‘Bless ordinary every day afternoon tea’
Agatha Christie

The Swiss have long been a nation of coffee drinkers. It is perhaps no co-incidence that in 2001 Starbucks chose Zurich, rather than say Vienna or Milan, for its first venture into continental Europe. When I land at a Swiss airport, before I even check the train timetable, I go in search of a cafe crème. The Swiss, in my opinion, make the best coffee.

Tea, however, is another matter entirely. Order black tea in Switzerland and you will be given a tall glass mug filled with hot water from an urn. It is served with a tea bag on the side, a sealed, plastic pot of UHT cream, a paper twist of sugar and a tiny packet of artificial sweetener. I would often stare, impatiently, at the fast cooling water as it sat on the counter, awaiting delivery to my table. Thirty years ago kettles were practically unknown in Switzerland and I boiled the water for my afternoon tea in a saucepan. The tea, of course, came from England, as did the teapot and the tea cosy.

If I asked Swiss people who came to my home whether they would like to join me in a pot of tea, the answer was invariably ‘No, thank you. I only drink tea when I’m ill’.  One friend, generally a very confident person, grew anxious and doubtful when it came to preparing me a cup of tea and would call me into the kitchen to supervise the process: How long to steep the bag; when to add the milk; should she warm the cup?

Tea was first introduced to England in 1660 by the East India Trading Company. The king, Charles II, placed an excise duty of eight pence on every gallon of tea sold. Consequently, it was only the very wealthy who could afford to buy tea and the masses continued to drink ale. Water at the time was a public health hazard.

The ladies of London kept their tea in exquisite caddies, many of which were made by the English cabinetmaker, Thomas Chippendale.  The unlocking of the caddy was as much a part of the ritual of serving tea as the drinking of it.

On December 16^th, 1773, the people of Boston, Massachusetts decided they had had enough of the English and their taxes and the East India Company’s entire cargo of tea was tipped into Boston  harbour. Three years later, the British Prime Minister reduced the tax on tea from 119% to 12%, thus making the drinking of tea available to everyone.

Noble Fearnley Hutchinson Fleming, known to all as ‘Toby’, was my father’s first cousin and a tea taster for the Thomas J. Lipton Company. Born in Wales, Toby Fleming joined Lipton as a young apprentice and was sent to India to learn the trade. This marked the beginning of a 50 year career spent on tea plantations in India, Sri Lanka, China and East Africa. Toby was in search of the perfect leaf and his assessments were based on soil, elevation, rainfall, temperature and quality of management. According to his obituary in the New York Times Mr. Fleming and his handful of experts would study the tone of the leaves (brightness indicated enhanced flavor), place them in white bone china cups lined up in rows, steep them in purified water, add a precise amount of skim milk and then sip. Based on the taste-testing, he would tell his agents what to buy at auction.

To clear his palate before tasting, Toby would eat an apple and to avoid bloating from the hundreds of sips he took in a single day, he would use chrome-plated cuspidors. He was also the man responsible for creating Lipton’s Ice tea in its current form. Using orange pekoe, the youngest and smallest leaves on the plant, he succeeded in producing a blend that doesn’t cloud. The cold tea remains clear in the glass.

Toby Fleming was long considered to be the industry’s leading tea taster, a man who oversaw half the United States’ total tea sales. He might have been surprised, therefore, by a report, published this week about the current habits of British tea drinkers. Sales of speciality and herbal teas now lead black tea sales by more than five million pounds a year.

The English crime writer, Dorothy L. Sayers, once reflected that there was something ‘hypnotic’ about the word tea. Whatever the weather, whatever the occasion and wherever I am in the world, I endeavour to be within reach of a kettle (or a saucepan) and I carry my own mug and tea bags. There’s nothing quite like wrapping your fingers around a cup, lowering your lips to the porcelain and taking that first sip of hot tea.

Noble Fearnley Hutchinson Fleming –  born March 7^th 1919 died February 24^th 2012

In 1973 I went to a Dustin Hoffman double bill at the Cannon cinema in Folkestone. The Graduate was a 15 certificate and Straw Dogs was today’s equivalent of 18+ (R/Restricted Viewing). Nobody had IDs back then and my friend and I must have looked older than our 14 years. Straw Dogs was subsequently banned from video for 20 years as a result of its violent content, which included two rape scenes. I credit my current inability to watch physical and sexual on-screen violence to the distress I experienced after seeing Straw Dogs. Sam Peckinpah’s film was re-made in 2011 and, unlike its predecessor, it bombed at the box office.

I recognise that my inability to de-sensitize myself to on-screen violence means that I often miss out on well-acted, well-written drama. I am, nonetheless, curious as to why death, and particularly violent death, is such an intrinsic part of mainstream entertainment. Why is explicit cruelty so compelling? What purpose does it serve?

Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychiatrist who pioneered the study of death and dying in the 1960s wrote: Perhaps the biggest obstacle anyone faces in the effort to understand death is that it’s impossible for the unconscious mind to imagine an end to its own life. The only aspect it can understand is a sudden, frightening interruption of life, a tragic killing, a murder, one of several gruesome diseases. In other words –  horrible pain.

So it’s a distancing technique. But if it exists everywhere, all the time, then are we not at risk of being anesthetized to death? Most of us, of course, will not die as a result of murder, suicide or a tragic accident. Most of us will die slowly, over a long or a short period of time, in a care home, in a hospital or in hospice. We are uncomfortable with the inevitability of ordinary death, which is so often concealed, sanitized and managed by a third party.

On March 23rd, 2004, the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, launched the first Cafe mortel (or Death Cafe  as it is known outside Switzerland) at the Restaurant du Theatre du Passage in Neuchatel. His goal was to draw death out of the shadows; he wanted people to talk freely about death, not behind closed doors, but in a social space that was accessible to all. Anyone could be part of the conversation, either through joining the group (although no one is required to share or even speak at a Death Cafe), or through ‘eavesdropping’.

Death is not private or confidential. It is a given. It is the one thing we all have in common. By talking about death and dying, you prepare yourself a little for your own death, so you’re not terrified of it, said Crettaz in an interview with Swiss Public Radio. Traditionally the Cafes mortels took place in restaurants and bistros where people gathered to eat, drink and talk. Wine and cheese were provided and no financial donations were accepted. There are already too many issues surrounding money and death, he said.

Bernard Crettaz was born in 1938 in Vissoie in the val d’Anniviers. The dark-stained chalets and the ancient chapels in this remote part of Switzerland are framed by a mountain range known as La Grande Couronne – The Great Crown. In these communities there are clear rituals around death and dying. At a young age, Bernard’s mother taught him how to dress the house in mourning using sacred objects from her tiroir du mort, or ‘death drawer’. His father took him to the cellar and showed him the oak barrels of wine and the aging cheese destined to be served at their funerals alongside fresh bread, baked in the village oven. In previous generations, the funeral wine and cheese were laid down at the same time as the couple planned their wedding celebrations. The vine, the cow and the field are symbols of our relationship with the earth, explained Crettaz.

Funerals are public events, a communal act of kinship among mourners and the bereaved. Death is both serious and extremely commonplace.

In 1979, at the age of 41, Crettaz received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Geneva, where he was a lecturer. Together with his wife, the anthropologist Yvonne Preiswerk, he founded an organisation that studied funeral rites and customs. When Preiswerk died in 1999, Crettaz took early retirement and returned to Vissoie where he devoted himself to writing. Five years later, he launched the Cafes Mortels, which he convened until 2010.

The Death Cafes followed in 2011 (hot drinks and cake have replaced wine and cheese). They now exist in 83 countries. Although there is a convenor, the discussions are group-led and there is no agenda, no objective and no judgement. The Death Cafe provides an accessible, respectful and confidential space without intention to lead participants to any conclusion, product or course of action. They are not grief or counselling sessions. The one I went to earlier this year was held in a public library. We talked about suicide and inheritance. The demographic was broad – from funeral director to pagan.

There is no right or wrong to dying, just a time, a place and a readiness. The Irish writer, Kevin Toolis, compares death to a marathon that you know you will have to run at some point. It’s compulsory and you can’t get out of it.  One day, without warning, the bell will toll and you will have to drop everything and go. Instead of pretending it isn’t going to happen, Toolis  suggests we get a little practice in beforehand, even if it’s just a few laps around the local park.

This is what Bernard Crettaz and the Cafes Mortels, sought to achieve. He wanted to help people better manage their grief and better face their death, because Death, he said, is a lesson in life.

—–

Bernard Crettaz born May 29^th 1938 died November 28^th 2022

Cafes mortels: Sortir la mort du silence, by Bernard Crettaz, 2010 Editions Labor et Fides.

https://deathcafe.com/

My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die by Kevin Toolis, 2017, W+N

In 2014 I attended a one-week course at Schumacher College in Devon with the poet, David Whyte and the activist Satish Kumar. Satish was born in India and, in 1962 when he was 26, he left Delhi on a peace walk to Washington DC, covering 13,000 miles over a two and a half year period. He and his companion carried no money, relying entirely on the kindness of strangers. As they crossed the border from India into Pakistan, a woman handed Satish a parcel of food, warning him that, as a Hindu, he risked going hungry in an Islamic country. Satish, though appreciative of the woman’s generosity, described what she had given him as ‘little packets of distrust’. If I travel as a Hindu, he told her, I will meet a Muslim. If I travel as an Indian, I will meet an Iranian, but … if I travel as a human being, I will meet a human being.

In the summer of 1981, my husband, Dan walked from Barre, Massachusetts to Auriesville, New York, as part of his Jesuit formation. Like Satish he carried no money. He travelled as a mendicant, relying entirely on what people gave him. Forced to relinquish control and rely on the unknown, Dan, like Satish, travelled as a human being, trusting in the generosity of other human beings.

The idea of leaving my house without any money or indeed snacks for the road is beyond my imagination. My motto in life is be self-reliant and don’t go bothering people. The glove compartment of my car is always well stocked with nuts and sweets. I carry a flask of hot tea, a blanket and a book in case of traffic delays or severe weather. I am, of course, a member of the Automobile Association. All this preparation enables me to travel light in terms of obligation.

Earlier this month, as I was exiting a parking lot onto a busy road, I misjudged the turn and drove with full force over a low brick wall. The car jolted but didn’t stall. I kept going. At the next traffic light, a silver sedan pulled up alongside me and the driver pointed to my rear tyre.

It’s completely flat he shouted. You’re driving on the metal rim.

I thanked him and pulled into a side street. Moments later, there he was, the man in the silver sedan.

Do you know how to change a tyre? he asked.

No, I answered, but don’t worry I’ll call my husband. Or the AA. Or I’ll drive to Halfords. In my head I raced on to increasingly extreme alternatives: ‘Or I’ll leave the car and buy a new one. Thanks though. Goodbye’.

Would you like me to change the tyre for you?

At this point, my stomach contracted into a solid rubber ball and I heard a voice in my head shout. ‘No. Go away. I don’t want to be the victim of a scam. Neither do I want your kindness intruding on my chaos. I don’t want to be beholden or grateful to a complete stranger, so please go away. Right now’.

Instead I said Gosh, that’s really kind of you. Thank you so much. But … you’ve probably got somewhere you need to be. I’ll be fine. Really…  

The man parked his car and got out. He looked as though he spent a lot of time at the gym. He stood very close to me when he spoke and I could feel his breath on my face. In the passenger seat of the car was a young boy, about fourteen years old. As the two of them began to empty the boot of my Volkswagen, I slipped my bag off the front seat and hung it over my shoulder. Just in case.

You might want to learn how to change a tyre, the man said – in a kind voice though, not in a condescending one. Your husband could probably teach you. My son here knows. I taught him how.

The rubber ball inside me began to soften until I could no longer feel it. This is really kind of you, I said, as I watched him jack up the car, his hands and his t-shirt smudged with tarmac and rubber. No worries, he replied, it’s what anyone would do, right?

No it isn’t I said …. a little too vehemently, perhaps. It’s not what anyone would do. Most people drive by. 

You’re the second person I’ve stopped for this week, he continued. On Tuesday I came across a Dutchman whose electric car had run out of battery power. Anyway, he added, it’s good karma, right?

I had only £15 in my wallet and, rather awkwardly, I offered it to the man. He stepped back, visibly shocked. I was embarrassed. My gesture was clumsy, perhaps even insulting. Beneath my awkwardness, however, I felt close to tears. I thanked him and I told the young man that he was lucky to have such a kind father. They followed me all the way to Halfords, but when I turned back to wave goodbye, they were gone. I don’t even know their names.

In his memoir, Undercover University, Frank Bell writes: In the friendly co-operation that is found in study and learning lies the greatest hope for the future of mankind. As in no other sphere of life, enmity and jealousy cannot flourish when the welfare of common humanity is in view.

Peter O’Connell at the School of English Studies, Folkestone and Frank Bell at the Bell School, Cambridge were pioneers in the field of language learning during the 1960s and 70s. These were the halcyon days of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) when school principals were friends rather than competitors: new developments were not protected for the financial benefit of individual schools but shared for the greater good of students and their teachers.

In 1971, SES welcomed a group of teachers from China. The People’s Republic was still living under the dictatorship of Chairman Mao. The teachers had all been hand-picked by the Ministry of Education and each one was an expert in a particular aspect of English culture. They spent four months at SES before going to the University of Bath. They were the most marvellous group of 14 people I have ever met and I loved every minute I spent with them, wrote Peter. He considered them to be a teacher’s dream, always seeking knowledge like the Holy Grail but never dour or pompous. Much about life in England was new and unfamiliar to them, and this had to be factored into the teaching programme. They had never heard of the London Stock Exchange and had no experience of press conferences or indeed of a free press. One afternoon they were taken to visit a local farmer and his wife who lived in a mock-Tudor mansion. Over tea, the leader enquired: How many families live in this house?

The Chinese were conspicuous figures wherever they went. The twelve men and two women all wore ‘Mao’ suits, cut their hair in the same style and never touched cigarettes or alcohol. They were all married but laughed merrily when commiserated with for being separated from their spouses and children. They not only lived in pairs in their host families, but never moved anywhere without a companion or a group. If one was separated and became involved in a discussion with an English person, it wasn’t long before another quietly moved in and joined the conversation. They were much loved, not only by their teachers, but also by their host families, who described them as tidy and clean, beloved by the children, punctual and courteous. They enjoyed taking their host family’s children to the swings and it was not unusual to see a brace of boiler-suited Chinese in the company of their English charges at local parks. Perhaps these outings were a comfort to them in the absence of their own children.

Peter prided himself on the fact that although he admired China and the Chinese people, he never hesitated to state his opinion that Marxism was a theory and not a science or a chemical formula. Clearly, his Chinese teachers did not pay him much mind, and when he invited them to write an essay on the organisation and characteristics of the ideal society for which they were fighting, they all wrote synopses of Marxist dialectics. He was disappointed that his otherwise perfect students were unable to break out of their ideology and the dogmatic inflexibility of their thinking.  He startled the group one day by saying how much he admired them because they were so profoundly religious. Their disapproving expressions changed to indulgent smiles when he added that he realised their religion was a secular one, but that it was nevertheless based on faith – faith in the sacred texts and the infallibility of their prophets. Peter asked one man what his view was of Stalin, to which he replied that Stalin was in the same category as Marx, Engels and Lenin. These are the heroes we worship, he declared. Worship? my father echoed. There …. I told you that you were religious, at which the entire group erupted in gales of laughter. The group leader, Lu Bong Hung, often commented that they had come to England to learn the language and make friends with English people, but even Peter realised that this was not a personal goal but a Peking-specified objective.

Rosemary Chan was both a tutor and host mother and two of the Chinese teachers lived with the Chans during their time in Folkestone. Armand Chan was born in China but raised in Madagascar. Initially, the two men were a little distrustful of Mr. Chan and his questionable status, although once it was understood that his family had left China before the rise of Chairman Mao, they became more relaxed. Armand was clearly not a traitor to the Cultural Revolution and, furthermore, the Chans served more rice than was customary in the English host families of their comrades. The two men shared a room and every morning they would get up early and walk round the garden reading Mao’s Little Red Book.

My own memory of the Chinese group is that they were utterly enthralled by the BBC’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Once a week, all fourteen of them would gather in front of the television in the Students Common Room and follow the unfolding drama between Emma and Mr. Knightley. The story of characters who spend their time in drawing rooms and ballrooms, discussing social status and the minutiae of romantic love, struck me as a far cry from the world of Mao Tse-tung. I suspect that Jane Austen wasn’t mentioned during the unannounced visits by the Chinese minister-in-charge.

The students loved to sing. All their songs were deeply patriotic and contained the word ‘Mao’ in almost every line. They sang Scotland the Brave but refused to sing Eriskay Love Lilt because, they explained, it put love of people before love of country.

The interpreter for the group was a man named Shen Xulun. Shen was raised in a scholarly family in Northern China and studied ancient Chinese culture and language at university. During the Cultural Revolution, intellectual  values were ferociously attacked and replaced by proletarian and peasant ideals. In 1966, Shen Xulun escaped from the Red Guards and travelled 1,200 miles on a bicycle from his hometown to Canton. As he made the journey through a country in turmoil, Shen kept a diary that attempted to reconcile his own idealistic view of the Maoist revolution with the corruption and exploitation of the officials he encountered around him. In 1977 Peter spent two months teaching in China and he smuggled a copy of Shen’s diary back to England. He spent several years trying, unsuccessfully, to find a publisher in the UK, America and Australia.

Westerners who have lived in south-east Asia for many years say that the Chinese character is impenetrable and, therefore, unknowable. In the West, people are used to speaking out about their problems, but the Chinese, certainly at that time, were not accustomed to self-examination: the Confucian concept of character has always taught that men are healed by constraints imposed from outside, not by releasing tensions from within. Rosemary Chan once served rhubarb and custard to her Chinese students, a dish they quite clearly found revolting. She urged them to leave it on their plates but they carefully explained that they had taken it and so they must eat it. It was, she told me, quite distressing to watch.

Excerpt from I Have Come to Say You Goodbye: A History of the School of English Studies Folkestone 1959 – 2017  by Una Suseli O’Connell

‘Sam thought about Grandad being ten or eleven at the end of the war. It was very hard to think of him as a boy’ *

Jane Phillips’ book The Clarendon Boys* was inspired by her husband, John’s childhood growing up in the Clarendon district of Dover.

John Buss was born one month before Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939.  That first year, John told me, in a recent interview at his home in Kent, was often referred to as ‘the phoney war’ because not a lot happened. Ships were sunk at sea but there were no bombs on land. It wasn’t until the spring of 1940 when the Germans began moving long-range guns around Calais, closely followed by the retreat from Dunkirk, that the war began in earnest. No other town in the country suffered more than Dover during WWII: 215 civilians were killed and more than 10,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

The Buss family, on both sides and across three generations, were Dovorians. John’s father, Joe worked as a welder in the Dockyards, a reserved occupation which meant that he wasn’t allowed to enlist. He was involved in several admiralty projects, including the construction of anti-submarine netting in the Channel. In September 1940, after a very large piece of shrapnel landed on the garden path immediately behind his wife and their infant son, Joe decided that Eileen and John should be evacuated to the Midlands. For the next five years, they were billeted with Mr. Read, a delightful man who became my surrogate father explained John. Due to the constraints of war, Joe was only able to visit his family three times a year.

John was six years old when, in the spring of 1945, he and his mother came home to 185 Clarendon Street. The town lay in ruins and while Dover dusted itself down, John and his friends formed a gang. They played on the streets and in bombed-out houses before discovering The Western Heights. This extensive network of fortifications, started during the Napoleonic Wars and completed in the 1860s, consists of tunnels, bridges, dry moats, ditches, pillboxes and immense forts, including the North Centre Bastion, Drop Redoubt, The Grand Shaft and the Citadel, where the soldiers were stationed and guns and ammunition were stored. The boys explored the tunnels, with no idea where they might lead nor whether they were safe from sudden collapse. They scrambled down cliffs to the beach and collected driftwood to build bonfires, carefully sweeping the sand as they walked to avoid disturbing unexploded objects. We read Swallows and Amazons. We drew maps and imagined finding buried treasure. There was a tremendous spirit of freedom and adventure and virtually no constraints, recalled John. All we ever told our parents was that we were going out for the day. I don’t think they worried about us.

On one occasion, the four friends discovered an unexploded mine rolling around in the waves. John knew a boy along Clarendon Street who had picked up a hand grenade which subsequently exploded. He lost his hand and had to wear a black leather glove. He looked rather sinister recalled John. They kept their distance from the mine and reported it to the signalman on the railway line.

At high tide, we used to jump off the stern of the beached destroyer, HMS Codrington, near the clock tower in Dover. At Samphire Hoe we once saw a Heinkel, a German bomber that had been shot down by Spitfires at Hawkinge. It was wedged in the rocks and we could see the bullet holes in the fuselage and the wings.

The boys found all kinds of war detritus on the beach, including dead horses that had been washed or thrown overboard. As their confidence and sense of adventure increased, they extended their explorations to the Warren in Folkestone. One afternoon, they were caught by the tide and decided to walk home through the railway tunnel. These were the days of steam trains so the tracks weren’t electrified but there were no fences either. The father of one of the boys worked on the railways and so they knew about the recesses in the brickwork. They knew too that if you put your ear to the line you could hear the train when it was still several miles away. Shakespeare Tunnel is almost a mile long but it is also dead straight. If the light at the far end was blocked, John explained, they knew that a train was coming and they needed to hurry to the closest lay-by.

Tramps and ‘vagrants’ often sheltered in the tunnels and the boys made friends with a man they called ‘Old Ted’ who used to walk between the Dover and Elham workhouses.

The gang broke up in 1950 when they sat the 11+. Of the four of them, only John passed the exam and went on to Dover Grammar School.

The Western Heights remains pretty much the way it was 150 years ago. The outside space is accessible all year round. There is no entrance fee and, on a clear day, there are fine views across the hills, down the cliffs to Dover Harbour and out to sea. Today The Heights are managed by a preservation society. The Citadel was converted into a Young Offenders unit, an immigration centre and finally a film location studio. As of 2023, there are plans in the pipeline to renovate and repurpose the fort as a hotel and leisure complex.

The Clarendon Boys by Jane Phillips pub. 2015, by Crumps Barn Studios

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, pub. 1930

https://doverwesternheights.org/

In the village of Groton, Suffolk is a black mulberry tree, thought to be the oldest of its kind in England. It was planted in 1550 by Adam Winthrop, whose grandson, John led the first settlers to North America in 1630. Winthrop founded the city of Boston and subsequently became the first Governor of Massachusetts.

In 2017 I was doing research for a family memoir and spent several days with the archivists of two Massachusetts schools where my father had been a teacher in the 1950s. The archival records at Groton School are stored in windowless, fire-proof, temperature-controlled rooms and access to documents is carefully supervised. I was fortunate that Douglas Brown, the school archivist, had been a pupil of my father’s in 1953. Doug has spent 56 years of his life at Groton – as pupil, teacher and custodian of the school’s long history. He handed me a manila folder with Peter O’Connell’s name written in ink in the top right-hand corner. Inside I found a hand-written job application which, rather surprisingly, admitted to having no particular skills in English other than a love of the subject and a promise to teach it with interest and enthusiasm. There were personal letters too, written to Jack Crocker, the Headmaster, long after Peter had returned to England.

In 1960 when Groton celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday, a book was published using the school’s rich repository of archived material. In its centennial year, a collection of photographs was produced, edited by Douglas Brown and taken from the many thousands in the Groton archives. In 2018 Doug mentioned that the trustees had commissioned a further history of Groton. He admitted that he didn’t have a lot of new material because, well, people don’t communicate in the same way. It is no longer possible to piece together a story using old letters, scribbled memos and blurred photographs. I thought of Isa Schaff, the archivist at Noble and Greenough School where Peter taught after he left Groton. Isa admitted to me that she ignored instructions to store archival material digitally and continued to print out significant emails which she kept in physical files.

According to an article in The Guardian this week, even the use of email is now in decline, especially amongst Generation Z (those born after 1997). Many young people consider email communication to be outdated, preferring the immediacy of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Doug and I are still in touch. Sometimes I mail him old letters and photographs I have uncovered from Peter’s days at Groton. Once I sent back a library book that my father had checked out in 1954 and never returned. Following a visit to Groton, Suffolk, I sent him a mulberry leaf from the Winthrop tree. I met Doug just 5 years ago and yet I know his address without looking it up and recognise his writing when he sends me a letter in the mail. I have friends of 20 years whose handwriting I have never seen because we communicate solely via email and social media. I have friends from 40 years ago whose handwriting I know immediately, even if they haven’t written to me in decades.

It took me almost two years to sift through my father’s personal papers. He kept everything, from his dry cleaning bills when he was a student at Cambridge to 50 years of letters and diaries. He also kept carbon copies so I have inherited not only the letters he received but also the ones he wrote. Some I almost threw away, frustrated by my repeated inability to move them from the orphaned pile. One, written in 1956, was particularly difficult to decipher as the handwriting and signature were almost illegible. It turned out to be a letter from Thornton Wilder to Peter, describing the influence of Goethe and Dante on his Pulitzer-prize winning play Our Town. Wilder’s nephew, a former pupil of my father’s, has asked whether I would leave the letter, in my will, to the Thornton Wilder Collection at Yale. In the words of Goethe himself: We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others*.

*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Die Wahlverwandtschaften/Elective Affinities, 1809

Related blog: A Bell’s not a Bell ‘til you Ring it. A Song’s not a Song ‘til you Sing it.  February 22^nd, 2022

Last week I went to the dentist. I have been a patient of Dr. McCoach for many years. I trust him completely and never question any decisions he makes regarding my dental health.

I grew up in the 1960s, before they put fluoride in the water, before the days of electric toothbrushes and interdental products. I don’t recall ever seeing a hygienist. The drills that went into my mouth shuddered vigorously and felt like jackhammers on my teeth. Our local dentist, Dr. Wilberforce (or Will-by-force as my father called him), was bossy and gruff. Dr. Paine was the perfect business partner – an ideal match in both name and temperament.

My mother was a firm believer in good dental care. She had worked, for many years, as a dental assistant in Switzerland. One afternoon, a woman arrived at Dr. Guebeli’s surgery with excruciating toothache. She had come a long way, on foot, she explained, and was disheartened to learn that the doctor had been called away. Anxious to help the woman, my mother slipped a piece of cotton thread round the tooth and tied the other end to the handle of an open door. She then slammed the door shut. The woman was extremely grateful but a little puzzled that Dr. Guebeli’s colleague wanted no payment for her trouble.

Many years later, our daughter Polly had a wobbly front tooth which hung by a thread for days into weeks. Eventually, my mother-in-law tried the door knob trick. I envisioned a fountain of blood and high-pitched screams from our 7 year-old but no … the tooth was out in a jiffy. No blood. No pain. Amazing.

My mother-in-law, like my mother, knew a thing or two about teeth. At the turn of the last century, her parents, Otto and Leni, emigrated to rural Latvia where, legend has it, they became cheese-makers to the Tsar. Before they left Switzerland, Leni, who was in her early twenties, had her teeth pulled and replaced with a full set of dentures. It was a practical solution, intended to save her pain and money over the course of her long life. It always struck me as strange that Otto got to keep his teeth. My mother-in-law used to say that in her next life, she planned to return with hair on her teeth. The image made me think of werewolves. It also made me wonder how a young woman in her twenties might have felt as she sat down in the dentist’s chair, making ready to have 32 perfectly healthy teeth extracted.

Teeth, like fingerprints are unique and, unlike the bones in our bodies, they can’t heal if they are damaged. In the words of Dr. Seuss When you get your second set, that’s all the teeth you’ll ever get.

By the time I was 9 years old, my mother had given up on Drs. Wilberforce and Paine and registered me with a dental practice on Wimpole Street in London’s medical district. I enjoyed these days out with my mother. I would get a day off school and after my appointment, we always went to the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square for a slice of Engadiner Nusstorte – walnuts coated in caramel sauce and baked into a shortbread pie. Whenever Dr. Calvert asked me if I had anything nice planned for the rest of the day, I lied. I didn’t think he would approve of all that sugar.

When we went to Switzerland on holiday, my mother would take me to see her former employers – Dr. Guebeli and Dr Beguin because, well, you could never quite trust those English dentists, even those with fancy offices in London.

Last week, as I rose from the dental chair, Dr. McCoach (who is from New Zealand) asked me about Polly and Lucy who had been his patients when they were teenagers. I told him that, between them, they had just one filling, to which he replied You have given them a gift for life. I thought about Lea and all the time and money she had invested in my dental health. It’s thanks to my mother, really, I said. She taught me the importance of looking after my teeth.  

Switzerland is famous for its dairy products, its mountains and its high standard of living. For some people, however, this is pretty much all they know. The bank teller at our local Nat West had no idea that the official name for Switzerland was Confederation Helvetia and the country was, therefore, listed under C, rather than S on the table of foreign currencies. A friend once confessed to a long-held assumption that Zurich was the country’s capital and, at a party, many years ago, a young man wondered why I was so dark because  …  ‘Aren’t you all blonde in Sweden?’

There are many stereotypes associated with the country of my birth and it is certainly true that the chocolate is delicious, the scenery is gorgeous and all aspects of Swiss life, from trains to hospitals, run like clockwork. And yet, beneath and beyond these somewhat common clichés, Switzerland is a nation of considerable complexity and contradiction.

The Swiss are immensely proud of their mountain roots. They are not, generally speaking, a nation of complainers. They knuckle down and make the best of often challenging circumstances. Every summer, my great-grandfather, like his ancestors before him, would lead his cows to high pasture. Between June and September he lived in an alpine hut, tending his animals and scything the meadow grass from hillsides too steep for cows to graze. The dried bales were sent back down into the valley on hay ropes to be stored for winter feed. Today farmers use lawnmowers and rely on helicopters but, other than this,  not much has changed, because, well …. you can’t move mountains and the Swiss Alps cover 65% of the country’s surface area.

Farmers have played an important role in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, which today accounts for 45% of the country’s exports (higher than cheese, chocolate and watches combined). In 1921, Arthur Stoll, director of pharmaceutical research at Sandoz (which later combined with Ciba-Geigy to form Novartis), successfully isolated the toxic fungus known as ‘ergot’ that grew on rye seed. Bread made from this infected grain caused seizures, lesions, psychosis and dry gangrene, and spread quickly through local communities. Stoll was fascinated to learn that, since medieval times, the fungal seeds had been used in folk medicine. Ergot was administered to women in labour as a way of accelerating childbirth and was also used to induce abortions. This association gave rise to the name – ‘Mutterkorn/Mothercorn’.

In the late 1930s, Albert Hofmann, a chemist at Sandoz was tasked with growing small and highly controlled amounts of ergot in the Emmental Valley for use in the Sandoz laboratories. The most productive strains of the fungus were then returned to the Emmental rye fields. Local farmers and their families were recruited for the harvesting process. It was time-consuming and back-breaking work but they were paid 12 francs for every kilo of seed heads they delivered to Sandoz. It was hoped that the synthesized drug might provide a cure for migraines. In 1947 Stoll’s son, Werner, a trained psychiatrist, took a single dose of the drug and experienced unexpected euphoria and vivid hallucinations. He immediately recommended it for further clinical research in the field of psychiatric medicine. Lysergsaurediethylamid subsequently became known around the world as LSD.

In 1951 my father took LSD under medical supervision. My Swiss mother, however, refused to have anything to do with pharmaceutical drugs and warned me away from all medication, including paracetamol. For headaches she prescribed coffee and, for everything else, it was either a spoonful of honey or a swig of Fernet Branca. In 1958, when Lea’s doctor in London recommended she take Thalidomide for morning sickness, she declined. The GP told her that the drug was being prescribed to women all over the world with very successful results. It turned out that the powerful sedative qualities of Thalidomide helped nauseous mothers, but the drug also acted as a nerve poison on the unborn baby. This story filled me with profound gratitude as well as a subconscious fear of pills. During my teenage years, in spite of my father’s LSD trips,  I never experimented with anything stronger than marijuana.

I hated the taste of Fernet Branca and don’t recall that it ever cured me of anything. It was, my mother told me, an herbal medicine, developed long ago in Italy. The recipe, like Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken, was a secret, but the bitter, black liquid was renowned for its healing herbs, roots and spices. First it would make me sick and then it would knock me out: Fernet Branca has an alcohol content of 39%.

It was honey, however, that held pride of place in my mother’s medicine cabinet. We would regularly drive deep into the Kent countryside and buy local honey from Mrs. Fitall in Smarden. It was not until I was in my early twenties that I asked my mother about her unusual devotion to honey, and she told me the following story:

In 1917, my grandmother, Rosa insisted on breaking quarantine to visit a family member who was near death with the Spanish flu. Twenty five thousand people died in Switzerland and more than 50 million worldwide.  Everyone advised against it, for her own safety but also for the sake of her unborn child. Rosa chose to ignore the warnings and within a few days, she too had developed all the symptoms. My great-grandmother asked the advice of the family doctor who said he had a possible remedy, although not one he had ever tried himself. He told her to go out into the countryside and buy as much local honey as she could find. She was then to spoon-feed her daughter until she became physically sick. She followed this advice, and Rosa coughed up streams of thick black liquid. My great-grandmother continued to administer the honey until her daughter’s lungs ran clear. Rosa survived and my mother was born on July 18^th, 1917. At birth, Mum told me, her body was covered in a black film which wiped off as easily as coal dust. I can find no recorded symptoms of the Spanish Flu that mention black liquid accumulating in the lungs, but perhaps no-one had ever tried the local honey cure?.

Like my mother, our kitchen cupboard is never without raw or locally-sourced honey. I eat honey every day. I gift it to friends. I still have one of Mrs. Fitall’s honey jars. As Friedrich Nietzsche said: It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.

The Christmas season in Switzerland begins, at least in my imagination, with the ‘Ziebelemaerit’ in Bern, which dates to the 15^th century and falls on the 4^th Monday in November. It is a unique market, dedicated entirely to onions. The narrow streets and the Old Town square are crowded with stalls from which hang braids of shallot, garlic and onion, woven through with dried purple flowers. From before dawn and into the night, an intoxicating smell hangs above the city – a combination of onion soup, garlic bread, caramelised nuts and mulled wine.

On the first Sunday of Advent the traditional evening meal is thick slices of gingerbread dipped in hot milk. This is followed by ‘Chlauser’, the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6^th when bakery windows are lined with small armies of ‘Grittibaenz’ – sweet, bread figures with currant eyes and pearl sugar sprinkles. The streets are busy with Father Christmases ringing hand bells, leading donkeys and handing out chocolate and tangerines. Our daughters once asked me why there were so many. I told a lie and explained that only one was the real Father Christmas. The others were his attendants.

St. Nicholas was a 4^th century bishop, born in Patara, Turkey, who secretly left food, small gifts and clothing on the doorsteps of the poor. Tangerines recall the purses of gold coins he anonymously gifted to destitute families and candy canes echo the crosier he carried.

In mid December, the girls and I would take the train to Bern for the unveiling of the Globus Christmas window. Founded in 1907, Globus was the grande dame of department stores, the Swiss equivalent of Harrods or Bloomingdales. Every year, the sheets of brown paper, which covered the storefront windows, were ceremoniously taken down to reveal exquisitely detailed storybook scenes: families of bears in hand-tailored outfits, toymakers in leather aprons and a tiny steam train that travelled through a snowy landscape. On our way home, we would buy a paper cone of hot chestnuts from the street vendor by the clock tower. In 2001 Globus was sold to a discount chain and, within a few years, the magical window displays were replaced by in-store merchandise.

When our daughters were still in Kindergarten, we came across a small ad in the local paper, offering home visits from Father Christmas. I called the number and was asked to send over some details about the girls, including what they wanted for Christmas. That year it was a bunk bed, and their dad was up until 2am the night before, assembling it for ‘Samichlaus’ to unveil on Christmas Eve. In Switzerland, Father Christmas comes not from the North Pole in a sleigh drawn by reindeer, but out of the forest, with a sledge, pulled by a donkey. He doesn’t come alone either but with a sinister companion known as ‘Schmutzli’ (‘Sooty’). Soon after nightfall we heard the ringing of a small bell and opened the door to a magnificent figure in a red velvet cape and a bishop’s mitre, emblazoned with a white cross. Beside him stood Schmutzli, dressed in a long, black, hooded robe. Only his eyes were visible beneath his black beard. In one hand he held an empty burlap sack and in the other, a birch broom. In the lowlands, Schmutzli has become a more benign figure but in the mountains of Switzerland he remains a menacing presence, one who threatens to beat and bundle naughty children into his sack as punishment for their bad behaviour during the year. The one standing in our living room was a doppelganger for the Grim Reaper. Years later, Polly recalled that it was his penetrating silence that she had found so frightening. Father Christmas opened his big leather bible and began to ask the girls questions, to which he seemingly already knew the answers. He was kindly but firm and warned them to stop biting their nails/sucking their thumbs and to always be gentle with each other. He asked them what they wanted for Christmas and listened earnestly to their almost inaudible replies. Finally, he led them along the corridor, opened the door to their new bedroom and there … tied up with a red ribbon, was a bunk bed.

I invited Father Christmas back the following year, but he had a medical condition, he told me and was hanging up his robe and mitre.

They err who think Santa Claus enters through the chimney. He enters through the heart.                                                         Charles Willis Howard  1896 – 1966

Every year, as November draws to a close, I ask my husband to tell me the story of his brief, but eventful career as a Father Christmas.

In 1970, Dan was hired by Kris Kringle and Associates to be the Sears Roebuck Santa Claus in Oak Brook, Illinois. Dan was eighteen, working the night shift at MacNeal Memorial Hospital in Berwyn and saving for a trip to Europe. Every afternoon he would hitch-hike to Sears, make his way to Santa’s Grotto and climb into his red suit. Kris Kringle and Associates paid their Santas an hourly rate of $2.50. The minimum wage at the time was $1.60. Today, a trip to see Father Christmas at a department store or the local garden centre can cost you between £15 and £50. In 1970, the visit and the candy canes were free.

Fifty two years ago, the gift most requested by girls was a ‘Dawn’ doll. Boys wanted a ‘GI Joe’. Popular children’s names that year were Todd and Heather and the Christmas hit was I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus by the Jackson 5.

Some of the nurses who worked with Dan on the psychiatry unit at MacNeal would bring their small children to visit Santa. On spotting them in the crowd Dan would call out, in his rich, deep voice: Well, well, well, if it isn’t Billy and Bobby Duryea. The fact that Santa knew their names would leave the little tots open-mouthed, wide-eyed and speechless. Dan learnt how to treat the older kids too, the ones who no longer entirely believed in Father Christmas, the ones who pulled his beard to see if it was real and studied him carefully for clues. Whenever he identified potential non-believers, he would snap the clasp on his grandmother’s French prayer book and begin leafing through its pages. He was searching, he told the children, for their names, in order to verify whether or not they were entitled to a gift. When the overly-inquisitive tried to sneak a peek at the pages, he would explain to them, with a steady but kindly gaze, that the words were written in Santa-Claus language.

Kris Kringle and Associates was founded by Earl Tegge, who had spent 25 years of his life as a professional clown in a travelling circus. I was tired of taking my children to see drunken Santa Clauses in dirty wardrobes with twisted whiskers he said in an article published in The Chicago Daily Herald in 1969. Santa Claus is a cross between a saint and a father confessor and I don’t think we can burst that bubble because businesses don’t want to take the time to properly screen, train and outfit the right person to play Santa Claus, Tegge explained.

Although the ideal Father Christmas is thick of beard and wide of girth, Tegge believed that personality was what counted most. Santa Clauses needed to like children and to be kind and patient with them. Another important skill was to know how to manage some of the more heartbreaking requests, such as Please Santa, will you bring my daddy home from Vietnam for Christmas?.

Kris Kringle and Associates is no more, but Earl’s son continues his father’s legacy, travelling across America with the Timothy Tegge Show, a unique combination of traditional vaudeville, magic and comedy.

www.timothytegge.com

An earlier version, titled ‘Kris Kringle Associates’ was published on December 6^th, 2020