|
News and Events >> English Evening >> Rachel's speechEnglish Tea It's about a year since I first called in to this building - seeing BBILC outside, the British-Bulgarian Information and Language Centre, I thought this might be the place I could learn Bulgarian! ‘No, I'm afraid not', said the kind person behind the desk, ‘but you speak beautiful English, can you wait a moment?' ‘Our Manager will be back soon and I am sure she would like to meet you. By the way, do you have any time?'! - and so, Rachel the writer, the business designer and coach, also became Rachel, the Native English Speaker with BBILC. It all seemed very surreal to me, and still does, as I have always been passionate about radio, a closet broadcaster, and for years listened to the BBC World Service when in England. I was never able to understand the BBC pulling out of Eastern Europe, out of Sofia; so short sighted in my view. Even today one of the jingles at the top of each hour is a round of local voices to all areas of the world where there are BBC stations ringing out ‘Beijing!, Helsinki!, Sofia!, Bangalore!', even though we in Sofia know the BBC are not stationed here at the moment. I have enjoyed all the various assignments I have been given here, for example, the English Speaking Club on Saturdays, and being the Native English Speaker alongside the BBILC language teachers in a number of businesses in Sofia. And, while I have been here I have learned about a whole new way of looking at tea! In Bulgaria, tea is much more about being a remedy, a herbal infusion, with honey. In England we put honey on our bread for tea, but not in the drink! Now, English tea, as you know is a whole other thing! An English person traveling abroad might say about a foreign holiday - ‘we had a lovely time, we saw this, we did that, and we met lovely people, but it is SO nice to be home and to be able to have a decent cup of tea! A decent cup of tea is made, one part, by the water having been boiled properly and not to have gone off the boil, and being immediately ready to pour into the already warmed pot, on to good leaf tea, and to be left for the water to take the strength of the tea, according to taste, and the other part which makes a decent cup of tea is the milk - it SO depends on the milk! Fewer people drink tea with sugar now than they did when I was growing up. Tea is as serious as food to us, in fact we use cooking terms about it for when it is ready in the pot - in the north of England we shout, ‘tea's mashed!' and when it has been sitting for too long and got a bit strong and a bit cool, we say, in a disparaging way, ‘this tea's a bit stewed!'. Ah yes, childhood in England in the 1950s and the 1960s….. I was born in Windsor, 30 miles west of London, in September 1951. My birth was not without difficulty, I was told, and while there was an hiatus between my mother starting labour and a decision to deliver her of me by caesarian section, the midwife said, ‘Well, there's just about time for a nice cup of tea!' My parents had not bargained at all for a baby girl. They had my names arranged. I was to be Mark Henry. My father, not a little inconvenienced and, with what might, in a dim light, be called ‘humour', said, ‘I know, we'll call her Bridget Arabella, so she can have the initials B.A.G. on her suitcase.' This was not agreed by my mother. Even after a week, he had clearly not accepted things as they were! My father came to collect us in his car. I heard something about this from my mother but years later I also heard it also from a member of the nursing staff. He opened the door of the car for my mother, settled her in and then walked round the front of the car and got in to drive off. A nurse on the steps called out, ‘I think you've forgotten something!' I was still where I had been put, in my carry cot, on the pavement! At my Christening, my Godfather was Hugh Hill a cousin of my father's. His family and ours spent many childhood sea-side holidays together in the south of England until we were teenagers, from the time when we were 3 and 4 years old. Also every month, at least once, we had Sunday Tea together, alternately, in each other's homes. This was a very English sort of Tea at 4 o'clock with tea to drink and sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. It was formal, with a table-cloth on the dining table in the dining room. There were many different plates of sandwiches and always a choice of cakes and the silver tea service and bone china cups and saucers. Silver is such a good conductor of heat that it is completely impractical as a tea pot but this sort of formality in middle class England at the time was as much about the look of the thing, as anything else. On these Sundays, a young girl and two young boys used to sneak into the closed dining room before Tea and just look. We were certainly forbidden to touch anything! The look we took was a very good look and the boys always had to make the calculation of how many chocolate finger biscuits there would be each - and it got down to fractions! In November last year, 2007, that girl and one of those boys did exactly the same thing here in Sofia, both now in their fifties, hand in hand, they made a replica dash to the dining table in the British Embassy Residence here, in Sofia. The boy was Jeremy Hill, now former British Ambassador to Bulgaria, and the girl was me. Arguments about whether it should be the milk to be poured into the bone china cup first or the tea, is a middle and upper class game which is a perpetual one, each little stratum of society having a sense of ‘knowing' or ‘believing' about itself in relation to the others, ‘not P L U s, darling', means, not People Like US! They, whomever ‘they' are, just don't know how to do things properly, which means they do it differently from us and the implication is that it is inferior! This is a dangerous minefield to the unsuspecting guest from overseas, in the area of serving tea! To give you an example, there is a whole catalogue of snobbery around how you make your tea, how you serve it, into what and in which order! Arguments ran and ran for decades about whether it was correct to pour in the milk first or the tea. ‘Well, Lady so-and-so, does it this way, or that way', and what only those at the top of this tree have ever known about the origin of this controversy is that if you were prosperous enough you would have porcelain cups and saucers, but what really sorted out the P L U s from each other was the quality of their porcelain for being able to withstand the heat of newly made hot tea being poured into a cup, without it being cooled a little as it mingled with milk, if that were poured in first. So what appeared to be an argument about an arcane knowledge of how to pour tea and that only the best people did it which ever way, it comes from an unspoken statement of confidence and status. If you were rich enough, that is if you had had old money for long enough in your family that you or even better, your ancestors had bought the very best porcelain you would with confidence of your money and good taste in aesthetics pour in the tea first. If you were in a less secure position about the quality of your porcelain you could not possibly risk this, as, to have a cup crack in the heat of the tea being poured into it, in front of your guests, would only draw attention to the inferior quality of your porcelain! This sorted out the P L U s from those who were clearly not People Like Us, darling', even though their sons, for generations, may be to the ‘right' school! The fabric of English life All the English wrap up much of their lives around tea. They punctuate almost everything with ‘putting the kettle on' so we can have a cup of tea while we are waiting, or for shock, or for celebration, or for commiseration, and either to settle us down or to keep us going! Summer Sports As the cry goes up, ‘Anyone for tennis?' - the unspoken understanding is that the game of tennis is the bridge, the justification, between lunch and tea on the terrace or in the rose garden - shades of England's relationship with the Indian Raj echoing along the hall to the kitchen. And Croquet! Have you seen pictures of a game of Croquet? Have you read ‘Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll? There it was played with flamingos as the mallets and hedgehogs as the balls. I have seen a great many real croquet games up-close those which are ‘friendly' in people's gardens, and also competitative international games. The image of the game in Alice in Wonderland is difficult for the modern game of Croquet to shake-off but what is common to the games from which The Reverend Charles Dodgson would have played while he was a Mathematics Lecturer at the University of Oxford, Christ Church College, and writing under the name of Lewis Carroll, and the games played today at club, county and international level is Tea! I have been involved with this on both sides of the tea counter, playing croquet or supporting the management at a very minor level, being delighted to be able to have the tea and cakes provided in many clubhouses, and as one of the team making and serving the tea - not from a silver tea pot, or sometimes not even a china one, but a huge water boiler with a tap on to tea bags, yet, however it is made or served, deep down, still, in England, everything stops for tea. Both my former husband and my late partner were international croquet players and how seriously this game is played (in a light-hearted way?) - but there is always Tea in the club house, where any antagonism is overcome by a ‘good' a decent' cup of tea. There is a similar scene in village cricket and while cricket games in England are played in local competitions there is a national one and the final is played at the most prestigious ground which is in London and called Lord's Cricket Ground. But, get this! There is not only a competition to be won at this level in the game of cricket, but, simultaneously now there is a competition among the village tea-makers and the finalists provide the teas at the Lord's Village Cricket competition at Lord's for winning teams to be found both in cricket and in teas! And yes, to an English person ‘abroad' for sometime, it is probably the sound of leather on willow, cricket ball colliding at speed with cricket bat which literally or metaphorically reminds them of England and her village and parish life and networks. I end here with some words from the poet Rupert Brooke which he wrote in 1912 which is made so evocative by the mention of his familiar local villages and the water and surrounding fields, and the ever present human condition, and yet! After all the pain, what gives him comfort?! This is set around the Cambridgeshire villages he knew so well and especially his favourite, where he had lived, Grantchester, from which the poem takes its name: And sunset still a golden sea Rupert Brooke 1912 Rachel Goddard And just for additional interest from Wikipedia, and which I did not specifically refer to on the English Evening: Grantchester is a village on the River Cam or Granta in Cambridgeshire, England. It is listed in the Domesday Book (1086) as Grantesete and Grauntsethe. Grantchester is said to have the world's highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners, most of these presumably being current or retired academics from the nearby University of Cambridge. |
