Afternoon tea with Maria

What makes a lady? Are you born to it? Marry it? Or do you have to be trained?

photo by Sally-Anne Mill

Dunedin, NZ

Late seventies and early eighties

Every Sunday, after we visited my father in his geriatric hospital (Parkside) my mother would take me and my sister to visit her cousin, Maria (pronounced like the wind, Mar-EYE-ah). We would stop the car at Roslyn shops and run in for a packet of biscuits if there’d been no baking that day. Then we would go to Maria’s house, half-way up a hill, to sit in a sunny room where silver pheasants stalked across the dining table and the Persian rugs were silk.

Maria and Greta were ostensibly single mothers at this stage. Maria had two sons, one at university, the other working in the USA. Greta had two daughters, me, and my younger sister Jane, both students.

Greta and Maria had grown up and stayed connected through travel, marriages and, eventually, living in Auckland as their children went through school. Both chose to move to Dunedin to be near Otago University, and for Greta, hospital choices for my father.

The two women were their own support team. Because it was bad form to drink alone, they began ringing each other when the sun went over the yard-arm and it was time to chat over a gin and tonic. Maria was also a good ally for me. I loved her dearly.

Once the kettle was boiled, the lesson began. Between the two of them, these two stylish ladies would try to make a lady of me. (Jane had the skills already.) We would sit perched on chairs surrounded on all sides with occasional tables weighed down with the full tea service. Under their strict tutelage, I would try to co-ordinate cup and saucer with cake plate and fork. Of course, I would play into it, using fine china as a mug and splaying my legs akimbo, defying them with nonchalance. Maria would display horror at such unladylike behaviour. I would have to begin again, keeping cup connected to saucer, knees together, making an effort.

We would laugh, making light of this sad time, as my father disintegrated in a state-run public hospice that no longer exists.

One day a tear ran half-way down his face. He said, ‘When am I coming home?’ Bob eventually spent seven years in Parkside before he died. He never went home.

When Maria died, she left me a teacup, saucer, and cake plate. A small card exhorts me to try to be a lady.

Still trying, Maria!

Searching for another Lady.

Looking down Stuart Street to Dunedin Harbour from the Roslyn overpass