‘Is that pastry or sludge from the sink?’ George teased.
‘I can’t believe our Clarrie hasn’t taught you any cooking,’ said Olive.
‘Mohammed Din sees to all that,’ said Adela. ‘He wouldn’t let me anywhere near the kitchen.’
This caused great hilarity among the Brewises, and “Mohammed Din sees to all that” became a family catchphrase whenever Adela showed her ignorance about things domestic.
A Scotswoman called Myra came in twice a week to do laundry and cleaning. Adela found it strange to see a woman doing the jobs that low-caste men did at home. Myra was loud and cheerful and sang along to the radiogram as she polished, even though Olive repeatedly told her not to turn on the machine as it gave her a headache.
‘Och, you need a good sing-song to encourage the elbow grease,’ Myra laughed in defiance.
While Olive went to lie down, Adela couldn’t resist joining in the singing. ‘Whistle While You Work’ became their shared theme tune as Adela pushed around the furniture for Myra, and the maid wielded the carpet sweeper.
‘Mrs Brewis puts up wi’ ma cheek,’ Myra confided, ‘’cause naebody else round here will work for her. Always complaining. If I worked for free, she’d still say I was robbing her blind.’ Myra laughed and continued in her forthright manner. ‘That Mr Brewis is a saint putting up wi’ her ways. And wee Jane should stand up for hersel’ instead of cowering like a wee timorous beastie. I’d not let Mrs Brewis speak to me like Jane allows her to.’
But at the café Adela saw another side of Jane: her cousin was popular among the staff and customers. She was welcoming and efficient and seemed to know something about everyone who came in, chatting to the women about their families, the men about football and handing out sweets to children on their birthdays.
‘Your mam started that tradition,’ Jane told her. ‘That’s what Lexy says. It’s one of my earliest memories being given a stick of liquorice in a bag of sherbet on my fourth birthday, even though it was just after the war and treats were hard to come by. I loved my aunt Clarrie.’
Adela enjoyed her visits to the tea room and the welcoming Lexy. She took little persuasion to lift the lid on the old piano and bash out popular tunes and sing along. She had learned to play at St Mary’s, and Tommy had taught her a handful of more modern melodies. Lexy would join in, and the café would fill up more quickly as shoppers were drawn in by the music.
After two weeks of badgering, Jack gave Adela a tour of the Tyneside Tea Company factory. It was situated further upriver in an austere building with a once-grand frontage now flaky with peeling paint and grimy from smoke. Behind was a depot of delivery vans, a few motorised but mainly still horse-drawn. The air was full of the manure smell of stables and the occasional whinny of a workhorse. Adela was surprised that they weren’t all out delivering.
She breathed in. ‘Horse smell reminds me of Belgooree.’
‘Wait till you smell the tea inside.’ Jack smiled.
He showed her around the packing rooms, where loose tea was being poured into paper bags and sealed. The air was dusty with dry tea. The workers spoke to him with deference, but his manner with them was friendly and encouraging.
George joined them in the tasting room. Adela felt a pang of longing for the one at Belgooree; here as at home there was a simple bench lined up with white china tasting pots, spittoons and samples of different grades of tea.
‘This is where we do our blending,’ Jack explained. ‘Gan on, Adela, and give us your opinion. Your mam was the best taster I ever knew. Let’s see if she’s taught you well.’
Adela worked her way along the line as George prepared the samples. She slurped through her teeth, let the liquid envelop her tongue and then spat it out.
‘Full body, heavy soil, probably picked during the rains. Upper Assam. I’d mix it with something lighter.’
Jack nodded and she tasted the next. ‘Umm, I like this. Bright, first flush, nice colour, soil more acidic. Darjeeling or Ghoom. A good breakfast tea.’
‘Not on Tyneside,’ said Jack. ‘They like a bit more body to wake them up.’
She carried on tasting and spitting and giving her opinion. ‘Fruity, apricot aroma, nice and balanced, mature, autumn flush, possibly Sylhet region.’
George was impressed and kept asking her about life on a tea plantation and how things were done at Belgooree. The more she reminisced, the more his enthusiasm grew.
‘I’d give anything to travel out there and see where the tea gets grown. Must be a grand life. Do they play cricket?’
‘They do, though there’s not much time for it. Tennis is probably more popular.’
‘Tennis is fine by me,’ George said, grinning, ‘especially mixed doubles.’
‘You should come and visit,’ Adela encouraged. ‘Mother would love that.’
‘Maybe I will.’
‘You don’t need to gan to India to know about tea,’ said Jack. ‘Everything you need to know about running this business you can learn from me, just like I learnt it all from Mr Milner. Besides, we can’t afford for you to gan away. You’re needed here, lad.’
Adela didn’t push the idea further; she could see how it made her uncle agitated. ‘Have things changed much since Mother was here, Uncle Jack?’
He sighed. ‘It’s been a tough few years, I’ll not deny it. We used to sell tea all over the North East, selling it door to door. Customers are very loyal, ’specially out in the small villages and towns. But now these new chain shops have started up and they’re undercutting us. They buy in bulk and sell cheap – no matter that the quality isn’t as good. Folk go to them to save a few pennies, and who can blame them?’
‘But you are still giving them convenience,’ Adela encouraged, ‘and personal service. Bet the likes of George brighten up a housewife’s day.’
George laughed. ‘I try my best.’
‘We’ll need more than George’s patter to keep this business going,’ Jack said morosely. ‘I’d like to invest in new packing machinery and a couple of new motor vans, but we can’t afford it. We’ve had to cut prices to compete. It’s down to the bare bones.’
‘I’m sorry, Uncle Jack. I wish we could do more to help, but Mother’s first concern is keeping Belgooree going.’
‘Of course it is,’ George agreed. ‘Da’s not asking for financial help.’
Jack’s look was haggard, and for a moment he said nothing. Then he rallied. ‘If anyone can save a business, then it’s Clarrie. I wish her luck.’
As they left the tasting room, Jack’s frown returned. ‘You’ll not say any of this to our Olive, will you? Not about things being bad. She’s such a worrier; it doesn’t do to let her fret.’
‘Course I won’t,’ Adela said, putting a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘But wouldn’t it be better if she knew what was going on? Then nothing would come as too much of a shock.’
Jack gave a hopeless shrug. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Adela worried about her uncle, but after that visit he refused to talk to her about the business and avoided being alone with her. Even a few words exchanged in the hallway seemed to annoy Olive. ‘Don’t you pester your uncle about his work,’ she warned. ‘When he comes home, he wants to leave all that behind.’
So Adela gave up trying to chat to her brooding uncle; he was so very different from the jovial, ambitious man that her parents had once described. She enjoyed George’s company best of all. She went to watch him play cricket at the club and met his girlfriend, Joan. Adela thought she was a bit dull, despite her dreamy blonde looks, but she could see how George basked in her adoration. He took Adela out in the van around his delivery route to the pit villages south of the Tyne, and she stared in fascination at the clanking pit wheels, the coal-blackened miners trudging back from the morning shift and the women dashing into the street at the sound of George’s horn. The miners’ wives were cheerful and saucy and reminded Adela of the tea pickers, who would make ribald remarks about their menfolk wh
en out of earshot.
She went with George to see Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes at the nearby Pavilion Cinema, a former theatre which was still decorated with ornate pillars and busts of naked women. He took her to see The Prisoner of Zenda at the Gaumont, which Adela enjoyed so much that she went a second time, and she chivvied Jane into going too.
‘Ronald Colman is to die for,’ she said. ‘We’ll sit at the back by the aisle so you can make a run for it if you feel unwell. And there’s a massive Wurlitzer organ gets played in the interval. George says they brought it over from the Bronx in New York. Isn’t that exciting?’
Jane went reluctantly, but the trip was a big success. She didn’t feel any panic sitting next to her chattering cousin, sharing a bag of lemon drops, and was so caught up in the film that she sat on to watch the credits. Sheepishly on the way home, Jane admitted that she hadn’t been to see a film since she was twelve and had never been to a talkie before.
‘I had this terrible memory of scary music being played while a monster came up on the screen. It seemed that real. I screamed and hid under the seat for the whole of the film. Mam was so cross with me for making a scene that she said she’d never go again.’
‘And she never let you go either?’
‘Said it wasn’t worth the risk of me getting hysterical. I know it sounds silly,’ Jane said and blushed, ‘but I’ve always been frightened of the dark and being stuck somewhere where I couldn’t get out.’
‘It’s not silly,’ said Adela, ‘but you don’t have to be frightened any more. You’ve proved you can do it.’
‘Yes, I have, haven’t I?’ Jane smiled.
‘When that Essoldo opens at the end of August, me and you are going to be first in line,’ Adela declared. ‘We’ll stuff ourselves with chocolates and swoon over the stars.’
The next time there was a social at the cricket club, Adela insisted Jane came too.
‘I can’t dance and I’ve got nothing to wear,’ Jane protested in alarm.
Adela marched her upstairs and pulled out the summer dresses she had brought from India. ‘Try them on.’
‘But I’m taller than you.’
‘We can let down the hem.’
‘And you’ve got more, you know, bosom.’
‘Only since you’ve started fattening me up with all your lovely cooking.’
They were reduced to giggles as Jane wriggled into Adela’s clothes and paraded around the room wearing a topee and impersonating a memsahib.
Adela laughed. ‘You’re a good mimic.’
They decided on a full skirt in turquoise chiffon with one of Jane’s white short-sleeved blouses, a wide pink belt and a matching diaphanous scarf, which Adela pinned around Jane’s shoulders, and clipped a mother-of-pearl hairslide into her short dark hair. Adela allowed Jane to borrow her deep pink lipstick.
‘You look gorgeous,’ Adela gasped. Jane blushed at her image in the mirror, amazed at the poised dark-eyed woman who gazed steadily back at her.
Adela put on a bright yellow frock that accentuated her curves.
‘I’ll have to watch myself with your pies,’ she joked, ‘or this dress won’t fit me much longer.’
She tied her hair in a golden snood, put bangles on her wrists and dark red lipstick on her full mouth.
Olive was sent into a panic when she saw them ready to go out.
‘Lipstick!’ she shrieked. ‘Get that off now, do you hear?’
‘There’s no harm in it, Aunt Olive.’ Adela stood her ground, catching Jane’s hand so she couldn’t run back upstairs.
‘Jack,’ Olive appealed to her husband, ‘you don’t want our Jane going out like that, do you?’
Jack looked up from his newspaper. He blinked in surprise at the young women.
‘You look smashin’, pet,’ he said. ‘You an’ all, Adela. Pretty as your mam.’
Olive looked thunderous. She rounded on her daughter. ‘You better behave yourselves mind. If I hear you’ve been making a fool of yourself, it’ll be the last time you go. And no talking to lads.’
Jack spoke up. ‘Haway, Olive, don’t you remember being young once? You were happy enough to talk to me and go out on my arm.’
Olive’s thin face tightened. ‘That was done proper. I didn’t gan out to parties wearing lipstick.’
‘George will chaperone us,’ Adela assured. As if on cue there was a hoot of the horn outside. ‘Come on, Jane. Bye, Aunt Olive, Uncle Jack. We won’t stay out late.’
In the car Jane laughed with relief as she recounted the confrontation to George. ‘I don’t know where you get the nerve,’ she said in admiration.
‘Aunt Olive isn’t a dragon,’ said Adela. ‘She just worries about things that will never happen. That’s no reason to stop you having a bit of fun.’
‘You are my kind of girl,’ George said and chuckled as he revved the car and they roared off up the street.
The cousins were in big demand on the dance floor that evening. Adela danced every dance, but got more enjoyment out of seeing Jane blossom under the attention of several of George’s friends.
‘Why have you been hiding your sister away for so long, Brewis?’ demanded Wilf, a lanky joiner at Vickers-Armstrongs engineering works. He wanted to walk her home, but Jane resisted.
‘Can I call on you?’ Wilf asked eagerly.
‘Mam doesn’t like visitors.’
‘Call into Herbert’s Café,’ Adela intervened. ‘She’s the manager there.’
‘Not exactly—’
‘The old tea rooms on Tyne Street?’ Wilf’s eyes widened. ‘They serve canny pies there.’
‘Jane’s homemade recipe,’ said Adela, linking arms with Jane and swinging her away before she could deny it. ‘She’ll be in tomorrow.’
As George drove them home, Adela said, ‘Well, that definitely counts as some Jubbulpore.’ The girls hooted with laughter in the back seat.
‘What’s all this talk about Jubbulpore?’ he asked in bemusement.
But he got no sense out of his sister and cousin, who dissolved into fresh giggles. He started a sing-song, and they sang nonstop all the way back to Arthur’s Hill.
CHAPTER 18
At the end of August, Tilly came for a visit to Newcastle with Jamie and Libby, leaving Mungo on the Dunbar farm with her sister and brother-in-law.
Lexy made a fuss of Tilly’s red-headed children. Jamie looked older than his fifteen years. He had grown tall and had his father’s square jaw, yet his interests were more in tune with his mother’s; he was bookish and more bashful than Adela remembered. They had been firm friends as children. Libby was thirteen and had grown chubby and argumentative since Adela had last seen her in India as a seven-year-old. She sparked with her mother, who nagged her to sit up and keep her elbows off the table. Libby’s answer was, ‘Why? What harm are they doing?’
‘Always got a cheeky answer.’ Tilly gave an irritated sigh.
‘It was a question actually,’ said Libby. ‘Miss MacGregor says we should question everything.’
‘I’m tired of hearing about the opinionated Miss MacGregor,’ said Tilly, rolling her eyes at Adela. ‘Libby’s history teacher is a bit of a firebrand.’
‘Mother doesn’t approve because Miss MacGregor is anti-imperialist,’ Libby said, ‘and so am I.’
Jamie patted his sister’s back. ‘We’ve been treated to daily lectures about the evils of colonial rule – in particular how awful we British are in India.’
Libby shook him off. ‘We wouldn’t like it if we were ruled by people thousands of miles away, would we?’
Adela was jolted by the words. She remembered Ghulam Khan being passionate about the same thing. How strange that she should hear it repeated by her youthful second cousin.
‘Well, young lady,’ Tilly said in exasperation, ‘it’s British people like your father who are working hard thousands of miles away who make it possible for you to go to your very good school. So you can tell that to your Miss MacGregor.’
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��From what I remember,’ Libby sparked back, ‘it was hundreds of coolies who did most of the work. It’s because they are paid so little that Daddy can afford to send me to school over here.’
‘Don’t be so rude!’
‘Not that I got any say in the matter.’
Adela could see Tilly’s eyes begin to fill. She knew how reluctant Tilly had been to send her children so far away for their schooling, so Libby’s words were bound to wound.
‘Don’t start that again,’ Tilly pleaded.
‘I wish I’d been allowed to stay in India like Adela was,’ Libby persisted. ‘You chose your school, didn’t you, Adela? And you ran away from the one you didn’t like.’
‘Well, it was my parents’ decision to send me to St Mary’s,’ Adela replied, not wanting to fuel the argument, ‘and it was your cousin Sophie who suggested it.’
‘I wish she’d suggested that I go there too,’ said Libby.
‘And I’d wish you’d stop going on about it,’ Tilly snapped. ‘You’re perfectly happy at St Bride’s.’
Lexy saved the situation by bustling over with a fresh plate of cakes. Jamie and Libby tucked in, and for a while the conversation turned to what Adela had been doing in Newcastle. They were interrupted by the surprise appearance of George.
‘Hello, Mrs Robson,’ he said as he strode across and kissed Tilly robustly on the cheek.
‘Goodness me, George,’ she cried. ‘What a handsome young man you are. Children, do you remember Adela’s cousin George Brewis?’
Jamie stood and shook George formally by the hand. Libby sat up and smiled. George pecked her on the cheek, which brought the colour flooding to her face.
‘Couldn’t miss out on seeing the Robson family.’ George winked. He sat down and helped himself to a sandwich. ‘Come on you two; you have to finish these cakes,’ he ordered, ‘or Lexy will never speak to you again.’
The Girl From the Tea Garden Page 28
