That Cup Of Tea

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 270, 13 November 1937, Page 8 (Supplement)

That Cup Of Tea

By N. O. Tannin.

THAT early morning cup of tea has tiecome so much an institution

that I often doubt if it is fully appreciated. I doubt if it is, unless one arrives late overnight at an hotel. In the morning, when the seven o'clock rattle starts in the passage} one lies wondering whether the maid will pass one by. The other morning, when I had made a cup and hopped back into the warm blankets with it I began thinking of the various circumstances and places which stand out in memory during an amusing, wandering life.

As a youngster there used to be a big morning tea tray placed on a huge blanket box on the first floor. We boys were supposed to be only on the outer fringe of this ceremony, but it was often a raid which made us '"first in." If tempers were even, it wp.s the informal meeting place for the planning of the day's diversions.

Then, while still a boy, I discovered what ship's tea was; a compound of distilled water, dish cloth, and a touch of tired soup. That was until. I found out how a steward could be coerced.

Not long after I had the delight of that cup of coffee (it seemed to fit in better than tea) some time about dawn, or a bit later, when the mail train from Capetown to the Transvaal—in those days it took four nights and three days—pulled up at a little station on the veldt; the air like champagne, the sky—why try to describe that ? —and the sun just peeping over the vast circle of the veldt or the Kalahari desert. Or it might be amid the Hex River Mountains, a veritable paradise of fruit and greenery.

It wasn't morning tea I had when I climbed the top of Table Mountain to see the sunrise, but a drink from a pool, and dry bread (we were "broke") and in the dark preceding dawn, as we munched a lump of bread, we wondered what the crisp little Reeds in it were. At daylight we found they were weevils.

Aboard A Ship

With Port Ahead

What about that cup of tea we drink on the deck of a ship, before sun-up, when a new port lies ahead? The smell of the land. Each land has its own smelL In the eastern Pacific such a dawn is unexcelled. Under such conditions it was my good luck to first see that gem of the Pacific, Rarotonga, its jagged peaks cutting into a pearly rose dawn. Later Tahiti, but that was rather spoiled because the most awful stench arose. "Is this the far-famed Tahiti?" thought I. But it proved to be the dilatory stewards cleaning out the vegetable locker on the fore hatch. Things had got rather ripe.

Even in Egypt we dusty "sodgers" had morning tea between reveille and roll call. That was obtainable for half a piastre in a huge marquee. It passed for tea. Actually, I think the Gippos stewed the tea, so-called cocoa, and coffee in the same pots alternately, and never washed them out. Still it was hot and sweet. But what a scramble! There I always got service because on the Q.T. I backsheeshed the niggers. I always told disgrunted mates it was not favouritism which got me attention but courtesy.

On the transport going to Anzac (we were like herrings in a barrel) we managed every morning to get cafe ai; lait and biscuits for a piastre. My recollection is that we lived, or practically, on that. On the peninsula itself the first thing we did when we got out of the front line in the morning' was light a fire and toil the billy. Sometimes it was tea with a "stick in it." Did we need it? The dawns there were magnificent, but I could not say that the atmosphere was sweet. Too much the smell of death.

Morning Tea In Cathedral Town

As long as I live I shall remember my morning teas when staying at a cathedral town in England. The wonderful spring of 1917. A charming room at the house of dear friends, looking into a delightful garden in which sang the thrush and blackbird, while the cuckoo called in the tree tops. Chestnuts just burst from their brown gummy buds. There I lay and read "Pastures Green," morning after morning.

Morning tea off the banks of New foundland. The air, though it was summer, dank and thick, and the smell of seaweed and the distant land. Often in the U.S.A. it was hard to get a cup of real tea but at the big hotels thy appointments accompanying early morning tea were par excellence. Fine tea, hot rolls, rich butter and trimmings. All on good electro-plate, polished to a turn: 30 cents and 10 for the page boy. By contrast there is that early billy tea, way up in the mountains of this country, when you and your mates gather around the big fire, shivering pleasurably before the glow. All things considered I don't think many of us would go back to the pint (or was it quart?) pot of heady mead with which our forefathers are said to have started the day. At the same time I am of the opinion that there are many who migrht begin their day with advantage with some such fill-up. They would start the day with a glow instead of i grouch. They would be mellow, and as th« old fellow down Coromandel way pays (or d'u] when he was alive). "A man ain't normal 'til he's had half a dozen beers."