The allure of tea

The Battle of Agincourt took place on October 25, 1415, in France. Shakespeare wrote a play about it. Most versions now in existence have expunged the tea bits.

Henry, the fifth one, was King of England and a slice of France. He was continually excluded from tea parties in Paris. It was said, a fellow would dress up as a dolphin and be most amusing at these gatherings. Henry liked a good tea party. He didn’t take kindly to not being invited. He was miffed.

Henry, the man of action, acts. He raises an army, and, as all the history books will tell you, he marches his troops across the English Channel. Exactly how he does this is lost in the mists of time.

He arrives in France very wet. This doesn’t improve his mood. He lays siege to several castles, and then yells some stirring words about getting into his breeches. Henry is keen to wear his new pants at the tea party.

The sieges are terrible. The thirsty, tea-drinking rabble teems over castle walls, across drawbridges and make for castle kitchens. There, the battle-mad invaders brew up pots of tea. They devilishly force conquered French maidens to bring them biscuits and cakes. The victorious rabble soon becomes indolent under effects of French tea and cake. In no time, they are learning the French words for please and thank you.

Henry won’t let his men idle long. His thoughts are on Paris, elegant salons, cups of tea, dainty cakes, and the chance to dress up as a dolphin, too.

It’s been raining for days, and it’s raining now. He’s pushing his troops forward. Then, just outside the town of Agincourt, he sees some 30,000 French on the hill. They taunt the English by holding up giant teacups on the tops of their umbrellas. This is strictly against the rules of chivalry.

If the sight is not enough to terrify and madden the soggy English, the French now cry, in one well-rehearsed sing-songy voice, “You’re not coming to our party.” They do this of course in French, so its devastating effect is lost on the English, except for a few noblemen who had been privately educated. These cleverly put their fingers in their ears.

Henry has only 5000 thirsty archers and 900 other fellows who could get in a very nasty mood if they don’t get their tea. But Henry and his army are vastly outnumbered. His troops become dispirited. He unrolls his almanac and notices that it is Saint Crispin’s day. Then, he has a fit of supreme eloquence. He galvanizes his troops in true Shakespearean form:

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
For he today that drinks tea with milk and no sugar,
Shall be my brother: be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen of England, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here:
And hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks
That drank tea with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”

With that, a loud hurrah! and off they go to win a decisive victory. Henry gets to go to the tea party, where he meets a nice French girl. He slips her a few cups of broken orange pekoe and, under the influence, she consents to be his girlfriend. Now formally admitted to the sumptuous Paris tea party, Henry also takes to the habit of dressing up as a dolphin.

Of course tea is the drink of the slow. The ceremony is leisurely and frequent. Some people never acquire the taste for it and go on to lead happy and productive lives. But there are those like me who had no choice. 

I blame my parents. I was an infant. I had been used to milk.

“Just put a spoonful in for him,” my father urged.

“He likes it milky,” murmured my mother seductively.

They had all the paraphernalia, too. I remember a small but solid silver tray, a striped blue and white teapot, with matching blue and white cups. The milk jug, of the same design, looked to me like a small ship floating on the tea tray’s silver surface. The sugar bowl was made of crystal, which made it somehow regal: a cut above the rest of the inhabitants of the tray.

I soon graduated from milky tea. I expect that I just couldn’t get the same feeling. I started drinking it stronger.

How was I influenced? Some say it was peer pressure. I wasn’t the only one. Other children drank tea. I had seen them. Even their scandalous mothers would ask me if I wanted a cuppa. Some of the more depraved even had tea parties.

I know. I was about eleven when I was invited to one of these by a girl. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know a lot about girls. I did know she was a friend of the two twins, one of whom liked to snatch my cap, and then would demand a kiss to get it back. I found this all rather embarrassing.

The adults had the stuff right there at the party. It was in industrial-strength teapots. There were cakes and little sandwiches, too. You can spot tea drinkers by the sort of sandwich they make. If you encounter dainty little cucumber sandwiches with no crusts, you can be sure a tea drinker made them.

A system of disorientation is used to get the young to drink tea. At the paper-hatted party, we were blindfolded and made to smell different foods in jars and guess what they were. After that ordeal, I was jollied into a game of spin-the-bottle. By then, all of us were so discombobulated that our resistance to tea, and cake, had been exhausted. We drank. We were merry.

But that strong masculine brew has its dark side. I am so drawn to a mental image of a hot cuppa that it can raise me from morning slumber. One wobbly foot in front of the other, I lunge towards the siren call of a kitchen cup of tea.

Christopher Richards 2006