Tea

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Tea Francis-Noël Thomas (bio) I did not come from a tea drinking family. my maternal grand-mother, who was born to landless peasants in Sicily and who, after having run a butcher shop to support her six children, became by her own account “a lady” after her children were grown and she had remarried, associated tea with the British movies she saw on television in the early 1950s. In her broken but confident and rhetorically astute English, she summed up all of these films in one phrase: “Ava-cuppa-tea.” She asserted in a manner that brooked neither contradiction nor qualification that this imperative—which in her articulation sounded like a single word—represented all the dialogue, and the subsequent taking of tea all the action, in each of them. She regarded these films not as works of fiction but as documents of current British life that formed, collectively, a complete and reliable guide to British culture. She did not claim in so many words that excessive tea drinking was the cause of Britain’s decline into postwar impotence and the loss of empire, but this thesis was unmistakably conveyed by the contemptuous tone in which she enunciated this universal plot summary of the entire output of the British film industry of the 1940s. I don’t recall my grandmother’s ever drinking tea herself—although according to my father’s later testimony she did so on at least one occasion. She drank cheap domestic wine, coffee, and ginger ale, like any sensible person. My father, who had a severely limited appreciation for his mother-in-law’s views of British culture and of most other things, nevertheless shared her contempt for tea. He was quite a good storyteller—so was my grandmother—and late in his life, long after my grandmother had died, he recalled in a nostalgic oral narrative his courtship of my mother. After several failed attempts to find someone to introduce him to her—at the time an astonishingly beautiful girl of eighteen—he finally succeeded and was invited by her mother to tea. “Tea!” he said. It is remarkable how much contempt, how much scorn, how great a sense of the absurdity of this invitation he could incorporate into the pronunciation of this single word. It was as if he knew then that he was about to marry the daughter of a cultural ignoramus with ridiculous pretensions. My mother almost never made tea, but she retained to the end of her life at least a half-dozen ornate tea sets, and for years she collected delicate teacups. The cups were stored in a china cabinet in the dining room and used only on the most exceptional occasions—when they were filled with coffee—the tea sets themselves, never. My grandmother died the year before I first traveled to England. I’m sure [End Page 82] she would have wondered about my mental competence had she known I was going to cross the ocean in order to spend time in a country that had dissolved its former greatness in endless cups of tea. By that time, I had drunk tea on occasion in graduate school—mostly at a local institution sponsored by the Division of the Social Sciences and known on campus as Soc Tea (the “Soc” pronounced with a long o and a soft c as in “ocean”—a shortened form of social). I was indifferent to the tea—which was also indifferent. I went to Soc Tea to meet women graduate students. I don’t believe I ever had seen so many attractive women in one room before—and perhaps I haven’t since. I’m sure my father would have been astonished to learn that, in what he would have regarded as a culture greatly superior to the one he grew up in, courting attractive women still involved the outlandish pretension of drinking tea. I must have drunk tea on my first visit to London, and on subsequent visits too, but the tea made no impression on me. The great gastronomic discovery of the time I spent in England, scones, came several trips later. I don’t remember what I drank...