Tea & coffee

[Katharine]

I still eat cornflakes from a deep bowl so I can drink the remaining milk CH style with my index finger hooked neatly over the rim. It still feels natural and easy.

Quite agree, it is only when other people look at you that you realise it is not normal behaviour - but then how much of mine is?

[Angela Woodford]

Thinking again, it may have been patterned plates we smuggled back to House, not bowls. I definitely remember the smuggling!

I dreamed last night that I was standing in Sixes kitchen. Remember those huge wooden dressers on the left side (as one went in)? There was a lineup of varying-sized CH pattterned plates on the top two shelves. Katharine was right. She herself possibly was responsible for the smuggling of some of them? They were never used, as far as I remember.

I remembered there had been comment about patterned china on the Forum a couple of years ago, so have rushed to find it!

In the bottom cupboard bit, where the silverfish dwelled, were odds and ends, a red biscuit tin (sorry, Philip!) and the horrible metal fish cutlery tin.

I have smelled again the weird smell of the kitchen - a mixture of:

milk, in the tin-pail-thing
the teeth-missing combs and the lipsticks of Mrs Scroggie and Mrs Palsey in the table drawer
the fish cutlery
the cutlery baskets, ancient fragments of food still attached
fruit
bread
and silverfish infestation

Might have tea in a bowl this morning?

[Katharine]

Thinking again, it may have been patterned plates we smuggled back to House, not bowls. I definitely remember the smuggling!

I dreamed last night that I was standing in Sixes kitchen. Remember those huge wooden dressers on the left side (as one went in)? There was a lineup of varying-sized CH pattterned plates on the top two shelves. Katharine was right. She herself possibly was responsible for the smuggling of some of them? They were never used, as far as I remember.

Of course I was! But in my time we used the plates daily for our tea, they weren't displayed.

Did you remember the scorched circles on the undersides of the shelves of the dresser? They happened when we held a candlelit party in there and had new candles that were too tall ... Now what were we celebrating? That will take some more thinking!

[Angela Woodford]

Did you remember the scorched circles on the undersides of the shelves of the dresser? They happened when we held a candlelit party in there and had new candles that were too tall ... Now what were we celebrating? That will take some more thinking!

Yes I do, Katharine!

A candlelit party? In the days of The Hag? You must have been fairly senior in order to have outwitted her and to have been able to go out and buy candles... I'm just guessing here... Perhaps it was a Haggish day off. Who went to the party?

I'm imagining that dry old dresser going up in flames

[Katharine]

A candlelit party? In the days of The Hag? You must have been fairly senior in order to have outwitted her and to have been able to go out and buy candles... I'm just guessing here... Perhaps it was a Haggish day off. Who went to the party?

I'm imagining that dry old dresser going up in flames

Well we can't have been more senior than UV or we would have been in Little Study or the Study itself. I think it was Christmas time - who was responsible for putting up the Christmas decorations? Was that LV or UV? It may have been when we had completed them - I know we had some of the church decorations from my father's parish for that but that doesn't help.

[Angela Woodford]

[quote="Katharine"]
Well we can't have been more senior than UV or we would have been in Little Study or the Study itself. I think it was Christmas time - who was responsible for putting up the Christmas decorations? Was that LV or UV? It may have been when we had completed them - [/quote)

It was always the LV1 who did the Christmas decorations! I remember big signs annually on Little Study door with warnings of "No Entry Without Knocking - Decorations In Progress". Maybe you had the party in the kitchen for reasons of the gas rings? Remember there was an ancient blackleaded range that was converted to two gas rings on top? And usually an unwashed saucepan in the kitchen sink in which milk had been boiled for hot-milk-instant-coffee? Even now I can't bear the smell of boiled milk - yergg!

[Katharine]

Yes, of course you are right it was Lower VI who did the decorations. I think we were younger and all in pinnies when we had the candle-lit party. Can't really remember, just the horror of smelling the scorching and seeing the marks appear. We got away with it, and did not get into trouble for it - don't think that the Hag ever saw the marks.

[nastymum]

When I was in LVI in 5s we did the decorations. We were were disparate crew and had lost some members at the end of the previous year. There was me and Lynn Ford, Sally Hugesson and Charlotte Lycett. I think Lynn Ford was the instigator of this but we decided to create a life sized nativity. After some thought we agreed? to go into Hertford and ask shop keepers for some dummies. Mary was no problem and a shop which sold ladies fashions? gave us a female dummy which we dressed up as the Virgin herself. This caused some hilarity as we had to get it back to school and hide it and dress it.Drunk with success we then went back into town to a gentleman's outfitters and explained our predicament and expected a similarly generous response . We were met with a short silence and some embarrassment as a rather diffident and somewhat camp gentleman's outfitter eplained that 'male shop dummies are somewhat different from female dummies..'
We were agog as you can imagine. He then produced a torso and revealed that the male dummies were just so. No head . legs or arms. Oh well we thought , better than nothing. We took it back to school and wondered what to do. We decided that the legs and arms could be disguised but an absence of a head would be difficult to manage. Ever resourceful we made a head from papier mache.Ooh dear. We had forgotten that you had make it hollow with a balloon and made it solid. Apart from looking like a serial killer poor Joseph began after a very short time to rot from the inside. The smell was quite the worst thing you can imagine. Lynn and I have been known to cry with laughter at the memory of this but I suspect you had to be there..

[englishangel]

Oh nastymum, mouldy flour paste, yeuch

My last Christmas as a student nurse my set had finals coming up in Mid January, so we all worked 8 nights over Christmas, then had six nights off seguing into the one week pre-exam 'study leave' and we all had cabin fever by Christmas Eve. The ward I was on was having a "Dickens of a Christmas" and we had more luck at Burtons than 5's Lower sixth and had acquired a Mr Pickwick dummy among other things. At midnight on Christmas Eve the only guy in my set came and 'borrowed' Mr Pickwick's clothes and dressing himself in them proceeded to walk the hallways of the Victorian Hospital (now demolished). Shortly after he set off I went fro supper to find the refectory full of people who had seen the 'ghost' including one hysterical 18 year old who said he had spoken to her. My how we laughed.

[Vonny]

My first Christmas at Hertford a few of us were sent out with a couple of sixth formers to obtain a Christmas tree. Obtain being the operative word We went to a forest walking distance from CH and erm, well, got a tree. I remember being on look out whilst the sixth formers found a tree etc. I also remember the lot of us legging it through Hertford with said tree

[nastymum]

Going back to the tea. I do remember going to the school kitchen for some reason or other and being transfixed by the sight of a Dickensian vision of a huge metal tub of tea being stirred by very alarming woman. She was hypnotically intent on the task of stirring the liquid with a huge wooden paddle which was attached to the tub by a piece of grotty old string. Having considered the tea stirred she dropped the paddle and walked away. The string was long enough for the paddle to fall to the ground where I imagine it remained until the tea required more stirring. Maybe that accounted for its unique taste.. either that or the completely criminal adding of the milk to the tea before it was decanted into the urn. I also believe that this may have been done several hours before the urn was moved to the house at teatime.

[Angela Woodford]

Brilliant, nastymum!

What a totally revolting process! You've revived my memory of those horrid grimy-looking tea urns - though I never saw the pre-decanting process with the alarming woman and the wooden paddle! Never in seven years could I bear even to taste that tea, and now I'm glad!

I wonder if the tea was made with some sort of economy tea + milk powder in giant bags? It was a thin grey-brown fluid, with no trace of a tea-leaf anywhere. When we were on hallwork, I can't remember lifting the urns onto the cracked grubby oilcloth we spread at the top of each table, but we must have done, then stacked the tea bowls on each side. The urn then came in handy as a prop for the Daily Telegraph. At teatime, I believe the tea urn plus the tin plate with butter pats, bloomer loaves and tin jug of "jam" was brought to each house by a little man in a brown overall; trundling the stuff on a wooden trolley thing. Am I right?

I quite enjoyed the technique at breakfast of serving the tea into bowls - a sort of two handed action. In House, serving it into those stained melamine mugs was more tricky and I scalded my hand a few times.

Does anyone else remember the method of folding the long (often very stained) white table cloths, beginning by pinching them up at each end along the fold-line? I found myself instructing a bemused helper in the art at a flower show, decades later.

[Ajarn Philip]

Does anyone else remember the method of folding the long (often very stained) white table cloths, beginning by pinching them up at each end along the fold-line? I found myself instructing a bemused helper in the art at a flower show, decades later.

I'm enjoying this thread (as I enjoy most Hertford threads) and grateful that I've never liked tea!

Angela, the above quote reminds me of a Sam Sheperd play I did a few years back in which I had to learn how to fold the Stars and Stripes. Took me ages...

[Jo]

Slightly off-topic on a tea & coffee thread, but we went bargain hunting at our local Poundstretcher yesterday and saw soap powders I haven't seen for years. It reminded me (although I didn't see any yesterday) of Stergene, with its very distinctive smell - does anyone else remember it? It was a washing liquid that most of us had for rinsing out underwear (even though we weren't meant to - twice a week at the laundry was held to be enough ). I vaguely remember it being a sort of translucent blue colour, with a soapy disinfectanty smell.

I don't believe I've ever seen or used it since, but I can still smell it, and if I did come across it now it would immediately transport me back again.

[midget]

Good stuff, Stergene, the domestic version of Tepol (?Teepol?) It was excellent for cool wash wool garments, but originally difficult to sell, bbecause "it ain't got no suds like soap" The manufacturers had to put in a foaming agent just for the hell of it.