Always Time for Tea

Elswyth’s English summers sometimes seem like a loving litany of tea times. In 1938 she basked in the friendly service of the oak-panelled George in Wells and also at the town’s Swan with a “smiling, white-aproned maid, laden silver tray, hot toast cakes, scalding, heavenly tea, at a table in the window. Wells never let you down.” Back in London, she sat under a big umbrella on the Hyde Park lawn among “a lot of well-dressed, smiling, chatting people drinking tea.”

A year later, at The George in Shipston, tea included nine kinds of cake and strawberries while Gloucester’s New Inn (pictured below) “had a delicious, imperturbable tea with hot, buttered toast.” But while the “plentiful strawberry jam and thick brown bread-and-butter” at a Winchester Inn left her feeling that “all was right with the world”, she decried its pastries, “covered with an aggressive sort of icing”.

From time to time she recounted other meals as when “at Guildford I met a truly noble cheese. It was a Stilton and it lived at the Angel. You will remember it often again, over a lump of hard Camembert in a gilded London hotel.”