Cafés by Paul May

The café scene at the end of Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea has always served as a reminder of my childhood. Visits to cafés were so rare that I can remember almost all of them, but one café in particular stands out. It was at the end of our road, and it was exactly like the one in Judith Kerr’s book. I can tell from the picture that the food would have tasted the same.  We only went there once, when I was about six years old, and I had apple pie and custard for dessert.  

Just like the little girl in the story I stayed at home with my mummy while my daddy was out at work. I used to look out of the window of our London flat, waiting for him to return, and I remember one night seeing a car on fire in the street. I was convinced my daddy was inside, which is strange because we didn’t have a car at the time, and is almost as dreamlike in retrospect as the idea of a Tiger coming to Tea.

It’s still just possible to find cafés a bit like the one at the end of our road, but others from my past have vanished entirely. My first café memory is of a Lyons Corner House somewhere in London. I must have been about three and I remember the queues for food and the steamy atmosphere and the noise of clattering crockery and conversation.  

Then, later, there were a couple of wonderful cafés in Norwich.  My grandmother would take me to Woolworths for fish and chips.  The café was on a mezzanine floor and you could eat your lunch looking down on the heads of the shoppers below.  Long before the eventual demise of Woolie’s they sold the building to Marks and Spencer but the ghost of the café is still there in the unusual layout of the M and S store. 

Also in Norwich was, and still is, the Assembly House. The café (well, it was a restaurant really, where you could have lunch or an early evening meal, but also tea and coffee) was in a large, high-ceilinged Georgian room.  It was chiefly remarkable for the fact that you collected your food and drink from a long counter and were handed a ticket. If you wanted more tea or cake you could fetch it and they’d add the items to your ticket—a bit like a bar tab. When you’d finished you went to the door where a cashier was seated with an ancient wooden till. Given that the loos were in another part of the building and there was a constant to-and-fro of customers it was obvious even to a small child that the whole system relied on honesty.

The system was still in operation when my daughter was a toddler, happily destroying chocolate cake in a high-chair.  They were always very good about children’s mess!  But it couldn’t last and by the 1990s when my son was little they’d started making you pay when you ordered. The clientele was eclectic: ladies in hats, tweed-clad gentlemen, actors from the theatre next door and hippies up from the country for the day. It was the sort of posh café where even poor people could sometimes go for a treat and everyone was welcome. Nowadays, at £42 for two for Afternoon Tea, I suspect poor people might give it a miss.

I can’t imagine writing in any of those cafés. In fact, I can’t imagine writing in any café. I find the people-watching far too interesting, so it beats me how J K Rowling managed to write substantial parts of the first three Harry Potter books in Edinburgh cafés. She says they’re perfect as you don’t have to make your own coffee and if you get stuck you can move on to another establishment and the change of scene and the fresh air come to your rescue. It may be that J K started a trend, because most London cafés these days are full of coffee drinkers with laptops and mobile phones.  Hard to tell if they’re writing though.  Probably they’re watching movies or listening to music.

But in The Tiger Who Came to Tea, still in print more than fifty years after it was first published, children continue to read about a little girl who sits down with her mummy and daddy and eats sausages and chips and ice cream at a table with a chequered tablecloth and a pot of flowers, while ladies in hats chatter in the background.

And not a laptop or mobile phone in sight.    

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