Blue Jean Chef

I grew up with tea. For as long as I lived at home, I had at least one cup of tea every day of my life. Tea was the appropriate beverage for every occasion. It was especially appropriate first thing in the morning. My mother would bring me a cup of milky tea when she came into my room to wake me up every single day. Indeed, she had a “Teasmade” right next to her bed which woke her up. I have never seen a machine like this since those days. It was an electric alarm clock with two pots sitting behind it. One was a metal kettle which sat on an electric burner. This kettle had a spout that curled over into a ceramic tea pot. My mother would fill the kettle with water at night and put tea bags in the ceramic pot. She would take cups and saucers to bed with her, leaving them on the bedside table with the appropriate amount of milk and sugar for each person already inside. When the alarm would go off in the morning, the water would start to heat up, boil, and eventually move through the curled spout, ending up on the other side in the tea pot. The tea would brew for about 5 minutes and then Mum would have tea, having stepped not one foot out of bed. Then she just had to distribute it throughout the house to my brother and me as she started her day. Tea was a “good morning thing”. Coffee came around much later in my life.

Tea was also a “nighttime thing”.

After dinner, every dinner, my mother would ask who wanted tea. Undoubtedly my father would say yes. Nighttime tea was different, however. This was the time when you could be daring, mix things up and branch out into different varieties of tea. Morning tea was always Orange Pekoe. At night, we could have Darjeeling, Earl Gray, or even Lapsang Souchong. My father and I were the only ones who liked Lapsang Souchong. It is dark black tea from China which tastes like a campfire – literally like having the burnt wood and ash in your mouth. My mother hated it. I don’t really know if I liked it at first, or if I just wanted to like it because my father did. Either way, it has definite appeal to me now.

The presence of tea in my everyday life was not really a surprise since my mother was born and raised in England. In England, tea is just a part of life, like wine in France. As a child, I loved spending summer months with my cousins in England. I was the youngest of all the cousins (at the time) and felt that it was exciting and an honour to spend time with older kids. It was the time when age meant something in the child world – you had a reverence for those older than you, even if older only by a few years. I felt special when I was with them on those holidays. I felt as though they liked having their Canadian cousin come to stay, and I knew I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Their house was a beautiful old three story house with a huge backyard. We’d spent Christmas’s there when I was really little. I had such fond memories of that house and I loved all three of my cousins. Huw was the eldest – four years older than me – and I felt some uncertainty and awe around him. Catrin, his twin, has always been, and continues to be like the older sister I never had. David was just a few months older than me, and we were often in the same camp on general group disagreements or disputes which brought us together. Every day with my cousins in England was an adventure to me. I would wake up, have a cup of tea, and wonder how we would spend the day.

Breakfast always came first. My older cousins, aunt, mother or Nana would toast the bread in the oven, under the grill. (The appliances in England seemed foreign and ancient to me. Why no toaster? Things like that made even the simplest breakfast exciting and different.) Then we always…always had tea.

Tea also served as the ultimate salve - a fix-it, make-everything-better solution to any ill, sorrow, or pain. It was one summer in England with my cousins when I first experienced tea as a comfort. We had gone bike riding together, the four of us, and I was having a wonderful time. I was riding the neighbour’s three speed bike – a step up from my bike at home, which just required pedaling forward to move, and pedaling backwards to brake. Coming back from the stores we’d visited, my cousins and I took a pedestrian path that ran between the houses. It was a paved steep hill providing a short cut between two streets. Huw, the older and wiser one, cautioned me to be careful of the cars at the bottom of the hill. I can still remember the thoughts in my head at the time. What was he warning me about? There were no parked cars at the bottom of the hill. I threw caution – Huw’s caution – to the wind. I took my hands off the breaks and let the bike fly down the hill. Sure enough, when I came tearing out of the bottom of the path, there was a car driving along the street towards me. Huw had meant moving cars, not parked cars. The car screeched to a stop. I pedaled backwards furiously, trying to stop, forgetting that this new bike had brakes on the handlebars rather than the pedals. I was lucky. The car didn’t hit me, but it shook me up and infuriated the driver who gave me a piece of his mind, probably out of fear as well as anger. I tried to hold back my tears so that my cousins couldn’t see.

We made it back to their house and my Mum was there. She sat me down in the kitchen and made me a cup of tea. The tea made it all better. Now as I think about it, there’s a really good chance it was actually my mum that made it all better, but she disguised herself in a cup of tea. Mothers are wise, for now she is disguised in every cup of tea I drink. When I’m down, sad, sick, stressed, if anything at all is wrong, I can have a cup of tea and feel like I’m being comforted in the way that only mothers know how. My Mum is every cup of tea – every cup of tea except for Lapsang Souchong. That’s definitely my Dad!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 4th, 2004 at 11:09 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.