Cheese Scone Pizza

 Late afternoon autumn glory - National Trust's Knights Hayes Court, Tiverton.

The clocks going back feels like a guillotine slicing off the light which has been keeping me alive.

We walk in the park with my husband's family, mushroom dankness underfoot - the children's energy, their bounciness, is luminous in the dusk falling around us  - a smudged charcoal cloak.

Back home, in the brightness of electric light I make cheese scone pizzas for supper with my ten year old husband's niece. My cotton apron, the colour of tangerines, hitched up round her waist, still comes nearly to her ankles. She stands on tiptoe to roll out the sticky dough. The wobbly flat circle looks a bit like a heart so she pulls the edge inwards to make two curves,  pinches the end to make a point and it's a perfect whole heart. The other one we press into the tin in an oval oblong shape.

While I take a phone call, she spreads them with the yellow Brandy Wine tomato sauce I cooked the day before ( eschewing  the stack of tin tomatoes still in the cupboard), she spoons over the roasted peppers and tomato quarters, adds a smothering of garlicky chopped mushrooms, lays Chorizo slices on one and thick slabs of Mozarella cheese on the other,

 showers both with grated Parmesan cheese and finally presses in a pattern of salty Kalamata olives.

While they bubble and bronze in the oven, sending out baked cheesy aromas, we prepare a salad together. She is already a practised cook, well trained by her mother, but still I swallow my heart in my mouth as I watch her slice cucumbers and radishes on the chopping board, the big sharp knife so close to small delicate fingers.

I realise that when I was ten years old I didn't even know what a pizza was let alone how to make one.

Later, when my husband wakes up, we sit round the table in the kitchen, a tall candle in the centre, the gift of white green lilies on the side, and his nephew announces they are the best pizzas ever.

Tonight I tell my husband we are having left over pizzas from last night for supper and I know he'll ask me,

What's pizza? 

And he does.