Here’s today’s table for Grandpa’s tea party. Memories of long ago parties…jellies in waxed paper dishes…red and green. Lots of balloons, crackers, paper hats sliding down over small heads. And my mother-in-law Belle’s glorious table, set with starched embroidered clothes and napkins and those three tiered cake plates, piled high with home made cakes. And my mum..always had “a nice bit of cake, to cut into”. She’d sit at the dropped-down front of the small kitchen cabinet, four-sided metal flour-sieve above her head. Lilian’s weekly Friday bake was either walnut, cherry or seedy cakes; puffing away at her cut-in-half Woodie ( Woodbines), pin stuck into its base. Smoked to its utmost. We had seedy, or walnut, or cherry…all with that touch of ciggie ash. For these mothers, a “proper” tea was loving us. They had lived through a sugarless war.