UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

Drying a Tea-pot

By DOUGLAS SPANKIE. (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.) WE are the domesticated generation, and must take our pleasures where we can find them. As the wheels of social revolution turn, we turn with them, and if old enjoyments are destroyed, out of the new order we can create fresh. Take a very simple example. As Christmas approaches visions of groaning boards, choice wines and multitudinous courses of rich food present themselves readily to the idle, college-fed imagination, and their anticipatory savour is sweet indeed. In the old, pre- revolutionary days this innocent form of mental gourmandise was a simple, unalloyed pleasure which had a place in everyone's Christmas preparations.

But today, alas, the sweetness is shdrt-lived. For no sooner has the dreamer in imagination emptied every plate and dish set before him, drained every glass and licked clean every spoon, than there comes to him with sickening foreboding the realisation that the washing-up still remains to he done. The meal was not more spoilt for Thyestes when he learnt that he had just devoured his own children. For what a washing-up it will 'be. The Mind's eye sees draining-boards piled high with fragile glass, lofty towers of plates, battalions of knives and forks, everything on a Cecil B. de Mille scale. Reason, dulled with overmuch South African Burgundy, falters at the sight of such heaped avalanches of china and glass, and the whole task takes on the aspect of a Thurber nightmare in which the victim, clad only in a dish-cloth worn about his loins, desperately tries to dry gigantic porridge-bowls with a small, damp rag, urged on the while by the lash of some vast and grisly personification of the Ideal Home. Too late now to pronounce a curse on hos- pitality, on relations who stay for Christmas, on the sybaritic habits of an age which demands that each course should be eaten off a separate plate with separate implements. Suddenly a return to that simpler way of life that the poets sing seems morally imperative, and there creeps over one a wave of nostalgia for those good days when two mess-tins, three eating-irons and an over-all flavour of metal-polish furnished all we needed to ask.

It is our tragedy, our own peculiar cross, that we can never look on a well-laid dinner-table without projecting our minds forward until it becomes a heap of dirty crockery, that we can never titillate our palates with the fairy lightness of a shuffle or an omelette with- out wondering how many saucepans were used in its preparation, and never accept an invitation to dine without immediately asking ourselves how we may without offence avoid washing-up. We are the children of an age which hard necessity aided by the Income Tax Collector has made self-sufficient. Domestic chores are our portion whether we like it or not, and we should be poor philosophers indeed if we could not discover in the daily routine of our domes- ticity some new truth and beauty, some fresh aspect of the eternal verities which hitherto was hidden from us. Perhaps we cannot with George Herbert make drudgery divine, but at least, expensively educated as we are, we can, like the Duke, find a sermon or two and some good in our adversity.

For myself, I have found that the most aesthetically and emotion- ally satisfying experience that the scullery can provide is to dry up a china tea-pot. The pleasure to be derived from this simple action is at once sensual, intellectual and psychological. No other article of household crockery is so interesting or so rewarding. To begin with, tea-pots are normally of a shape and size that fit comfortably into cupped hands. The spout and handle, balancing each other in subtle harmony, provide safe, substantial grips, so that it is practically impossible to drop a tea-pot, at least uninten- tionally. Then the smooth contours, so reminiscent of the pure abstraction of an 'Attic vase, and the bold, breath-taking parabola of the flanks seem designed for easeful drying. The dish-cloth can find its way about a tea-pot without encountering any of the perverse awkwardness displayed by a cut-glass jug, for instance, or the sordid components of a mincing-machine.

Again, the tea-pot has usually but recently been emptied of its pint or two of boiling tea. As a result the china still holds the water's heat. A living, soothing warmth seems to emanate from deep beneath the potter's glaze, sensuous to the touch and in

mocking contrast to the tepid, dish-water warmth of the other articles. To hold a newly-emptied tea-pot is to experience a

physical pleasure well-known to our grandmothers but lost to us since hand-warmers went off the market. It is to feel between your palms the potential life-force that lurks in all inanimate objects ; it is a profound metaphysical revelation.

But the tea-pot possesses one cardinal virtue besides which, for the dryer-up at any rate, all its others pale into nothing. It is the characteristic which endears it to scullions of long experience, amateur and professional, all over the country, and gives to their work that intellectual excitement which otherwise it would lack.

Trained men, graduates of England's better sinks, will have guessed

what I mean. I refer, of course, to the traditional ban imposed on drying the interior of a tea-pot. Anyone who has given a moment's thought to the subject will agree that the psychological effect of this concession on the dryer is enormous. The reason for it is unimportant ; what matters is that it gives an opportunity for the exercise of expert knowledge, for only those who have a certain acquaintance with household duties know of it, and one suspects that the dryers-up of countriei less civilised than our own, where the drinking of tea is indulged in light-heartedly, if at all, have yet to learn of it.

In addition, of course, it panders to that side of our nature which will jump at any excuse for leaving a job half-done ; and in some of us, alas, that particular side is singularly well developed. Head-

masters recognise the. same principle when they grant their pupils extra half-holidays. The pleasure gained from them is intensified,

not so much because it is unexpected—it is seldom that—but because it is undeserved. And there is no fillip to a man's morale quite so efficacious as the enjoyment of a pleasure to which he has no specific right.

There are other minor points. In the washing-up systems most usually to be encountered in this country the tea-pot is normally one of the last items to appear, and can therefore be interpreted as a signal that the job is nearly finished and the less exacting task of putting away can begin. Again to the symbolist the tea-pot, designed as it is for the brewing of our national drink, can hardly

fail to take on the aura of something intensely nationalistic and patriotic. Perhaps it would not be too extravagant to suggest that

the ethos surrounding tea-pots is as British as the ozone at Clacton, and that their tutelary deity.is Britannia. But this is an aspect of the subject I have yet to study fully, and I do not wish to labour

it. It is enough if I have succeeded in indicating a line of approach to a subject which some may have hastily written off as entirely base and profitless. We may all be in the gutter, but let some of us join Oscar looking at the stars.