Tea Sets - Celebration Cuppa

 
Aunt Tillie’s Silver Tea Set

“Take it,” Aunt Tillie insisted.
We sat side by side, our bare legs
Sticking to her plastic-wrapped couch
In that hot apartment on 34th Street.

“An heirloom,” Aunt Tillie said,
Showing the ornate tray in our laps.
“To pass down to your children.”

Who had absolutely no interest
Forty years later, to waste even
A minute with a polishing cloth.

So Aunt Tillie’s silver tea set
Goes to Goodwill
Along with my vintage china.

Aunt Tillie had been so sure
Generations would treasure
The chance to entertain in elegance.

But she spent her life, like I did,
Accumulating things that would one day
Be dumped for a tax donation.

Unloading my car, I see I am not alone.
So many others my age, discarding
Knickknacks we once though we needed
But now wish to unstick from our skin
Like the plastic on Aunt Tillie’s couch.

                                                   Jacqueline Jules

Jacqueline Jules is a poet and writer of children’s books. She lives in Long Island, USA. When I read this poem and realised that was exactly ‘it’, I felt relieved that I’m not alone and I need not feel guilty for doing a similar thing.

We had to pack things away to make space for our damp course to be replaced. This task also became a down-sizing project ready for that move we keep talking about. Emptying a display unit and a cupboard, I made the decision that the tea sets had to go. By tea sets, I mean family heirlooms and not items we had acquired for ourselves. A china tea set, painted gold, made up of cups, saucers, small plates and a sandwich or cake plate, with a milk jug and sugar basin, was a gift from the family to my maternal grandparents for their golden wedding anniversary in 1972. I remember the party and buffet taking place in their pub and I always thought I remembered my mother being there, but she had passed three years earlier. She must have been there in spirit. We had toasted the ‘bride and groom’ by drinking tea from the gold cups, some of us, anyway, and congratulating them on reaching fifty golden years of marriage. Or fifty golden years of constant bickering, but that’s another story.

The other tea set, also china, ivory coloured with tiny gold detail, belonged to my maternal great-grandmother. I don’t think it marked an occasion, it was hers and the two sets were kept together after they were passed down to me and my sister. I don’t know who had them first, they’ve been backwards and forwards, more recently ending up with me and nicely displayed in a glass cabinet. Until the great clearance.

My sister was quite sure she didn’t want them back and I could do what was best for me. Looking on Ebay and other online sites, I learnt that we weren’t dealing with treasure here. I would have to donate them to a charity shop where they would sit with other rejected heirloom tea sets for years. It was a very sad thought, but with the date for the start of the damp proofing looming up, there wasn’t much time for sentiment and the tea sets were bubble-wrapped and packed into boxes.

During this time, I had a welcome visit from a close friend of many years. We were overdue a catch up and a good gossip, which we did before moving into recent things like the state of our poorly house, the cost of the remedial work and being ruthless in getting rid of things. Someone in her family was about to have the share of a charity shop for a week, so she gladly took a box of DVDs and some clothes. When the tea sets were mentioned, it was music to my ears to learn that her sister did afternoon teas and might be able to use them, she would ask.

A few weeks later, on the other side of one of our trips away, I was happy to wash and re-pack the heirloom tea sets and send them to their new home where they might be used. Thank you so much, you know who you are.

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Recipe Poetry - If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked A Cake

For the past week, I’ve had Blue Mink’s ‘Melting Pot’ going round in my head. It was a good song back in the day, carrying a message in a poetic recipe form. Unfortunately, the lyrics, seemingly harmless in 1969, are inappropriate for our enlightened PC modern times. I decided not to include them here, but they are easy enough to find on Google.

Instead, I share with you my wonderful birthday cake recipe, made the same way for years and years of family members birthdays, even my own. My sister has made me a cake a couple of times. She’s got a birthday this week, one of those with a ‘0’ on the end and she looks so much younger.

Hands washed, pinny on, oven on 180c, and off we go.

Ingredients:  3 eggs, or 2 eggs and a splash of milk; whipping cream, strawberries and chocolate flake to decorate; 6ozs of self-raising flour, 6ozs of caster sugar, 6ozs of margarine.

Give yourself at least an hour,
Gently sift the finest flour.
Caster sugar is the best
Weighed properly, not just guessed..
Use three fresh eggs, nice free-range
Or two with milk for a change.
Margarine, the best is Stork,
Mashed and softened with a fork.
Beat all in the Kenwood, fast,
‘Til a smooth and shiny cast.
Transfer the mix to cake tins
And bake for twenty-five mins.
Whilst they cool, whip up some cream
And prepare the décor theme.
Strawberry halves, chocolate flake,
For this special birthday cake.

Trust me, it is delicious!

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Enslavement - History

When I was young and starting out in my working life, I was amused by a cartoon poster on the staff room wall depicting a group of disgruntled workers, with one of them shouting, “They can’t sack us, slaves have to be sold!” It was harmless and was meant in good humour at the time, but it wouldn’t be acceptable now.
 

Recently, a statue of merchant Edward Colston was toppled and pushed into Bristol Harbour during the George Floyd protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. Colston was a figure of controversy for a number of years, concerning his involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. He is one of many British merchant / slave traders and there are things to learn about all of them, good and bad. Colston’s statue was removed from the harbour and will take a place in a Bristol museum with his full details. Perhaps that would be the way forward with other controversial figures.  Every city and town in the United Kingdom has area names and street names that can be traced back to a potential slave trade origin. It would be wrong to rename them. Morally, history cannot be changed, rewritten or hidden, as in Orwell’s ‘1984’. We learn from history and move on.

Across Morecambe Bay, on Sunderland Point, lies Sambo’s Grave, a place I have visited many times.
Sunderland Point was an 18^th century port serving Lancaster and surrounding areas with cotton, sugar and slave ships from the Caribbean. Sambo is thought to be a young slave belonging to a ship’s captain.  He took ill and died at Sunderland Point, and as a non-Christian, was buried in unconsecrated ground.
 

From Wikipedia – ‘Some sixty years after the death, a retired head master from Lancaster Boys’ Grammar School, Mr James Watson, heard the story and raised money from summer visitors to the area for a memorial to be placed on the unmarked grave. Watson, who was the brother of prominent Lancaster slave trader, William Watson, also wrote the epitaph that now marks the grave,

 Slavery is still out there, hard to spot, but it exists in different forms, some of it close to home. County line drug runners, under-age prostitution, sweat shop factory workers. Vulnerable people from here and abroad promised a better life. Modern slavery.

Sonnet to William Wilberforce

 Thy country, Wilberforce, with just disdain,

     Hears thee, by cruel men and impious, call'd

     Fanatic, for thy zeal to loose th' enthrall'd

     From exile, public sale, and slav'ry's chain.

     Friend of the poor, the wrong'd, the fetter-gall'd,

     Fear not lest labour such as thine be vain!

     Thou hast achiev'd a part; hast gain'd the ear

     Of Britain's senate to thy glorious cause;

     Hope smiles, joy springs, and tho' cold caution pause

     And weave delay, the better hour is near,

     That shall remunerate thy toils severe

     By peace for Afric, fenc'd with British laws.

     Enjoy what thou hast won, esteem and love

     From all the just on earth, and all the blest above!

                                                  By William Cowper

   Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Came Forth Sweetness

I'm going to start this blog with a digression. I never thought of myself as a cruel child, but I wince slightly now in recounting the following tale from my formative years. When I was aged four and living (as I'm sure I've explained before) in deepest, darkest Africa, I used to collect toads and pop them into old Lyle's golden syrup tins, the lids of which my father had punctured with a few holes so the creatures could breathe. I think I must have imagined I was an intrepid explorer, scouring the continent for rare and exotic beasts and bringing my amazing finds home to base-camp, much to the wonderment of all.

I was certainly in the right locale; but toads were about as exotic a trophy as a four-year-old armed with a few syrup tins could expect to ensnare; and as for the wonderment element - which is the real point of telling this story - that consisted of presenting a tin to my younger brother (aged two) and enjoying his reaction as he pulled off the lid  and came forth not sweetness (as the famous logo proclaimed) but a toad, springing right up into his surprised face. It's a trick that, to my satisfaction, worked on more than one occasion. What can I say? Boys will be boys. No toads were harmed. Digression over.

ye olde imperial measure golden syrup tin

I always took that instantly recognisable and usefully recyclable green and golden syrup tin for granted with its lion, its bees and its slogan 'out of the strong came forth sweetness'. It was only when I was mulling over ideas for this  sugar  blog that I decided to delve a bit deeper - and here is what I found...

Take the lion in the picture. I always assumed he was sleeping contentedly (possibly after a heavy meal of treacle tart, one of my own favourites as a lad), but he is in fact dead. And those bees buzzing around his head aren't seeking out any last traces of treacle to be found on his magnificent muzzle and whiskers, they've been nesting and breeding in his corpse. Quite a shocker.

Abram Lyle, founding father of the East End sugar refining company that bore his name, was a very religious man and he took that slogan from a Bible story (Judges chapter 14 if you wish to check it out), which relates how Samson on a visit to select a bride from among the Philistines once tore a young lion apart with his bare hands and on re-passing the scene some considerable time later found bees nesting in the carcass, from which he extracted honey that he took home with him. That led him to pose the following riddle to the Philistines at his wedding feast: 'Out of the eater came forth food and out of the strong came forth sweetness.' After puzzling over this for three days the guests advised Samson's new wife to get him to expound on the meaning of the riddle or they would burn the house down. Ah, the old days, the old ways!

The image of the lion on the Lyle tin is based on a painting of 1849 by Sir Edwin Landseer, entitled 'The Desert' (or alternatively 'The Fallen Monarch'), reproduced below. The original can still be seen in Manchester Art Gallery.

the lion sleeps forever

Sir Edwin was famous for his depictions of wild life in various media. His most well-known works are the sculptures of lions that stand at each corner of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square. He was also much given to drugs and drink, suffered from depression and his family eventually had him certified insane.

Abram Lyle & Sons duly merged with England's other leading sugar-refining company Henry Tate & Sons in 1921 to form Tate & Lyle. In the previous century both of the firms' founding fathers had become millionaire sugar magnates and Tate's lasting benefaction (on his death in 1899) was to the world of the arts in the form of the Tate Gallery. In a curious way, that closed a circle.

I make a point of trying to avoid sugary foods, except for the occasional treat. Treacle tart remains one of my few sweet indulgences; not so easy to come by nowadays. In Egypt it's called 'palace bread' (if you ever need to ask). The finest treacle tart I ever had was at a pub in Moretonhampstead on the northern edge of Dartmoor. It was made with black treacle. That was over thirty years ago but remains a fond memory.

To wrap up this week's blog, a new poem - a work in progress (so subject to change) - a somewhat caustic commentary on La Dolce Vita, a tilt at the second estate and those who possess it or aspire to it.

The Sweet Life
Life on Quality Street boasts
an embarrassment of bitches;
the cream of Tory motherhood
has suckled the next clutch
of arrogant young bucks who
aspire to lord it over us;
their ancient double-barrelled names
already down for Cleversods,
that prestigious school-on-the-hill
where they'll learn how to be elite,
with bullying and buggery for sport,
get taught how to shoot, ride roughshod
and be ready to rule the world
unfolding at their precious feet.

Meanwhile on Quality Street,
behind those beds of roses
and bold front doors with CCTV,
fanlights and carriage lamps,
anachronistically a feudal world prevails
of nannies, butlers, cooks and maids
whose duty is to serve, but not observe
discreet affairs between masters and au pairs
or mistresses and fashionable beaus,
to make sure everything is laid out
on the plate precisely so the second estate,
whose members, ensconced, immune
from want or strife can thrive;
no shadow of austerity shall taint their lives.

With silver spoons in mouths
and later up their noses - one supposes -
the children of the privileged
will want for nothing but compassion
as they grow into their roles.

How elegantly debutantes
perform the ritual mating dance,
in season now and looking for a match
more based on money than romance.
Handsome but penniless won't cut it
unless the title's right;
coarse with a king's ransom might.

So history repeats itself,
the mystery of succession of the privileged.
They take their places on the boards
of hedge fund companies with offshore fortunes
well beyond the reach of law
or buy a safe seat in the House from where
with others of their ruthless kind
they legislate to decimate the Welfare State
in the interests of keeping things sweet
for their fellow residents on Quality Street.

Thanks for reading. Stay sassy and sharp, S ;-)

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Sugar - A Little Stick of Blackpool Rock

 Somewhere, hidden in the maze of back alleys and side streets of South Shore, there once stood the rock factory. It was only a two minute jog away from our pub, very handy for my first summer holidays job and I was excited to start. Well, I was more excited at the prospect of earning a wage to fund the spends for my school trip to Yugoslavia at the end of August. Dad gave me pocket money for sorting empty bottles at weekends and re-stocking shelves when the pub was shut, but he’d paid for my adventure and anything more was down to me.

On my first morning, I presented my fourteen and a half year old self at a side door to the factory. It was only eight o’clock but already a hive of activity. I was ushered into an office where a fearsome looking man dressed in chef’s whites glanced my way and barked orders. I would work eight until six with an hour off at dinner time. I would brew up when told to for morning and afternoon breaks. I was given a pale blue, long sleeved overall, the same as all the ladies. Some wore headscarves tied like a turban. They were the ones who touched the soft, pliable rock when it was tipped from the sugar boiler. They rolled it, gently stretching it until it was the required thickness, or thinness. This was a skill. They had to work in unison and very quickly before the rock began to harden, otherwise it would crack when cut into lengths. The things we learn in life.

My place was in packing, no headscarf needed. I put labels on jars of ‘pebbles’, wrapped sticky tape round the lids and boxed them up ready to go. I put rock into walking-stick tubes and taped caps on them. I tied ribbons on to blue and pink plastic handles ready to be put into the ‘sugary dummy’ mould. Later, I was shown how to operate a machine that sealed cellophane wrapping round giant humbugs. I knew I’d reached a peak when, at last, I donned a pretty headscarf and went into the finishing room to learn how to wrap sticks of rock. There is a skill to it and I’m not sure if I mastered it. Holding one end still, it sort of twisted itself while my other hand rolled it quickly then twisted the other end, and remember to pop a ‘Blackpool Rock’ slip in as it rolled. It is likely that there's a machine to do it these days. Mainly, I was packing items up ready for despatch.

It was a learning curve about some aspects of the real world. Although I was brought up in pubs, some with ‘salt of the earth’ men’s vault bars, I must have had a sheltered life. I’d never heard so much swearing all at once and really rough talk from women and men alike. A couple of girls who had come to work in Blackpool for the summer talked openly about meeting lads and what they got up to on the beach at night. They weren’t much older than me and were friendly enough but laughed at my naivety.

The highlight of my time there was being pushed around the huge sugar store in a wheel-barrow by a boy I knew from school, also on a summer job, and jumping out quickly without being seen.

The low moments were nearly every day for the first week, probably longer, the sickly, sweet smell of molten sugar with a hint of mint or worse, aniseed, turned my stomach so much I’d be running down the yard hoping to make it to the loo before vomiting. At the very least, I’d have a headache.

I managed the full five weeks as arranged and had new clothes and holiday money for Yugoslavia. It was all worth it.

 

 

A light-hearted blog, a serious poem. I love this.

 

 

The God of Sugar (Sugar Shed, Greenock)

Cavernous – and empty now –
no shouts of dockers,
no barefoot women shovelling
molasses – it has the chill
and hush of a cathedral.

Like a pilgrim arrived at a shrine,
wanting something to touch
for a vision or sign
that a saint or god is there,
I rub the tip of my finger

against the rough bricks
of the wall and lick, tasting
sweet dirt, seeing, shining
in the gloom, an obese boy¬
like Elvis in a sequin suit.

What prayers should I offer
to this god of sugar?
Most fitting and proper,
prayers for the slaves
drowned in leaking holds;

or for those who survived
the voyage to the Caribbean
to cut the cane, lashed
until their backs were striped
with festering wounds.

Or prayers for the child
who spooned golden syrup
from the green lion tin, dribbling it
in spirals to form amber pools
in her porridge; who stole

from her mother’s purse
to buy red-tipped sugar cigarettes;
who ruined her teeth
on lollipops and seaside rock?
Prayers for the woman

who still craves sweetness:
savouring strawberries dipped
in the sugar dish, gobbets
of crystallised ginger, figs
almost rotten with ripeness.

by Vicki Feaver

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

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