for Clementine Fairbrook

clem. you are sixteen and i am, technically, four months older than you and i have therefore (as established in year 8) been in charge of the friendship since 2021. i would like to officially hand over the running of the friendship on your birthday. you have, in the last year, done all of the actual work of it anyway — you texted me first when my dad was in hospital, you walked the long way home from school for three weeks in november when i didn't want to be alone, and you made me a small lemon drizzle on the saturday after the worst week. that is, by some margin, the most that anyone has ever done for me. happy birthday, my friend. the cake is yours. the kitchen is yours. and the friendship is, as of today, also yours. — pip xx

My Clemmie — You were born on a Sunday morning in the autumn of 2010 at half past four, in the middle of a power cut, and the midwife at the cottage hospital in Honiton said, very calmly, "you'll have to hold the torch for me, Daniel," and your father did. You arrived in candlelight. You have, since then, been quietly drawn to candlelight, to warm rooms, to bread coming out of the oven on a Sunday, to the back door being open onto the garden in October. I have, for sixteen years, been your mother and have, for sixteen years, been quietly astonished at the small precise way you go about your life. You are the most careful reader I have ever lived with. You are the kindest baker I have ever known. You are the only person in this family who, when asked what they want for their birthday, says "a quiet Sunday at home" and means it. The oven is on. The kitchen is yours. I love you very much. — Mum.

CLEMMIE!!!! i am eleven and you are SIXTEEN and i think that is very old and also very young at the same time. mum said i can write whatever i want for your birthday so i am going to say the things i would not normally say. 1. i am sorry i ate the last of the lemon drizzle on tuesday. i know it was yours. it was very good. that is why i ate it. 2. you are the best older sister at our school. olivia harlow said so as well last term. (don't tell her i told you.) 3. when you go to sixth form and then to university i am going to be very very sad and i am also going to keep your room exactly how you left it. don't worry about the room. i will keep it nice. happy birthday, clem. i love you the most. — tils xxx

clem!! happy birthday!! iris from history, who you let copy your essay plan on the napoleonic wars in year 10, who you walked home with on the long way through the fields when ms. atherton was being unbearable in march, and who, on the saturday morning of the half-term, came round to your kitchen at half past nine and was given two slices of the sourdough and a cup of tea by your mum and was, for two hours, allowed to just sit at the table and read while you baked. nobody else lets me do that. nobody else's house feels like that. it is, by some distance, my favourite kitchen on earth. thank you for letting me into it. happy sixteen, clemmie. the long way home through the fields is, as ever, the better way. — iris xxx

Dear Clementine, Mrs. Whittle, from the cottage at the end of the lane, writing to thank you and to wish you very many happy returns on your sixteenth birthday. You have, for two years now, taken Barnaby on his long Wednesday-afternoon walk down to the river and back, in all weathers, and you have, in those two years, never once been late, never once complained about the rain, and never once charged me the full amount I tried to give you. Barnaby loves you the most of any of his walkers, and Barnaby, as you know, is not generous with his affections. I am eighty-one years old and I will not, I suspect, see your twenty-first, so I am writing this down properly on your sixteenth: you are the kindest girl on this lane. Your mother and father have done a very good job, but most of it, I think, is just you. Many happy returns. There is a small parcel by the front door at the cottage when you are next round on Wednesday. — H. Whittle.

My Clementine — You were four when I first put you on the kitchen stool at the cottage and gave you the wooden spoon, and you held it exactly the way your mother had held it at four, and the way I had held it at four in my own grandmother's kitchen in Lyme Regis in 1952. The spoon is the same spoon. It is the only thing I still have from that kitchen. This is what I would like you to know on your sixteenth, written down on a Wednesday morning at the kitchen table in the cottage in Cornwall, with the bread proving on the rack and your grandfather asleep in the armchair: a kitchen is the warmest room you will ever build. Build one. Keep it open. Let the back door swing onto the garden in October. Let the bread come out of the oven on a Sunday. Let the people you love sit at your table and not feel they have to be clever, or interesting, or anything other than fed. The spoon is yours when you want it. Come for the weekend in November. I will teach you the seeded rye your great-grandmother used to make. With all my love, on your sixteenth — Granny.

Clementine — Your godmother writing from the kitchen at Trebarwith on a Tuesday morning in September, with the sea making its usual noise outside and the dog asleep, as ever, in the wrong room. I have been your godmother for sixteen years now, which means I have, in that time, watched you grow into precisely the small steady person your mother always said you would be — and at six I did not, I confess, fully believe her. (You were, at six, going through what I now understand to have been a very bossy period. Your mother was, even then, quietly right.) What I would like to say on your sixteenth, on the record, is: I have known a great number of teenagers in my work and I have never met one who reads as widely or as slowly as you do. Keep reading slowly. It is, in a fast century, the most useful thing you can do. The bookshelf in the green room here is yours, the next time you come down at Easter. Take whatever you want. Many happy returns, my darling. — Marina.

Clem-bot — Uncle Felix here, from the shop on the Cowley Road on a Saturday morning at half past eight, before we open. There is a wedge of the Tunworth on the counter with your name on it, which I will bring down on the Friday before your birthday and which your father will, I expect, eat half of before you get to it. (Watch him. He has form.) What I want to say on your sixteenth is this: you are, by my count, the third person in this family to be quietly serious about food, after your grandmother and (when he can be bothered) your father. The other day you texted me, unprompted, at half past nine on a Wednesday night to ask whether the rind on the Stichelton was meant to be the colour it was, and I sat in the back office and stared at the message for about ten minutes because no other sixteen-year-old in England, I think, was asking that question on a Wednesday night. Keep asking. The shop is yours when you come down in October. I will put you behind the counter on a Saturday morning and pay you in cheese. Many happy returns, kiddo. — Uncle F.