Dr Sally Bayley.
Tea shops encourage the telling of intimate things. A tea shop rendezvous automatically creates intimacy and sympathy; over tea and teacakes you are ushered into a feminine world of secrets and confidences. Tea is as much about looking concerned and interested as it is about quenching thirst or having a sit down. Children’s author, Shirley Hughes understood this when she wrote the classic children’s story, Sally’s Secret, in which small girls practise passing the sugar and milk over tea. Tea outside, in the case of Hughes’s charming story, tea at the bottom of the garden, is the beginning of a vital relationship of trust and intimacy between Sally and her next door friend, Rose. Sally and Rose know they like each other because they can make tea together, nicely.
When you go out for tea you have to be nice; certainly this is what your mother would have told you. Only nice people go out for tea. Remembering her Edinburgh childhood, the Scottish writer, Muriel Spark, draws upon the patois of Edinburgh’s Morningside ladies delivering solemn auguries on the weather and marriages in Mcvittie’s tea room on Princes Street where she was taken by her mother after an energetic shop. ‘Niverthelace’, said the respectable Morningside ladies gathering in close across the table, ‘despite what he might say, we know better.’ The Morningside ladies are the equivalent of Macbeth’s witches hovering over their cauldron, chanting and churning and stirring up fate; making a recipe for the future. What they don’t know isn’t worth knowing. Spark’s reminiscence reminds us that tea shops are places for telling those who think they know something, that you know something better. Vital bits of information can be stirred in with the sugar, stories can be told and information gathered.
Mcvittie’s, like the English Lyons Tea Rooms that opened in the eighteenth century, were places where women could gather in public and form company and conversation: tie social knots. In the eighteenth century women had to be chaperoned, but by the twentieth they were going it alone in the microcosmic world of the tea room. The novelist of social manners, Barbara Pym, brilliantly captures the tea room lady sitting alone at her isolated table listening into the intimacies of others: a fly feeding from crumbs. Tea, she tells herself, is cheaper and better for her than alcohol; and in the tearoom she can spot other species of existence, their habits and their markings, their manners and modes of behaviour.
Going out for tea is as much a matter of social anthropology as it is refreshment. Miss Marple visits tea rooms for both and often gains a clue or two. People tell one another things over tea, especially women. She relies upon this fact. Over tea she can learn a great deal of history. Tucked away in the corner by the window, she watches the population of St. Mary Mead pass by. Tea rooms are also viewing stations, cosy observation towers.
At nine o’clock and five o’clock the corner of my local tearoom is filled with the familiar form of a gentleman reader. He always has a book in hand and he always looks up when I pass by. We notice one another. I wonder how much his choice of chair has to do with wanting to be noticed. He reminds me that coffeehouses, the sort frequented by James Boswell (Child’s coffeehouse in the City, the exclusive club for gentleman readers and Parliamentary speakers), no longer exist. Where do men go when they want to read and look at passing ladies? Where can the lonely or distrait find comfort and intimacy outside their front room? Perhaps this gentleman goes to a tea room not to be alone, but to strike up conversation. Perhaps he has something to tell. I should go in one day and pull up a chair at the adjacent table. I should put on my interested look.
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This lovely piece has filled me with nostalgia for the teashops of my youth. They were everywhere. Every village had one, often run by two old sisters who lovingly made buns and scones and Scotch pancakes and all sorts of creamy and chocolatey cakes. We had favourites all along our usual routes and would stop at them as regularly as at petrol stations. Teashop heaven was in Stockbridge, near where the thirsty from North and South crossed those from East and West. It had half a dozen establishments, each with its charms.
Things were not always cosy. When I was 12 a seedy old man aged about 30 took me to a Lyons corner-house and said, licking his lips, that he did not suppose I had reached the age of puberty. I asked what that meant and he started explaining that my mother and father had to do certain things in order for me to be born. I had known about that since I was 6 so I smelt a rat, hastily finished my toasted teacake and bolted with him in pursuit. I saw him glaring as the gates of the lift to the South Kensington underground closed behind me.
Wonderful again, Sally. Absolutely sublime.
This has flung me right back to first year tutorials, huddled in a tiny room on staircase 5, listening to talk of Henry James with hands wrapped around a warm mug and a bookcase acting as an impromptu and incompetent osteopath.
Or all of us clustered around the kettle in Ali’s room, periodically looking out of the window onto Market Street to watch the world go by.
My favourite part is about the man in the tea shop: always in the same place, and always reading (but reading what?).
What a lovely and exactly written portrait, full of insight and beautifully composed. I want a cup of tea now, but I must try to find the kind of tea shop, and company, that Sally Bayley evokes. Yet I suspect I may not encounter anything that comes close to hers. Sally Bayley’s tea shop is at once real, and from the world of dreams and the pages of books..
“Only nice people go out to tea.”
As a country child in the early 1960s, the ‘treat’ of visiting a tea room in town could be a daunting experience. Our noisy ragtag family would attract disapproving looks from well-dressed customers and I would suddenly become conscious of my feral appearance and lack of table manners, (effects of living in a house without running water and electricity, not improved by a family tendency to argue loudly at table, sometimes using cutlery to reinforce a point).
This is such a familiar world to me; I was struck by an almost uncanny recognition as I read it. There’s a frisson in enjoying a clandestine cuppa, not least because usually tea is domestic, safe or familial. Many’s the time I’ve enjoyed my tea as your gentleman does, sometimes with a cake on the side. Sometimes it’s a prelude to inspiration: the muse wafts up through the steam. And then at other times, it’s just a switching-off; a relaxing of limbs and an emptying of the head.
I do wonder whether we have our own Morningside ladies in North Oxford. A field trip may be called for.
I read this piece in India surrounded by family. I read it out loud to my brother, his german wife and her mother who is trying to sleep in the next room. My brother in classic Indian style polished off nearly a whole box of Indian sweets during my reading. The German lady half asleep murmured that she felt like a cup of tea and my brothers wife spread out on the coach and relaxed. This piece by Miss Bayley does exactly what a tea room is supposed to do, relax everyone, make everyone take a pause from the continuity of life. Well done.
I have never been in a tea shop but with your description I feel I have. We don’t have tea shops in Spain. I suppose the closest rituals we have to this are walking while eating an icecream or going to a café for a coffee. Walking with an icecream is a game of looking and being looked at. When we have a coffee we sit like you do in a tea shop and we usually talk about things we have not seen. I would like to have a tea in one of Ruby’s coloured tea cups and just watch life through the window. But Ruby’s tea cups are in a bookshop.