Bun-Fight In Bsi

By Rosa Moore

IF there is one form of entertainment which follows in the Islands a set and regular pattern to which one ad heres through pressure of circumstances rather than the conviction that it is all that it should be, it is the tropical after noon tea party.

A few days beforehand, one sends out a shower of little notes. Simultaneously one looks through recipe books with com parative confidence until one remembers the Egg Situation: tropical hens are in variablystanding with reluctant feet Where the brook and river meet or else sitting on lumps of coral with a hypnotised look and a high fever.

Various ladies now indicate their wil lingness to come and see how the doy leys are standing up to the vigorous tac tics of the washboy and whether suffi cient of the flowered teacups are still intact to go round.

One then settles for two eggless re cipes and one in which powdered egg may be introduced without too revolting an effect. One goes into the kitchen and surrounds oneself with basins, under the black scrutiny of the cookboy.

Said cookboy suffers so severely from a feeling of plagiarism that he instantly behaves as though the stove were a boiler required to reach dangerously high pressure. He will pile on wood in such a subtle manner that only when the kettle tan-dances across the top does one realise that the anpropriate temperature has now turned into a raging inferno.

He will noiselessly open the stove door and stare accusingly at cakes having the temerity to rise; this cures them.

He will beat a reconstituted egg with such vigour that the ball-bearings drop out of the egg-beater and he will butter tins so lavishly that melting moments skate about on a glaciarium of grease.

He will then go outside and call upon all his ancestral debbil-debbils to cause biscuits to spread, scones to taste of bak ing powder and pikelets to be suitable for patching jeep tyres.

HOWEVER, the happy moment comes, the ladies arrive and as usual seem seated so far apart that conversa tion must be shouted across the arena, as though all we need is the bull and the matador.

These appear only it turns out to be a bull in a china shoo Wakio nush ing the tea-trolley which has chosen this moment to cast a tyre. It comes hopping into the room on three legs while the china jingles like mad and the milk (verv tinned) throws itself in an abandoned manner into saucers, sugar and tea strainer.

The dainty afternoon fare (looking, alas, like something run up for an an nual picnic of hungry footballers) is laid on the little table. Four hundred and ninety-two flies, who have been com plaining that nothing ever happens around here, promptly converge on the icing of the ginger cake, which is al ready fainting in the tropical heat and giving a good imitation of a brown glacier.

One pours out the tea. The lid of the silver teapot crashes into the third tea-cup. Wakio, summoned, opines: “Him’e beggar ud finish now” only he doesn’t say beggar.

It may be so, but one carries on bravely.

Bending over the array of food, for one moment one finds oneself on the verge of saying, “I have much pleasure in de claring this sale of cakes now open, in such a deserving cause.”

Conversation now falls into Groove Number I—cooking;1—cooking; failures with damp flour, triumphs with powdered eggs, sur prises with moths in the raisins, unre hearsed effects with ovens that refuse to heat.

Groove Number 2 is cookboys; cookboys who can make real scones, cookboys who whisk unfinished cakes out of the oven if not watched, cookboys whose fathers are building new houses and need them at home, cookboys very sulky because they’ve sent home for a wife and nobody applies.

The ladies nibble politely, growing sticky with the glacier icing, slipping easily into Groove Number 3—cats: cats that won’t eat tinned meat, cats that are pregnant AGAIN, cats that must be re lated to the Major’s cat because of the same striped tail.

WAKIO comes and gathers up cups, knocking a hat sideways here, treading on a toe there, interrupting a tete-a-tete elsewhere. Hot, sticky, over fed, one feels an incipient attack of hos tess neurosis.

The ladies rise to go, “You will come to me next Wednesday?”

“Now don’t forget Friday week.”

“It has been delightful we must fix a day quite soon,” they say.

Good! Then it will be their turn to try to cream the butter with the sugar and plumb the mysteries of the wood stove and the cookboy with the evil eye.