Tea with the Scobies
Once upon a time, many years ago, in an idle hour on a train or a plane or in a library, scribbling in blue Biro in a research notebook with pink, narrow- lined pages, I wrote a dramatization of what it was like to have tea at my parents’ home in Cardiff. Back then, before I became a writer, I did not date my notebooks, but since my brother Harry (born in January,1955) appears in the piece as a college student, I am pretty sure it was written in 1972.
The years between 1970, when my daughter Sarah was born, and 1973, when my daughter Catherine was born, were fraught with emotion for me, and my memories and records are sketchy. But in 1972 I was an assistant professor at Wellesley College, and I vaguely remember going to Europe on my own for a few weeks on some kind of research trip, leaving four-year-old Chris with Mike. I must have spent a few days at my parents’ home in Cardiff before flying home, and that visit seems to have stirred up strong feelings in me.
Ever since going up to Cambridge as an undergraduate but especially since marrying and settling with my family in the United States, I found myself slipping back into my teenage self whenever I returned to my parents’ home. This was partly involuntary and partly an expression of love. and it both amused and angered me. I could see that my mother and grandmother were reassured and comforted when I played my old role as “daughter”, but I found their lack of interest in the new me, the “real me”, frustrating. In Cardiff, I was once more “our Gilly” but I was also an alien scholar beaming in to observe the human fauna, size up the domestic space, record the idioms, pick out the relational patterns, and see what the psychologist R. D. Laing called “the knots”.
These were feelings I could not voice to the world or even formulate for myself, but for which I found mimetic release by writing my own version of the then trendy “kitchen sink” drama.
Here I offer a slightly modified version of the tea party scene, followed by my reading of it today.
We are in the dining room at 52 Kimberley Road. It is a small, narrow, multipurpose room some eight feet by twelve where the family comes together during the day. It forms a kind of corridor between the kitchen and the rest of the house, and the carpet and linoleum are worn. A door with a stained-glass panel at the top leads into the hall at one end. At the other end, a doorway leads into the little scullery-kitchen. On the wall against the kitchen is a fireplace, now blocked by a standard two-bar electric fire. A sliding glass door next to the fireplace would, were it not blocked by two armchairs, open onto “Nana’s Room” where Nana’s dining room furniture and odd storage items reside. Once or twice a year, party food is laid out on Nana’s table. Otherwise, for reasons of family politics, this pleasant, shapely room with French windows onto the garden is unused and therefore unheated.
The two shabby, well-worn armchairs under the sliding door are where members of the family can often be found reading a newspaper, several of which, of both political persuasions, are delivered every day. Next to the armchairs is a built-in, glass-fronted china cabinet. On the wall next to the door is a sideboard, its top crowded higgledy-piggledy by letters, cellotape, a china dog, playing cards, and the key features of family life--a portable radio and a small television, one of which is always turned on during the daytime. Given the small size of the room and the large collection of furniture, laying the table for meals requires planning and experience. Once people are seated at the table, it is impossible to get anything out of the china cabinet or the sideboard.
The table is set for five with a slightly food-stained tablecloth, elderly cork table mats, nondescript but matching cutlery and crockery, butter in a butter dish, jam and tinned cream in cut- glass dishes, a larger cut-glass bowl of tinned fruit, and a fancy plate with slices of fruit cake.
Mum’s voice from the scullery: “Tea’s ready….I said, tea’s ready!”
She walks stiffly to the door into the hall, and shouts,” I said tea’s ready, and if I have to say it one more time, you know where you can put your tea.”
I walk through to the kitchen and come back bearing the teapot and a plate of sliced, buttered bread. Nana comes in and sits in the chair next to the kitchen. I squeeze into the chair at the end of the table facing my mother, easing my knee around the table leg.
Nana: Where’s Bill then, our Esme? Isn’t he having his tea with us?
Esme: Honestly, Mam, I must have told you a dozen times, but you don’t listen to a word I say, just go on asking stupid questions. You know as well as I do it’s his bowls night. It’s the big tournament. What do you think I’ve been making all those bloody sausage rolls for? Here, have some fruit. (Mum hands Nana a large bowl of tinned fruit).
N: I don’t want all that. I can’t manage all that. Why do you give me all that. It makes me queasy if I eat all that.
M: Don’t talk through your hat, Mam, for God’s sake. It’s no more and no less than I’ve been handing you these last twenty years, and you know you like tinned pineapple.
N: Oh, I don’t know. A little bit of bread and butter is all I really fancy for my tea, I’ve no appetite, but I suppose I must eat what I’m given and give God’s thanks for it. Pass me the bread and butter will you, our Gilly.
Gillian: Sure, Nanny, here you go. Need any jam or anything? Here’s your cup of tea..Er…..sorry, I know I’m the only one that takes it, but did you put the sugar out, Mum?
M: Just as I’ve sat down, of course. (She heaves herself to her feet and goes into the scullery, returning with a Baroquely ornamental blue glass sugar bowl with a fluted spoon, and slams it down on the table, pushing her hair back from her face in a habitual gesture).
M: Pfff, Jesus it’s hot in here. How you can sit there, our Mam, with a woolen dress and a thick cardy on I’ll never know. The perspiration’s popping out of me.
Gillian puts sugar in her tea, and silently starts in on the fruit and bread and butter.
Nana : If you’d only let someone give you a hand, Esme, you wouldn’t get so hot and bothered all the time. But you always have been the same. Here I sit twiddling my thumbs all day long and you’ll never let me do any little thing. I may be old, but I can still do some little things, and it helps to pass the time. Time hangs so heavy when you’ve got to my age.
M: For crying out loud, Mam, you know what has to be done by now or you never will, and if you wanted to help, you’ve only to show willing. I go out every morning, come back with a load of shopping and you haven’t even washed up the cup of Glaxo I made you before I went out. Lady Muck, that’s you these days, I must say. Ever since our Dad died, you haven’t lifted a finger for yourself or me. No wonder you’re going out of your mind with nothing to do. Idle fingers make idle minds, as you’ve said to me many a time. It’s as much as I can do to push you out of the door every week for the bloody whist drive.
N: You’re so unkind, Esme, and I don’t know why. I try to keep as quiet as I can and not offend you and all you do is scream at me for the slightest little thing. There’s days I hardly dare to open my mouth, but you jam my words down my throat. I never treated my mother like that, though she lived to ninety-three, and proud of it. I waited on her hand, foot, and finger.
M: Well, I’m not waiting on you hand, foot, and finger, and that’s all there is to it. My grandma had more get up and go in her little finger than you have in your whole body, and that’s a fact. I’m not your bloody slave and (she winces aloud) and now I’ve banged my bad knee on the table leg again, right where I caught it at the bus stop the other day. Just as I was going to get up and switch the kettle off for more tea. That kettle’s boiling its head offs, but no one would notice it but me I suppose.
G (slipping carefully out from around her table leg ) Don’t get agitated, Mum, I’ll make the tea. (from the scullery) Does anyone want anything else while I’m up?
N: Could you get the other jam, Gilly love, if it’s no trouble. This raspberry your mother buys gets between my teeth.
M: My God, isn’t the jam good enough for you now?
(At this moment, the front door is heard to slam, and Harry comes in, humming loudly).
Harry: Hello ullo ullo, at it again, are we? Nothing like a nice quiet afternoon row to get the digestive juices flowing. (He sits down between Nana and Gillian, and looks around the table expectantly) All right, ma, what’s for tea then? I have to be out by six thirty. Me and some of the lads are going out for a little pub crawl to celebrate Jimmy’s getting the sack.
M: So what else is new, and when did you ever need any excuse for getting drunk? And tea’s on the table, in case you hadn’t noticed. The rest of us have already finished, of course, but there’s still plenty left.
H: You mean we’re not having anything hot again, nothing to eat but this sweet muck? You know I never eat tinned fruit. At least my landlady gives me a decent meal when I come back from college at night, egg and chips or something. I’m making myself beans on toast. (He goes into the scullery).
M: What with him and your gran, our Gilly, it’s enough to make a saint swear. I don’t know why I bother sometimes, really I don’t. And then I’m told I’m neurotic. At least your father eats what’s put in front of him and thank you. As long as the meals are in front of him on time and the meat and veg are cooked through, he never makes a murmur, not in thirty years of marriage.
H (from the scullery) The bloody toaster’s not working again. I fixed it the last time I was down and now it’s busted again. What the hell do you do to the appliances anyway? God, I hate this kitchen.
M: There’s nothing wrong with that toaster. You just need to watch it, that’s all. Your father makes toast every morning with it and never burns a piece. Use the grill if you can’t do it any other way. (The three women sip tea in silence as noises of cooking issue from the scullery.
M: Leave the saucepan to soak, I’ll do it later.
(Harry comes in carrying a plate with two pieces of buttered toast heaped with baked beans and a bottle of milk)
Nana: You might at least put it in a jug, our Harry. You know your mother doesn’t like bottles on the table. She’s always very fussy about things like that, your mother is, so try not to upset her.
H: What’s the point in putting it in a jug when I’m going to drink the whole thing. Just makes for more washing up, seems to me. (in between forkfuls of toast and swigs of milk) Where’s Dad then? Isn’t he in yet? Usually you could set the clock by him sitting down at the table.
M: Just because you’re always late, doesn’t give you the right to make fun of your father. He’s at his bowls night tonight as you might know if you took any interest at all in what goes on in this house. It’s the big tournament tonight, and your Dad’s been quite nervy about it, for him. When I went down with the sausage rolls and the trifle I’d promised Flossie Williams—she always asks me for a trifle, Flossie does, she says it always goes, I expect it’s all that sherry I put in—anyway, your father was blowing his nose and pacing around that way he has—you know, our Gilly! I could tell he was nervous.
Nana: When Bob had a tournament down at the bowls club, he always looked as cool as a cucumber—and that blazer I bought him at Trahernes—you remember the one, Esme—it fitted him like a glove. And he’d never dream of putting his bowling shoes on anywhere but on the green. Kept his shoes and his woods perfect he did. He was a real bowler, your father was.
M: All right, we’ve all heard it a thousand times, and I know Bill will never be the bowler our Dad was, but he enjoys it, that’s the main thing. By the way, Harry, if you’re going out around 6.30, you could give me a lift into town.
Nana: You’re not going out again Esme? Rush, rush, rush, that’s all you do and never an evening quiet at home. And I suppose I’m to be left on my own again for another long evening. I might just as well be dead for all the company I get. Someday, Esme, you’ll know what it’s like to be old and unwanted.
M: Oh, for crying out loud! (She gets up, hits her knee against the table leg and stands clutching her leg, her face contorted with pain) That bloody table leg. Go in the other room and watch the TV, Mam, for goodness’ sake. It’s that quiz program you like. and you know you hate to miss it.
N: Very well, I know when I’m not wanted. That bad hip and knee of yours will be the death of you, Esme, if you don’t lose weight and take the weight off them more often. Always gadding around here and there. It’s one thing after another with you, and never a moment’s peace.
(Harry gets up, leaving everything on the table).
H: Well, I’m going upstairs to get ready. If you want a ride, Mum, you’d better get your skates on, I’m not waiting for you.
Mum gets up and painfully limps into the scullery with a pile of dishes.
G: Leave these to me, Mum, if you’re going out. I can finish them when you’re gone. (Mum continues to clear the table and Gillian moves skillfully around her as they both go in and out of the narrow doorway)
M: Nowadays it takes you five minutes to wash a cup, our Gill. All that silly rinsing. Such a waste of hot water--it drives your father mad. But I have to change my dress and drag a comb through my hair, so you can dry. This blouse is soaked, I’m that lathered up. It’s only a small meeting, but I’m the chairman so I have to go. Your grandmother’s got me so wound up I’d just as soon not go. She takes all the pleasure out of it.
Esme fills a small washing up bowl with water, adds a big dash of Fairy Liquid detergent, and rapidly washes plates and cutlery and puts them on the draining board.
Gillian: Everything would be so much easier, Mum, if you had a draining rack and a tray.
She picks up a very damp and dirty tea towel and begins to wipe the dishes and to carry them into the dining room and puts them back into the china cabinet. Mum (pouring away the dish water and drying her hands on her apron) You know, I can’t go through the door without her wanting to know where I’m going and if I think I am going to be long. And the same routine when I get back. Once I get up in the morning--and bless your father for always bringing me my breakfast in bed--I haven’t a moment to my myself or a thought. How your father stands it, I don’t know, but she provokes even him sometimes, she’s that difficult. I might as well have sent her to the old folks home for all the thanks I get. And she won’t even take a shower—her bedroom stinks, it turns my stomach every time I go in there, and as for when the doctor comes to see her, I could die of shame. Ever since your father decided it would be better to take the bath out and put in the shower, she refuses to take a good wash………”
At this point, my little tea party scene runs out of resentment. I resurrect it in this memoir because it is the first sign I’ve found in my papers that what I wanted to be was a writer. And, in just a few pages, this tea party scene conveys the feel of what daily life was like for me when I was growing up than I could have come up with in a whole chapter. But reading it today, I see its cruelty as well as its accuracy. This is not something I will show to my uncle Tom, my last living Cardiff relative.
In my later revision notes to this piece, I wrote “Death to father announced by telephone to end the play. His strategic importance in the house has been shown.” Perhaps one of the many reasons I never actually tried to write this kitchen sink drama is that I could not possibly kill my father. I loved and revered him too much to make him a figure of my imagination.
With my mother and grandmother, it was different. I knew them from inside and outside, I was bonded to them and formed by them, and so I could be harsh with them. I could also have a little fun with my brother in his carefree student days. Harry grew up to be not only the most devoted husband father, and grandfather but head cook, bottle-washer, and ironer to the whole Scobie tribe. But I could not place my father at the tea table. His presence would have changed everything.
Dad was the oil that kept the domestic machine working at Kimberley Road. He was the buffer between my mother’s flaring temper and my grandmother’s passive aggression. It was, literally, a thankless task since gratitude did not come easily to either.
We children observed our father and modeled ourselves after him. Like him, we would make it our work to establish harmony in the home. But to do that we all three knew without ever putting it into words that we had to get out of the dining room at 52 Kimberley Road and develop new ways of interacting day by day with the people we love.
