When I Had Tea With Great-Aunt Molly

I like to think that if I’m ever invited to tea at Buckingham Palace, I won’t disgrace myself, thanks to Great-Aunt Molly.

I was thirteen when I had tea with Great-Aunt Molly. She was born in … well, she was a lady and didn’t discuss her age, but we guessed that she was born during WWI. She went to a girl’s school during the 1920s and 1930s and played tennis for the county of Sussex. In the 1990s, my family and I spent a week in Sussex, one perfect summer when I was thirteen. We stayed in a holiday cottage on a working farm. We took long walks through the fields and woods of the South Downs. We visited many of the ancient ruins and stately homes that exist in that part of the country – places like Bodium Castle and Parham Park. And one day, when the sun was shining out of a clear blue sky and there was just a hint of a breeze, Great-Aunt Molly invited us to tea.

We arrived at her house and found tea laid out on a tea trolley in the front room. There was a bone china teapot, jug of milk and bowl of sugar on the top with a pile of perfectly matching cups and saucers. There was a plate of bread and butter and another of cake and biscuits below. And there was a bundle of silver teaspoons. Great-Aunt Molly explained that the tea set was her mother’s for years. Her mother married in 1912 and her tea set was Edwardian. The china was so fine that it was almost transparent!

Great-Aunt Molly poured the tea from the teapot into the cups. She inclined her silvery head and smiled. Calmly she asked if we wanted milk and sugar. When the tea was made properly to her satisfaction, she passed the cups and saucers, followed by tea plates for the bread and butter.

My cup wobbled in the saucer as I gripped the china and wondered how to drink out of the cup with a saucer in one hand and a plate in the other. One of my sisters suggested that raise cup and saucer together to our lips and slurp out of the cup. Great-Aunt Molly looked shocked. I believe the words “certainly not” left her lips. And then she showed us how to juggled the tea things calmly and elegantly. The trick was to balance the tea plates on our knees and hold the cup and saucer in our left hand. That meant we had to sit up straight and, with our legs poised on the tips of our toes, keep our knees together and steady. Slouching was unwise. Any attempt was betrayed by the tinkle of china against china or the jangle of a falling teaspoon as the cup and saucer wobbled on the uneven “table” of our knees.

We lifted first our cups of tea and then the slivers of bread and butter to our lips with our right hands. Kindly, but firmly, Great-Aunt Molly led us in a stately dance of polite conversation. We discussed the weather and the beauty of the local countryside while sipping tea and nibbling bread and butter. The plate of bread and butter was a work of art. The bread was white and the crusts were removed. The slices were so thin that it was possible to see the china through them – where the butter, which was almost as thick as the bread, didn’t hide the pattern of the plate. There was a plate of chocolate swiss rolls to follow. They were bought, I think, especially for my sisters and were eaten with great relish.

Our etiquette must have shocked Great-Aunt Molly, but she didn’t criticised us, she simply showed us the proper way to do things and assumed that we were capable of having tea like ladies. She was as gracious as she would have been to the Queen, had she been entertaining Her Majesty, rather than four little girls. We discovered, later, that Great-Aunt Molly who worked as a “fire-woman” during WWII and later returned to the girls school where she was educated. This time she was a teacher. None of us were surprised to learn that she taught etiquette to several generations of girls. She was one of the last Edwardian Ladies. I’m grateful for the privilege of knowing her and having the chance to acquire some of her grace and charm.

My last memory of Great-Aunt Molly is of her, standing tall with her silvery hair in impeccable order, showing my family a school photo of herself and her lacrosse team. All the girls wore old-fashioned gym tunics and blouses with stockings and shoes. They look confident and excited and hold their lacrosse sticks ready foe the game. Great-Aunt Molly is standing in the back row, just a girl of fifteen or sixteen years old, smiling. It wasn’t hard to believe that, all those years ago, she was as good at “playing the game” as she was at pouring the tea and instructing her great-nieces on the finer points of etiquette. I like to think that if I’m ever invited to tea at Buckingham Palace, I won’t disgrace myself, thanks to Great-Aunt Molly.

Whether your art is scribbling or something else altogether …

Art is not perfect; it was never supposed to be. Art is what happens when you extract something true and good from the mess of life. When life comes from death, beauty from ashes.

(Jeff Goins)

A Damsel in Distress

‘Is that Billie?’

‘It is not Billie, whoever Billie may be. I am female, George.’

‘So is Billie.’

‘Well, you had better run through the list of your feminine friends till you reach me.’

‘I haven’t any feminine friends.’

‘None?’

‘No.’

‘That’s odd.’

‘Why?’

‘You told me in the garden two nights ago that you looked on me as a pal.’

George sat down abruptly. He felt boneless. ‘Is – is that you?’ he stammered. ‘It can’t be – Maud!’

(A Damsel in Distress)

What do you get if you take a castle in England and add an earl who loves his garden more than his seat in the House of Lords, an heir who has an inflated idea of his own dignity and importance and a daughter of the ancient and noble family who thinks she loves a penniless American?

You get, of course, a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

Add a bossy sister, Caroline, with a charming and vague stepson, Reggie, who loves, not the daughter of the family, but the secretary of the earl, Alice. Then add a blue-eyed, blonde-haired chorus-girl called Billie. And then add another American who writes songs for musicals and has a warm heart.

Call the earl’s daughter Maud and the American (the second American, who isn’t penniless) George. Imagine that Maud appeals to George for “protection” while escaping her brother Percy and that George falls in love with Maud and moves into a cottage by the castle to storm her heart, not realising that everyone thinks he is not George, but …

I don’t want to say anything else and risk spoiling the story!

I don’t like all the P.G. Wodehouse novels I’ve read. I have no hesitation, however, in pronouncing A Damsel in Distress not only one of my favourite stories, but one of his best novels. It’s a classic. It hints at the beloved characters of the Blandings Castle books, but in A Damsel in Distress the characters are mostly more realistic and at the same time rather softer and warmer. It’s quite funny, but really touching too. It’s full of surprises. Best of all, perhaps, it has a loveable hero and heroine and a happy ending and it’s written as only P.G. Wodehouse could have written it and it sparkles!

‘Hullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ul-LO! Topping morning, isn’t it!’ observed Reggie. ‘The sunshine! The birds! The absolute what-do-you-call-it of everything and so forth, and all that sort of thing, if you know what I mean!’

Exploring Your Sense of Style

Do you feel confused when you look into your wardrobe? Are you overwhelmed when you go shopping? What is your style? For clothes? For shoes? For accessories? Finding your style is never going to be quite as easy as 1-2-3, but it is possible and rewarding.

Read more here …

Modesty on YLCF

What, exactly, is modesty? And why, when modesty can be defined and described with poetic words like “restrained by seemliness” and “delicate”, do I struggle with a number of myths about modesty? A myth isn’t, usually, an out-and-out lie. There’s some truth in a myth. That’s what makes a myth so confusing, especially when it’s about something so personal as modesty.

Read more here …

Celebrating the Resurrection

Jesus’ resurrection is the final kerygmatic “piece” that, together with His birth and death, sets the good news, the gospel, in motion and creates the Christian life. Everything necessary for the Christian life is now laid out before us and put into action in us. The way we live our lives, the impulses and desires we have to get in on what God is doing in the wonders of creation and the mess of history, is activated now by Jesus’ resurrection.

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson

I haven’t been around in the bloggy world recently, but I’m making it official, I’m taking a break over Easter. My family and I are going to celebrate Passover and remember, in the context of God’s promises, the death and resurrection of Jesus. And it’s spring – so life is full of beauty and wonder! May each and every one of you enjoy this season to the utmost and experience a special celebration of our Lord and Saviour’s resurrection – and the gift of His resurrection life to all of us who believe – this Easter.

Every one of these is a proclamation: this – this birth of Jesus, this death of Jesus, this resurrection of Jesus – is something we cannot do for ourselves, cannot take credit for, cannot take over and run with, cannot reproduce in any way. It is done for us. We can only hear and believe and enter this God-for-us reality that is so generously given as both the context and the content of our lives.

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson

The Heart of Society and a Story of Bristol Harbour

Milsom Street in Bath, built in 1762, was one of the centres of fashionable life in Bath in the 1700s and 1800s. It was where people met to shop. It was where Catherine Moreland, the heroine of “Northanger Abbey”, learned to love a hyacinth. In “The Abolitionist”, Anna Ashwell walks to Milsom Street to look at a bonnet in a shop window, with her cousins and her great-aunt’s black pageboy. Later she walks down Milsom Street, en route to the Pump Room, with her brother James.

Diane tugged her arm and pointed into a shop window.

“Look,” exclaimed Diana. “There it is – and isn’t it the prettiest bonnet you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes.” Anna looked at the bonnet through a mist of tears. “N-n-no,” she stammered. She turned away from the window and said, “I am sorry, but I do not know.” She glanced back along the street at Lady Hawkridge and Lady Caroline Stainburne and a short, stocky black page. “I do not know anything.”

“The Abolitionist“

“Have you written to Percy and asked for his advice?”

“To a degree.”

Anna gazed at a building which was ornamented with pillars and a plain building next door on which was written Circulating Library and Reading Room without attending to the meaning of the words or experiencing her usual thrill at the thought of a library full of books.

“There is so little time for anything that matters in Bath and our cousins are always calling and proposing amusements and parties. I did not know how to explain the extent of my predicament.”

“The Abolitionist“

{Video of Milsom Street}

In Bristol (as well as London and Liverpool), meanwhile, ships were coming and going from England and the West Indies. There was a harbour in Bristol from the 1200s and some people think that sailors from Bristol landed in America before Christopher Columbus. Sadly it was one of the biggest, busiest slave ports in Britain between 1630 and 1745 and between 1697 and 1807 a total of 2,108 slaves ships left Bristol for Africa. There they bought slaves and carried them to the West Indies. It is estimated that 500,000 Africans were carried into slavery by slave ships from Bristol.

“Caring is the most difficult thing I have ever done.” Jenny dashed her tears away with a quick, impatient brush of her hand. “That day in Bristol … no one cared. My father did not care. His friend did not care. None of the people at the dock cared. And I promised to care. I promised to care even when it was difficult and foolish. We have to care.” She stamped her foot, in a satin slipper, on the stone floor. “We always, always, always have to care, even when it breaks our hearts.”

“The Abolitionist“

And it is in this city, in “The Abolitionist”, that Anna’s friend Jenny was born and where her concern for slaves and desire for abolition was sparked – here in the harbour which has changed a lot since 1807 although the cobbles are the same and the sea and sky look the same in any age.

One [black] girl was sold in 1792, after many years in England, and shipped back to plantation work in Jamaica, in the Caribbean. She was put on board a ship in Bristol leaving for Jamaica, and it was reported that ‘her tears flowed down her face like a shower of rain’.

Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery

{A Story of Bristol Harbour}

At a museum in Bristol (where the pictures below were taken with permission) I saw for myself a beautiful tea set from the age of Jane Austen and William Wilberforce. It was displayed with a tea chest and a pair of sugar pincers …

… and a sugar loaf. The sugar was scraped off the loaf with the pincers. The loaf looked very innocent – very refined. It was hard to believe the story behind the sugar and I know the facts of history. It was hard for Anna Ashwell to believe the story too – and act on the facts.

There was a part of the coast of Africa that was called the Slave Coast and I have friends who have been to that part of the coast and visited the slave forts as well as friends who know, because the people are their people, how the Africans suffered.

Africans were carried into slavery and we have, today, some of the records – the lists of the Africans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean on ships, worked on the plantations of the West Indies, lived in chains.

It makes me wonder, when I shop today, do I know what the stories behind the brand names and special offers are – behind the chocolate I eat and the clothes I wear – and do I care?

Disclaimer: This is, effectively, a home video. Please excuse the less-than-wonderful quality! Click on the links and the video will play in Windows Media Player.