Pass me a plate

In the middle of our porridge plates there was a blue butterfly painted and each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first. ['Butterfly laughter', Katherine Mansfield]

It is not only food we remember but where we were at the time; the plates we ate off, the cups we drank from and who we were with, of course. A particular thermos flask reminds me that during my lunch break at work during the weekends, I would take my coffee and sandwich outside under that tree, on that bench, with some extra bread for the sparrows. While I was living in Norway, on a fine Winter’s day and on an expedition into the countryside, we would stop the car for lunch, find a suitably flat rock, dry and warm above the snow, and unpack the thermos and sandwich.

Childhood was spent amongst the mid-tones of Crown Lynn crockery with the soft yellows and browns of Autumn Splendour. A great aunt sent us from Christchurch a Royal Albert cup & saucer but wrapped only in a brown paper bag; even the fragments were patterned and scrolled and the colours, rich and deep. In my twenties I preferred, thank you, the simplicity and austerity of plain white porcelain from Northern Europe. After that, I gave up and collected odd pieces of anything that took my fancy though it was mostly blue & white for years. Perhaps still is. For my 70th I was given a cup and bowl of Royal Copenhagen.

Katherine Mansfield wrote about her grandmother’s blue butterfly in 1909. That butterfly would have been imported. It was not until the 1940s, during and after World War 2, that New Zealand began seriously producing Crown Lynn crockery and Temuka pottery. The New Zealand Railway’s cup & saucer was first produced by both of these firms although I’ve never seen the Temuka version. I went hunting last weekend to see what I could find. Only last week a Crown Lynn Railways cup & saucer sold for $265 I think the antique dealer said; at any rate, I could have had a saucer for $90.

The Taumarunui Railway Station stopped selling pies and a cup of tea to passengers on the overnight express on Friday, 21 February 1975. Queuing on the platform in the middle of the night in the middle of the island; the silence of the sleeping town; the chill in the air; the clunk of the cup against the saucer, the rattle, even the spilt tea.

Ten minutes for refreshments is the signal for the rush As the famished hordes exterminate the feeble in the crush No battlefield is grimmer, where battered heroes die than the bloody Railway battle for a cupper and a pie.

We didn’t know there was a song, ‘Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line’, originally a poem by Peter Cape (1926–1979), and published as 'Taumarunui' in The Listener on 24 October 1958 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Main Trunk Line. That will have to be for another ‘food poetry’ anthology, next time.

https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/1148 www.folksong.org.nz/taumarunui/index.html

'Railway songs', URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/railway-songs, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 20-Dec-2012