Gifts from The Republic of Tea-time

by Adam Parry.

 

Mrs Six Faces cuts my cake and takes the first slice for herself as usual. Nana wanted to pour the tea, but Mum took the pot off her. Nana had already worked her way through the cheese and pickle butties that I made with my own fair hands, she was looking tired and hardly able to lift the teapot. I watched Mrs Six Faces gobble her salmon sandwiches-taking two of those pink fondant fancies I like-  like a skinny horse just come off a diet. I moved the plate of shortbread over to my side of the table when she wasn’t looking. There were only Nutella sandwiches left, grudgingly I bit into them giving Lady Six faces a right dirty look, I shared the short- bread with Mum and Nana  as she had left for her book club. Mum had poured the tea and I put in the milk I was only allowed one half of a sugar spoon I didn’t like it to sweet. Nana sucked on the short bread she’d dipped in her tea, so between Mum and me the plate soon emptied. As Mum took Nana up to bed I tided up and washed the dishes, dried and put everything away.

The boys were  never around at tea-time, Grandad, or Dad or the wee boys. They never sat round the table with it rose embroidered white table cloth. I’d try and persuade them say I’d make any sandwiches they liked. But come Tea-time they we’re out of sight and sound still I enjoyed it watching Nana sucking on soggy short bread, laughing to myself at the look Mrs Six Faces gave me when I moved the bowl of sugary tablet out of range.

They watched me like parrots when I cut the onions or made decorative tomatoes.

This day Hilary my older Sister was staying with us we were all round the table and she gushed ‘you should be a cordon bleu chef’, but didn’t know who or what that was and I passed the plate, Mrs Six Faces was at the book club so there was plenty to go around.  Nana wanted another cup of tea but Mum said it’d keep her up all night like the last time. But I watched as they poured my special tea and their eyes lit up at the aroma. So I watch them my sister and Mum and Nan. Learnt to notice the tea time  treat they most enjoyed, I carefully watched Nan, her hand not shaking as she poured the tea chomping her salad cream sandwiches and the cake, so light and fresh. She cut Nan’s second slice, mother had what’s left but she always give her the last bits of meringue as if it were important medicine piece by piece to her lips Mum almost giggles and she is so proud by the look in mum’s eyes.

So I watched and learnt and I’d fill up the huge wedding day plates, which-she’d been told when she was little- disappeared one day and Nan had been frantic looking for them which she soon did, the way Mum told it was a Greek epic. With cakes I devised  fresh from the oven, all their treats and new ones I wanted to tempt them with. Now that Mrs Six Faces was permanently lodged in the book club chatter went tireless about the table, talking with our mouths full reaching over the table to get the last bit of chocolate cake was no longer a military operation. A night now and again Nan would sing, she had a beautiful voice, I sing her songs in my head as I prepare and bake, whip cream, slice fruit as if I have Nan’s greatest hits coming through my ear-phones.

One morning Dad woke up early and called up the stairs, ‘if you so good at cooking you can make my breakfast.’ I’d watched him many times making his own so I knew the basic ingredients, how he liked his bacon crisp as a soldier and his eggs runny and his tomatoes squishy so I set to the task with pleasure, his own cooking was atrocious fried eggs turned into scrambled eggs at his touch, so when I presented him with the plate he almost looked surprised as if this was the breakfast he only ever dreamed over. It was all gone as I washed the dishes and afterwards the plate looked licked clean and was working on the marmalade and burnt toast he liked, he looked up at me grinning, ‘it would’ve been better in bed.’ I huffed. ‘Compliments to the chef,’ he said in a French accent to cheer me up, he had never said he was proud of me and now he didn’t have to as he sat there smiling at me.

‘Molto beno,’ he said, he had started saying that a lot about everything, and stood to get ready for work. Often he got me to make his breakfast and his second breakfast, he was always late for work, while I washed the dishes he ‘d clap behind my back and giggled into sink. So, soon, like the tea parties it became a regular thing. Father complementing me as if I were an Italian Princes as I washed up. The wee ones loving the same crisp soldier of bacon as their father. I put down the platefuls of breakfast for them gobble down as if they were in a race to finish first.

Mind you Mum came down and Nan slowly behind came down to aroma from the kitchen that had broken into their dreams and lured them to me. I kept them out of the kitchen and they sat to wait until their breakfast was ready. I had fresh hot bread baking in the cooker as I stirred the beans and fried mushrooms and eggs. Mum was happy about the plate I put in front of her, but Nan didn’t like mushrooms and the egg looked like it’d put it through a grinder. ‘I don’t want them’, she grumbled, so I scraped them off her plate and added two of the beef sausages I had kept for my own breakfast. Carefully I rushed about making sure the food would still be hot when I gave them it. For once I told my sister to wash the dishes as I still had to get to school on time, she had eaten more than even Dad and left me nothing for my own breakfast, as they grew the wee ones asked me to make their pack lunches as they indicated with a finger down their throats at Mum’s derisory lunches. I’d make apple pies for them and cheese and tuna sandwiches I knew they enjoyed.

Of course tea times were only every other day now.

If a guest came to the house I’d create something special for them and after the shambles of last Christmas dinner I was put in charge. For special days I would make from scratch chicken soup and crusty bread.

I was so busy making so many different food for everyone tea-times were only once a week now and I was missing them.

I felt such a delight watching them eat, at nights I dreamt of being a short order chef in a New York deli. I told the dream to Dad and he laughed and said:

‘No Yank is going to you away from us.’

At class I learned how to make meringues and custard slices which the greedy boys liked better than me, but I kept a few hidden as they were my favourites and I was always left with dregs. But over the year they must have gobbled down a thousand custard slices, and there were Mum and Nan to consider before me, Nan always made a mess of them custard and icy top sticking her fingers together as if she could never let go. Later I started to learned to make Strawberry Pavlova’s. When I took the pavlova out of the box school provided Dad and the boys would crane their necks over the box to see my latest speciality. I said:

‘ Why don’t you have tea with me and mum and Nan. All the family traipsed behind down the stairs to our tea room. Dad held the door for me but stood in the doorway. I told him:

‘Come in, come in.’ With my arms spread indicating the  treats on the table, a pavlova at the centre of the table, Dad loved strawberries, he’d even been trying to grow some until most of the strawberry plants died. So the temptations gave him a push in the door. To Mum’s surprise kids from the neighbourhood queued up to join Tea-time.

‘We need more cups’. Mum said. Dad said, ‘ we need more strawberry pavlovas.’ I laughed. But, soon we were all crammed around the table like starvelings, forks poised.

For the first time I poured the tea time tea before anybody else did then I sat on Dad’s lap feeding him pieces of his favourite pavlova. I’d never heard him laugh so much.

He never drank his tea.

 

…and no birds sing.

By

Adam Parry

Jacob’s wanderings led him upon the withered path where black bare trees, rotted. Fallen leaves like a sickness and the ground about the trunks infected, putrid as a nightmare. Here the green he had been surrounded by each summer’s day was tinged and out of focus like a trick of the mind. He sighed deeply feeling danger ahead, the start of the path had been so inviting, a gateway of interlocking oaks, sunlight caught the dew upon the many spider’s webs, wild flowers and long grass at the side of path almost growing as high as Jacob. Looking back towards the Moor where he had set off from, but it was not there and grey clouds encompassed the Earth, he was afraid but also stubborn and went still along the withered way.

Clumsily he is tripped over by roots in the slime of the path and plunged into it. It stank and he thought he might throw up and as he struggled to stand he realised he was plastered in it. He should go back and then he sighed this will pass and I’ll find a way to the sunlight. Now he tested the path for trickster roots or buried rocks and his way forwards was slow. Soon he heard the trickling of a water nearby and brightened and headed for it to be repulsed as soon as he saw it, dead birds were slowly being swept away on the surface a wild dead pig was rotting at the water’s edge its surface clouds of insect dark flocks and swift clouds all drenched in disease.

Yet still he stank and was disgusted by himself so he stripped and tentatively immersed himself in the dark dank looking water, flies feasted on his face and encircled his head. He lowered his head to escape the assault lowered deeper in dank water soon he submerged his head and for a moment he lingered unwilling to return to the surface. He began to clean himself afraid of the water, later naked he washed his clothes, he built a small fire and dried his garments, as the fire raged up orange spears of flame, strange noises came from the forest other angrier noises jarring joined in the protesting cacophony. It moaned: it seemed the forest was weeping. He realized it was his fire that had set them off so he threw mud on the flames extinguishing it and soon the sounds of trees diminished. Startling him a panic of wood-pigeons rose like the morning sun hidden above the gloom of the clouds.

A voice called his name and he felt a hand-gloved gentle touch on his shoulder. He turned and he recognized her face but he couldn’t remember her name or who she was, she smiled at him as if he were someone else. He tried to remember who she was and suddenly the woman shrunk away and turned into nothing. He trudged on his feet sucked into the mud then he heard a voice coming from the forest, he knew it was the voice of woman he had loved.

‘Retrace your steps; go back to where you were, go to where is the sun is happy in the sky, the dog walkers and all their dogs where trees grew tall forever green here sickness sleepwalks, as if it were barred from that world where song birds delighted in the blue, Go back the way.’ She offered her hand and turned him from the way to the sick lands and he started to walk as the woman led him along.

‘This way,’ she pointed to where he longs to lay in the long grass this way homeward. He looked back at the withered path yearning to survey it’s dark terror he wanted to push on believing in all the rot and decay he could see the something imbued with light and it would grow brighter in the dark.

He turned back and followed behind the woman he had loved, as he watched the swish of her tied length of hair behind her back rocking from side to side its golden stands mesmerising him. He remembered that he had left the house this morning to gather rocks to line his garden path, and now his eyes strayed and a moss green stone was half-immersed in the stinking mud. He stopped the woman’s hand was on his shoulder but he ignored it and bent down to wrestle the rock for his garden from the clinging mud, he began to get frustrated and again he was covering himself in mud and stinking, he began to get angry, and once again felt her hand on his shoulder and he rose with her touch and she faced him and put a light finger over his lips.

‘Shh. Come on.’ She grabbed his hand and a thrill rushed through him, a thrill of the memory of the hand always in his and always in his in all their lives they’d always had her hand in his and his hand in hers, the truth of her touch him made him run faster to the Moor as if he were fleeing the sick lands, yet ahead he could still not see the greensward of the moor and the woods beyond. He thought all those ideal rocks that’d look great in his garden and even as he ran he looked back at the dark places he come, then a desire to wrest his hand from her grasp and a paranoia began to eat him. What if she is taking me somewhere worse? Jacob began to struggle with her, but her grip was stronger than his and he did not get away, she would let him pause to look at interesting rocks, she sought his freedom and only their fingers combined could free him.

They all of a sudden came to the start of the withered path and moonlight spread over the moor and hand in hand they traversed the many ways of the moor and came to the subtle, strange shadows in the half-light of the woods. After the fearful dark of the withered way by contrast he felt as he were in a wonderful dream and he were a joyful ghost seeing diamonds in moonlit air. Jacob looked back at the two oaks at the start of path and cruelty crept into his heart. He didn’t belong any more under moonlight and starlight and he believed deeply that at the end of withered way he would find light at the end, light enough to heal the land. Here in eaves of the woods he would go back, but she looked deeply in Jacob’s eyes and read the plan in his head. She told him to sit beside her beneath a pine tree, unwillingly he sat there, here golden hair reminded him of the sun and he struggled to stay seated.

‘You will see the sun soon, stay with me until the dawn.’

She seemed to fall asleep and as she lay there he put his arms around her and in his dreams he knew her name and all the things they’d done together, yet when he awoke it was as he had never dreamt at all.

With the sun the dogwalkers walked as if in another dream started along their chosen paths. A dog golden retriever came up to her and licked under her chin, she startled awake and the dog flew off, she looked up at Jacob who extended his hand to pull her up she grasped the hand and soon she stood beside him and at the golden grass of morning moor, some of it high as houses they walked a swift way and soon could see away in the distance hills gathering about themselves on the lightening horizon. She spoke then, her final words and he held those words, the sound of her voice deep in his heart.

‘Shy away from withered ways, my love, there are always new routes under the midday sun, fresh worlds with fruit in the bushes and crows laughing. Wander far and wide with fresh sunlight at its end, but please as you wander the surprises of the earth, forget the unlight of the withered ways you will find new ways into the morning.’ She paused, then pointed to the intertwined oak trees. ‘That way no birds sing.’ She smiled and said again as if she were praying. ‘That way no birds sing.’ And with the last word she seemed to fade and only her tentative smile remained. And he never saw her again.

He heard the birdsong and listened deeply as he walked the familiar way to home. So many songs serenading the land he walked around the hedgerow down the muddy path to the quiet road where his home lay sleeping.

The next day he took a new way across the moor; in his heart he knew this path was true and each step delighted him. As he wandered he heard the canticles of the day and spoke to the dogwalkers with a fresh, new born smile and watched as the dogs roll in the moor, sunlit and smiling.