The Future is Tea and Trifle

 

I had a message from a friend saying that she and her brother are selling the family home. She’s sad about this but intends to take from the division of the spoils, only an antique biscuit jar and one of her father’s favourite books. She is a person of rare grace and part of that grace is her integrity. I thought about her as I travelled up to see my mother this week, on November 11^th 2014, as she continues to pack up her house for sale and divide up the contents.

I decided that I would try to be as much like my friend as possible and not allow myself to take away things I didn’t really need or like, just because they were familiar, or attached to old memories. It was a battle with myself  as my mother showed me the remaining tea sets; strange blue Wedgewood, which she said pointedly had been left to me by a favourite Aunt. The lid is not the right one, gold leaf has worn off and the spout is chipped, but she urged, ‘do you still want it?’ Not really but then I do like the strange Arabic pattern on the china, I did like my aunt,  and would I want anyone else to have it?

Then there is the 1930s set, belonging to another well loved aunt. Very pretty but a bit cracked, the cups not the aunt. I could manage to let that go. Below, foursquare and fat sits the brown 1970s teapot, which looks to me more suitable for coffee, and matching plates. We used those all through my turbulent teenage years. It’s surprising that there are any left considering the scale of family fights at that time. I think I will take it, then my mother points out that the plates are, ‘the wrong size, as no one has High Tea anymore.’

I decided to take them anyway, for very old and bitter time’s sake.  We moved onto my other grandmother’s grand silver plated tea-set, from the 1950s. She used it all the time, with sugar tongues.  I can’t imagine ever doing that, so I decline it. With all the other sets I have accepted I am facing a future of serious, dedicated tea drinking. In the cupboard below we find the glass bowl my mother used for making strawberry mousse, every Sunday tea, high or low. Strangely it’s much smaller than I remembered and a lot less fancy. We both view it with disappointment.

‘Not much good,’ says my mother, and mores suspiciously, ‘not cut glass.’

Further back from the darkness of  a cupboard, she produces an astonishingly beautiful bowl, modern crystal engraved with daffodils. It would like wonderful containing a lemon gin jelly.

‘Don’t put boiling water into it,’ she says in alarm.

This came from an old lady she used to visit as part of a befriending the elderly scheme. At the time I thought she was nearly as old as the people she supported,  in fact they were quite a lot older. This lady had once been married to a wealthy man.

 ‘She knew a good thing when she saw it,’ said my mother, I think referring to the glass bowl. When I knew her she was tiny, frail and rough as guts. She once showed me a photo of her father standing outside his butcher’s shop in Dudley, proudly wearing a blood stained apron, his Jack Russell beside him.

‘He had a dog whip to thrash the dog,’ she told me, ‘especially if he went after bitches.’

I shuddered at the sight of her after that, her words having given me a clear glimpse of the horrors of the workaday English past. I was not keen on visiting her but after she had a stroke  my mother invited her  for Christmas lunch. She couldn’t speak well but I remember her reedy Black Country voice suddenly ringing out, ‘Can I have some more of that custard?’ referring to my brandy sauce. I liked her again after that.

 Not a very precious memory perhaps, I am not sure.  My memories are all over the place, too many of them, I remember a lot from a very early age and don’t want to discount anything. As Soren Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’ I am still a long way from understanding mine. I think I am trying to resolve things through the prism of these glass objects. I can’t be separated from them, and other things that once belonged to people now dead.

We moved into the kitchen drawers, where I took an old thing for making mint sauce which I can remember my mother using on Sundays, my granny’s whisk, bought some time in the early 50’s, and my mother’s best fridge magnates; a couple of fishermen and a tiny Cornish pasty made of real pastry I gave her after a holiday in St. Ives, and a tiny picture of a child painting at a giant easel, bought from  a tile museum in Holland.

On the worktop we scattered metal spouts for ancient icing bags, used for numerous children’s parties and Christmas cakes which largely went uneaten. I took some birthday cake candles, but having no children, nulliparous as one doctor coldly put it, I will have to use them for my own rather twee, camp birthday cakes, at parties where aging people half  ironically bring back the pleasures of childhood again for a few silly hours. I also took wooden spoons used over the years for brandy sauce, savoury sauces and general roux, worn down and parched with age like bits of flotsam thrown up by the sea. But no, no, at last I could say a real no, to any more mugs!

As well as the daffodil bowl I also said yes to another large cut glass dish which my mother said would be idea for Christmas trifle. This bowl commits me to inviting a lot of people around at Christmas to eat a lot of trifle. Perhaps I will even have a trifle party. My future is going to be largely about tea, made with leaves properly, drunk from strangely small, delicate cups, and splendid glass bowls full of trifle and jelly.  I left with a pin cushion embroidered by an aunt I never knew, to celebrate the coronation of Edward VIII, which never took place, a pair of gardening shoes and a potato masher, even though I already have them at home.

On the train I thought about my childhood and my grandparents, dissimilar families living on different sides of the river Mersey, and my rather unlovable grandmother always using her grand tea service. So I decided to have it after all, paying tribute to her standards whenever I used it. Then I thought of the other granny, poorer but so much loved, and felt deeply sad that there is no one to whom I can one day leave her whisk.