TBT - Afternoon Tea with Old Ladies

When I studied abroad, I met a girl named Danae, and one weekend we booked a bus tour to Stratford-upon-Avon and The Cotswolds. It was a lovely little trip (with a very tiny hotel room in Birmingham), and on the trip we met two nice old ladies who lived in the town where Danae and I were going to school.

Kay & Margaret were their names. You can see a picture of them in the scrapbook page below. (I was getting artsy with a roll of black-and-white film. FILM. Remember that? Yes, there were days when in order to make a picture black and white, you had to use special FILM.)

We sat with Kay and Margaret at dinner the first night on our trip and listened as they told us stories about Ormskirk, England back in the day. The school we were studying at used to be a teacher's college. (Seriously, the parallels between where I studied abroad and where I went to college in Missouri were uncanny.) During World War II, the American soldiers were "oversexed, over paid, and over here".

Kay had a husband, but Margaret was a widow, and so Danae and I struck up a correspondence with her after that weekend trip. Margaret invited us to her cottage for afternoon tea one day and served us my first and last glass of Sherry. I can't speak for Danae, but that was some nasty stuff! We were too polite to say "no" to an old lady. We would have eaten human brains if Margaret had served them.

afternoon tea with Margaret

We also joined Margaret, Kay, and Kay's husband for a delicious lamb dinner one evening at Margaret's cottage. They were so nice to us, and Danae and I really appreciated the hospitality.

I don't know what happened to the three of them. I had Margaret's address, but I don't think I ever wrote, and I really should have. By now, she's probably dead and her children (if she had any) inherited her cottage and have probably sold it. But one day, Danae and I should go back and see what became of Margaret and her home.