Home & Kitchen · 4 days ago · By Harriet Coombes

“My Hands Won’t Let Me Paint the Stripes Any More.” Why a 73-year-old Worcestershire grandmother is selling her last hand-painted watermelon bowls at a special price

For 46 summers, Avril Pinnock’s husband grew watermelons in a glasshouse in the Vale of Evesham, where everyone told him they’d never grow. After he was gone, she made a bowl that looked like one of his melons, and her six grandchildren started emptying it before tea. Now the arthritis in her hands has made the decision for her: on 30 November she closes her pottery shed for good. Fewer than 200 bowls are left.

The packing shed still smells faintly of tomatoes and damp earth. For forty-six summers, this is where Royston Pinnock boxed the asparagus, plums and runner beans from his market garden outside Pershore, and where every grandchild in the family learned that the best thing in the glasshouse at the end of the garden was the one nobody else in Worcestershire could grow: watermelons.

Royston has been gone since February 2024. The old fruit trays are shelves now. And on them, in neat rows, sit small ceramic bowls painted like watermelon halves, each with a zigzag rim and six little coloured balls perched on the points.

Avril Pinnock picks one up and pulls the blue ball. A thin steel fork slides out of the rim. She spears a grape with it and hands it over.

“That’s Alfie’s,” she says. “Don’t tell him I let you use it.”

Forty-six summers of melons

Avril is 73. She married Royston in 1972, the year she turned nineteen, and in 1978 they took over a few acres of market garden in the Vale of Evesham, the county’s old fruit and vegetable country. Asparagus in May, plums in August, beans and tomatoes for the shops in Worcester and Cheltenham. And in the glasshouse at the end, every single summer, a row of watermelons.

“Everyone said he was mad,” Avril says. “You can’t grow watermelons in England. He grew them for forty-six years. Little ones, mind, but sweet. And one row was always yellow inside. That was for the grandchildren. He called it the secret row.”

Avril has been throwing pots for more than twenty years, first at an evening class in Evesham, then on a second-hand wheel Royston bought her for their thirtieth anniversary. Mugs, pie dishes, the odd lamp base for the church fete. Nothing she ever sold for more than petrol money.

When Royston became ill, the land was let to a neighbour. After the funeral, she moved her wheel and her little kiln into the empty packing shed. “I couldn’t bear the quiet in the house,” she says. “Out here I could hear the lorries on the main road and pretend.”

That first summer without him, the grandchildren still came on Sundays. There are six of them, from Lottie, who is 24, down to Alfie, who was six. Avril did what she had always done: she cut up fruit, put it in a plastic tub and popped it in the fridge.

“And there it sat,” she says. “They’d open the fridge, look straight past it and reach for a packet of crisps. By Wednesday I was throwing out mushy melon. Every single week.”

It isn’t only her grandchildren. Only around three in ten adults in England manage their five a day. Most of that fruit, Avril is convinced, isn’t being refused. It’s being forgotten behind the pickle jar.

A bowl that looked like Grandad’s melons

The idea came that December, while she was trimming pie dishes for Christmas. “I thought, those children never once walked past one of Royston’s melons. Not once. What if the bowl looked like one?”

She threw a small, round bowl about the size of half a melon and, while the clay was still soft, cut the rim into a zigzag with the same little kitchen knife Royston used to cut his melons at the sink. She painted the outside lime green with dark green stripes, a thin white band along the edge for the rind, and the inside red with little black seeds.

Then she solved the other problem. “Nobody ever had a fork,” she says. “They’d eat with their fingers and drip on the settee, or go rummaging in the drawer and forget what they went for.” So before the first firing she pushed a narrow hole down into each of the six points. After the glaze firing, a little stainless steel fruit pick with a coloured ball on top slides into each one. Six points, six picks, six grandchildren. Each one got a colour.

Christmas Day, 2024

She set the bowl on the kitchen worktop on Christmas morning, filled it with grapes and satsumas, and didn’t say a word.

Alfie found it first. He pulled the blue ball, saw the fork come out and shouted, “This one’s MINE.” Within a minute every grandchild had claimed a colour. Lottie took pink. The bowl was empty before the turkey came out of the oven, and Avril refilled it twice.

“Twenty years I begged them to eat fruit,” she says. “And a bowl did it in one afternoon. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be offended.”

By spring, the bowl lived on the worktop for good. Lottie’s mum asked for one for her own kitchen. So did the vicar’s wife. Then a neighbour wanted one with a yellow inside, “like the secret row,” and Avril made that, too.

What makes Avril’s bowl work

There is no trick to it, and Avril won’t pretend there is. “It’s a bowl,” she says. “It isn’t going to make anybody eat sprouts.”

What it does is three simple things. It gets the fruit out of the fridge and onto the worktop or the table, where people actually see it. It looks like something you want to reach into. And it brings its own forks, kept right in the rim, so nobody has to go looking for one and nobody eats with sticky fingers.

Grown-ups like it for the same reason. At a buffet or a bridge afternoon, everyone pulls a pick and keeps it, so there are no fingers in the grapes and no cocktail sticks all over the table. Avril’s WI group now uses two of them for cheese and pineapple.

She is honest about the size, too. The bowl is about 17.5 centimetres across and 9.5 centimetres tall. “It’s a snack bowl, not a salad bowl,” she says. “A good bunch of grapes, or an apple and a couple of satsumas cut up. Enough for the children before tea. Then you fill it again.”

She is just as particular about the picks. She uses stainless steel ones with small two-pronged tips, because cheap plastic picks snap and wooden ones go fluffy. “They’re little forks with a point,” she adds. “Fine for older children and grown-ups. I wouldn’t give one to a toddler.”

A queue at the Plum Festival

In August 2025, Avril took forty bowls to a trestle table at the Pershore Plum Festival, mostly because Lottie dared her to. They were gone before lunch.

This August she brought a hundred and sixty, and a lady from Cheltenham bought nine at once for her grandchildren. “She said, ‘I am not having them squabble over colours at my house,’” Avril laughs. “I told her, that’s half the fun, love.”

Visitors took the bowls home to Birmingham, Bristol and London and wrote asking for more. For a while Avril posted parcels from the village post office every Tuesday. There was no website. There was a spiral notebook and a great many stamps. This autumn Lottie, who now looks after the orders, finally put the bowls online.

The bowls come in two versions, both with the same green-striped rind and the same six picks: Crimson Red, painted like the little red melons Royston grew every summer, and Golden Yellow, for the secret row.

“The yellow ones always go first,” Avril says. “People think I’ve made them up. I tell them, you just never knew the right gardener.”

Why these are the last ones

Every bowl takes Avril the best part of a week from start to finish: thrown on the wheel, trimmed, cut, pierced, dried, fired, painted stripe by stripe, glazed and fired again. Then each pick is fitted to its point by hand so it slides in snugly and doesn’t rattle.

At 73, her hands have made the decision for her. Arthritis has been creeping into her knuckles for years, and this summer it reached her right hand, the one that holds the brush. “The long stripes are the problem,” she says. “By the third bowl my fingers swell up so badly I can’t close them around the brush. I sit there with ice on my hand and look at the bowls I haven’t painted yet.”

Her doctor told her what she already knew: rest the hand or lose it. So this autumn’s firing is her last. On 30 November she is closing the shed, and Lottie will keep posting what’s left of the final batch until it runs out. Right now that is 187 bowls.

For the last batch she has set one price: £39 a bowl with all six picks, instead of the £69 she charged at the festival. “I didn’t make these to get rich,” she says. “I made them so children would eat a grape. I want them on kitchen worktops and under the tree by Christmas. Half the people at the festival bought them for their grandchildren anyway.”

The shed closes on 30 November. After that, what’s left of the last batch is posted until it’s gone, and there won’t be another one.

What families are saying

Where to get one of Avril’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Avril’s own little shop, which Lottie runs from her kitchen table in Worcester. No shop on the high street stocks them, and there won’t be another batch like this one.

“After the thirtieth, I’m done,” Avril says. “If there are a few left at Christmas, Lottie will keep posting them. But I’m not making any more.”

Payment and delivery: The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand with its six picks in place and dispatched within 1 to 2 working days. Every order comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee.

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