Steaming beetroot, dead beneath the ice, and what the oak tree saw
With Kaliane Bradley, Katrina Porteous, and Rowley Leigh
Last weekend, I went back to the Midlands to visit family, and we took my grandma to get lunch in Birmingham. As we drove into the city, after a few minutes of rare silence, she suddenly spoke up. ‘If your grandad was here, he’d be telling us about all of the houses he stayed in around Birmingham when he first arrived in the UK,’ she told me, naming a couple of the streets she remembered. I searched them up and told her that one happened to be just around the corner to where we were sitting in standstill traffic. She fell quiet again.
My maternal grandad passed away quite suddenly in 2019, a loss that hit my extended family hard. Today marks the sixth year anniversary of that day.
In the car, I asked my grandma more questions about my grandad’s early days here — who he stayed with, what he did in Birmingham, if anyone who hosted him still remained in the city — but she had limited answers for me. Our stories of him are often sprinkled with such uncertainties and plot holes; when a recounted memory misses a detail that nobody present is confident they know for sure, there’s a moment of quiet for the part of the story we’ve lost.
It’s something I thought about when reading about Kaliane Bradley’s struggles when pulling together the story of the Polar explorer, Robert McClure, which features in today’s issue of Boundless. ‘Biographical research seems to promise a soluble person. One can’t solve the still-living, who careen into a future invisible to analysis, whose interpretation is still open to negotiation, who we only get a single facet on. But with the dead and archived, we have so much more access,’ she says, of McClure.
Kaliane has significantly more research at her disposal when trying to pull together the threads of Robert’s life than I do of my late grandad — but there are still moments of fiction, details imagined where things have been lost. She mentions, for example, illegible words in a letter he sent to his wife, words smudged by time. ‘How hopeless, how hopelessly tantalising!’ There are always gaps to be filled.
I imagine it’s frustrating to be faced with those gaps when trying to pull a biography together, but, perhaps quite selfishly, it brings me some comfort; it doesn’t matter that we don’t have evidence to back up every anecdote my grandad features in, that some of the details are fuzzy around the edges or his quotes might change through intergenerational Chinese whispers. When we fill in the gaps, the person we try to piece together becomes more ours, because the story of their life is a story we’ve partly written. All any of us have left in the end, really, are stories.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
Haunted by Robert McClure
Bestselling author, Kaliane Bradley, on her obsession with piecing together the patchy life of a Polar explorer
There’s a line in a letter – written in 1853, from the Polar Sea – that has haunted me for several years.
The letter writer was Robert John Le Mesurier McClure – at this time Commander McClure, but soon to become Sir Robert McClure. He had sailed to the Arctic in 1850, as part of (yet another) attempt to discover the whereabouts and ultimate fate of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition, which had vanished into the ice, taking two refitted warships and 129 men with it. McClure didn’t manage to find any trace of them, but he did find the Northwest Passage, the until-then hypothetical route connecting Europe to Asia via the Canadian Arctic.
The Northwest Passage, which proved too ice-choked and perilous to use as a trade route, was the great white whale of the 19th-century British admiralty. Franklin had been sent out to find it. Multiple expeditions had been sent out after him to find him, and, while they were up there, maybe find the Passage too. It was momentous that McClure found the Passage in October 1850. Unfortunately, his ship wound up trapped in pack ice. It took several more years before a rescue ship found him and his near-starving crew, and he was able to write home.
I’m using Herculean restraint to write this. I’ve been calling this man ‘McClure’. I don’t think of him as McClure. I think of him as Robert, my good friend Robert. At this point I have spent several years getting to know Robert. I’m telling you some private things I’ve learned about my friend Robert. For example, he married young, and, from what scant evidence we have, unhappily.
Kaliane Bradley is the author of the New York Times and Sunday Times-bestselling novel The Ministry of Time.
You can also listen to Kaliane chat to Erica Wagner about tracing Robert’s McClure’s story and the enduring appeal of failure on the latest episode of the Boundless podcast. Apple Podcasts / Spotify
Living memory
Katrina Porteous on a tree she’s known since she was a girl
There is an oak tree, Quercus Robur, which I have known for nearly my whole life. It stands in my late parents’ garden, higher than their house, an ancient, bifurcated grey trunk, split from the base, its crazy mass of zigzag branches underpinning a glorious round green crown. Now bound in dark ivy and sunk waist-deep in an overgrown beech hedge, the tree seethes with life. There are networks and circuits within it that I will never know, and plenty that I do, for it is home to multitudes, from the blackbirds that sing from it, spring after spring, to shining emerald beetles, mysterious, papery moths, thread-legged spiders, the tiny ethereal bats that flit round it at dusk; and the raucous jackdaws and magpies which strut in its shade, dibbling the mossy lawn beneath it for leatherjackets, or to bury acorns. Branching under the earth, its roots’ secret roadways, wide as its crown, transfer water, nitrogen, carbon, invisibly connecting countless more species in a hidden mycorrhizal network that leaves its signature in fairy-rings of fungi over the lawn.
I do not know how old the tree is. At a guess, at least a couple of hundred years. The house and those around it were built in the late 1950s and early 60s, and when we moved there nearly 60 years ago, a neighbour, then in her 90s, regaled us with childhood stories about playing in the little burn at the bottom of our garden, then a field. The oak tree, marking the field boundary, was already fully mature. Looking back at those stories now I measure the scale of memory in that tree. The tiny village our neighbour knew, and the world to which it connected, where news was delivered through green lanes by horse and cart, are no longer recognisable; but the tree stands where it always did, its fractal branches holding the ‘living memory’, passed on from neighbour to child, now spanning the best part of a century and a half.
Katrina Porteous' fourth poetry collection, Rhizodont, was published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2024 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize
Steamed Beetroot And Turnips With Beluga Lentils, Pickled Garlic And Lemon — from Rowley Leigh's A Long and Messy Business
Enough for six.
Ingredients
1kg (2lb 4oz) mixed beetroot (with leaves if possible)
200g (7oz) small turnips
200g (7oz) black beluga lentils, green if not available
1 red chilli
a few sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
2 lemons, plus extra juice for seasoning
olive oil, for seasoning
30g (1oz) golden caster sugar
200–300g (7–101/2oz) beet tops or purple sprouting broccoli
sea salt
1 red chilli, deseeded and sliced into very thin rings,to garnish
For the pickled garlic
30 garlic cloves, peeled
2 tablespoons sea salt
250ml (9fl oz) cider vinegar
100g (31/2oz) golden caster sugar
1/2 cinnamon stick
10 cloves
I used red, golden and candy stripe (a.k.a. Chioggia) on this occasion, but all good beets may apply. Pickled garlic can be bought, though you can easily pickle your own, as below.
First, pickle the garlic. Sprinkle the garlic with the salt and leave for 4 hours. Bring all the other ingredients to the boil in a saucepan, then simmer for 10 minutes. Rinse the garlic and pour over the pickling juice. Bottle in a clean 500ml(18fl oz) jar and refrigerate, ideally for 2 weeks. Pickled garlic should last a year in the fridge.
Wash the beetroot and turnips well, cutting off any stalks and leaves. Half-fill the bottom of a steamer with boiling water and place the vegetables in the top with a sprinkling of sea salt. Steam gently for 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, rinse the lentils in cold water, then bring to a simmer in a pan with fresh cold water. Add the chilli, thyme and bay leaves and, without seasoning at this juncture, continue to simmer very gently without letting the lentils dry out. Once tender, remove from the heat and dress with sea salt, lemon juice and olive oil.
Peel the lemons, paring off the zest without any pith. Cut this zest into very fine matchsticks and place in a small pan of cold water. Bring to the boil, then drain and refresh in cold water. In another pan, dissolve the sugar in 100ml (31/2fl oz) water over a low heat, then add the lemon zest and simmer slowly until glossy and translucent. Lift out the zest and reserve.
Rub the cooked beetroot and turnips with kitchen paper to remove the skins, then cut them into segments. Put the beet tops or broccoli in the steamer, with the beetroot and turnips on top just long enough to wilt them.
Place the lentils in a serving dish and arrange the steamer’s contents on top. Slice 3 or 4 pickled garlic as thinly as possible and sprinkle over. Add some very thin rings of chilli, lemon juice, sea salt and olive oil to taste.
WINE: Despite the vibrant flavours, it is the rich earthy taste of the beets that will win through. A full-bodied white with a little oak treatment will work very well – nothing like a glass of Meursault in the depths of February.
Rowley Leigh's A Long and Messy Business was published by Unbound in 2018