlier in January, and it was a wonderfully cosy book to read by the fire on a cold evening, as much of the action revolves around a bakery. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars, The Ship from Simnel Street follows the story of two sisters: Polly and Susannah Oliver, the daughters of a successful Southhampton baker, Jonathan Oliver, and his socially-ambitious wife. Oliver’s bakes are renowned throughout the local community, with queues outside the door every morning for the regular supply of bread, plum cakes, spice cakes, buns, breakfast rolls, lardy cakes, flockbread, cobs and madeleines.

Mrs Oliver would like to see pretty Polly married to the local banker’s son, but Polly has other ideas: she has fallen in love with a lowly soldier, Dick Fletching, who is sent to fight in Spain. Refusing to wait anxiously at home, Polly dons a disguise and smuggles onto another ship bound for Spain, in search of her true love. Poor Susannah, meanwhile, is left to cope with her bereft parents, and, once her father leaves home to track down Polly, she must learn to pull her weight in helping to manage the busy bakery. When her father finally returns, Susannah is no longer the schoolgirl he left behind, but a resourceful and capable young woman.

Jenny Overton uses her knowledge of old country customs, recipes and folksongs to make The Ship from Simnel Street a fascinating read for anyone interested in British history and traditions. Important events and days of the year, such as Harvest Festivals and Shearing Feasts, Candlemas Day and Easter Sunday, involved the baking and eating of specific foods, and Overton describes these in satisfying detail. Many of these specialities, such as flockbread, I hadn’t come across before:

On the first Saturday in June, Jonathan baked flockbread for the shearing feasts…. Made for shepherds and drovers, flockbread was dark and sweet and sustaining, and would stay moist all day long.

November is a busy month for Susannah, as, in the absence of her father, she must oversee the orders of Clementy cakes on St Clement’s Day and Catherine-wheel cakes for St Catherine’s Day (‘large open mincemeat tarts, with rim and hub and spokes of pastry - and every unmarried girl in town ate a slice for luck.’). The Christmas baking must be organised too: as the plum puddings bob in their pots, Susannah takes note of what else to prepare: ‘biscuits and gingerbread for the Eve…Christmas pies and Christmas loaves on the Day.’ She must also organise the supplies for ‘keeper cakes’ and mincemeat.

It is these insights into the traditional celebrations that marked the passing seasons in Georgian England that I found so engrossing. Food is an integral theme in The Ship from Simnel Street: not only for its historical significance, but also as a means to bring together a family and community. The whole town rallies to help Susannah and her mother, when - worrying ceaselessly over Polly - Mrs Oliver hatches a scheme to send a ship-full of wedding cakes to Dick’s regiment in Spain. ‘Polly went without our consent’ explains Mrs Oliver ‘I don’t want her to go without our blessing.’ Miraculously, the 1,200 cakes - each a token of love - reach their destination, and Polly, examining the Oliver Bakery’s signature clover stamp on each cake, knows how much she is missed.

Day-to-day domestic details are at the heart of Overton’s book, but she also touches on what the war overseas meant for the people at home: the rising cost of flour is a continual worry for the Oliver family, and the town is put into high alert whenever a naval ship docks in the harbour, as it was all too common for the admiralty to kidnap men into service, even when they held certificates of exemption. Children, singing through the streets, were used to warn of the arrival of the ‘Press Gang’ who would force men into service. Overton quotes one such song:

All things are quite silent, each mortal at rest,

When me and my love got snug in one nest,

But a bold set a’ ruffians they entered our cave

And they forced my dear jewel to plough the salt wave.

I begged hard for my sailor as though I begged for my life,

They’d not listen to me although a fond wife,

Saying ‘The King wants sailors, to the sea he must go,’

And they’ve left me lamenting in sorrow and woe.

The songs scattered throughout the book provide an evocative soundtrack to The Ship from Simnel Street, and indeed it was a folksong that originally put the idea of Polly’s voyage to Spain into Overton’s head. I know this will be a book that I’ll enjoy rereading in years to come, and I can only hope it will be republished sometime soon - it deserves to be!

The Ship from Simnel Street is one of my recommendations for Winter Reads in my latest YouTube video, which you can watch here.

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