Book Review//Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

There are two pieces of information I got out of this book. The first one is in the brief overview of the 1950s at the beginning of the book. Did you know that in the 1950s the average member of the U.K. population drank 10 pounds of tea a year? I thought I drank a lot of tea but I obviously do not know what a lot of tea is. I need to up my game.

The second piece of information is that Mary Essex really, really likes exclamation marks.

Tea Is So Intoxicating is the story of David and Germayne. David decides that he wants to start a tea house.

It was just about this time that David got the idea of cooking, and he got it badly. The jelly and the greengages started it, and now he simply could not leave the oven alone. He spent all his spare time messing about in the kitchen, and leaving sinks full of washing-up for somebody else to do, and then getting irritable because his food did not always turn out the way that he had hoped. He tackled the most difficult dishes, and considered that he carried them off extraordinarily well. He made jam at the end of the summer, and jammed up the entire place. There was not a door handle one could hope to turn without bearing the mark of David’s jam on the palm of the hand. He made soufflés that wouldn’t stand up, and jellies so firm that nothing would knock them down, but he got a great deal of fun out of it. and the moment that the Dolly Varden Cosy Tea Shops, Ltd., went phut he got the idea. One solid idea reared itself as an alternative in the torpid grey matter of David’s mind and, as those rock-like jellies that he would insist on making, established itself so firmly that nothing would knock it down again.

“I shall start a tea-house,” he said.

“Oh, David, must you?”

“I certainly shall. There’s a fortune in it.”

The village is not happy with the idea of a tea garden in their midst. Mrs. Arbroath, who believes she rules the village, decides something must be done about it. Meanwhile, she falls in love with Colonel Brandish but Colonel Brandish is enthralled with Mimi, the cake cook from Vienna who has a deleterious effect on all the men who encounter her.

But wherever the rest of the world was going, Mrs. Arbroath was digging her toes in and going the same way as usual and abiding by the consequences. She was dictatorial, and she held on to her reins with the most convulsive grasp, fast becoming the joke of the place. With the second world war, of course, everything made yet another gigantic slip, and although she put it all down to that detestable man Hitler, she could not help judging form what she saw going on about her that he was not entirely to blame, but that other detestable people were in the wrong, too. In a world that was changing desperately, only Mrs. Arbroath continued firm as a rock.

Years ago, Germayne ran away from her husband and married David. It becomes very clear that she is starting to regret that decision. Digby’s, her first husband, solidity and dependability is no longer looking quite so boring. Germayne and Digby have a daughter, Duck, who comes to stay with Germayne for a little while. Duck gets in a motorcycle accident and Digby comes flying to her side. Germayne is becoming more and more unhappy. Mimi is causing chaos everywhere she goes. Mrs. Arbroath thinks she is engaged to Colonel Brandish but he doesn’t agree. Everything feels like it is hurtling toward disaster and unhappiness. It is obvious the tea shop is not going to be a success and when it opens on a day of torrential downpours it is just what the reader expects.

Mary Essex was a prolific writer. She wrote over 500 novels and biographies under various pseudonyms which is a number so large it is almost hard to comprehend. Did she write a novel a month? She must have written at breakneck speed and Tea Is So Intoxicating reads a bit that way. Not that it is poorly written, it isn’t, but that the story is told at a gallop and the reader is rushing along with it. Maybe this explains the huge number of exclamation marks? I did find those a bit irritating–it was almost as if the exclamation marks were sometimes used to indicate emotion without the writing doing it itself. I realize that neither of the quotes I used has too many exclamation marks so you will just have to trust me on this. I do find myself thinking about the characters and wondering what happened next and if they were happy so I did become involved in the story. This is not my favorite of the British Library Women Writer series but I did enjoy it and I would read more by Mary Essex (or Ursula Bloom, Sheila Burns, etc.)

My thanks to the British Library for sending me a copy of this book for review.