Smoko at the Falklands, and the Lady Whose Name I Shall Not Mention

I have always maintained that one can learn more about a country from its tea than from its constitution.

This theory has survived several tests.

It survived England, naturally. It survived Ireland. It survived Argentina, where the matter becomes complicated by the existence of the mate and by the alarming willingness of otherwise respectable people to drink it through what resembles a piece of plumbing. It survived Japan, China, and India, where tea has been elevated to an imperial art.

And then there was the Falkland Islands.

I had come to Darwin on East Falkland on a day when the landscape seemed determined to demonstrate that the South Atlantic possesses no particular interest in making itself comfortable for the benefit of visitors.

There was sky everywhere.

Sky and wind.

Not the tame little rectangle of sky one encounters between buildings in London, but an immense, cold hemisphere of it, stretching over the brown-green country until the distinction between earth and weather became almost philosophical. The road seemed to run into the landscape rather than across it. Here and there were fences, sheep, distant hills, and the occasional dark punctuation of a bird.

It was the sort of country in which a man begins to understand why people become attached to maps.

Darwin itself has a curious historical presence. It is not grand in the conventional sense. There are no marble boulevards, no triumphant monuments demanding that one admire the achievements of civilisation. Instead there is space, silence and the peculiar dignity of a settlement which has learned to exist at the edge of things.

And then there is Darwin House.

I had been told that one could simply drop in for smoko.

This struck me as an excellent arrangement.

The English have, over the centuries, devised increasingly elaborate methods of having tea. There are drawing rooms, afternoon teas, silver pots, tiered stands, cucumber sandwiches and enough porcelain to equip a minor palace.

The Falklands have smoko.

Historically, Falkland farm life involved demanding physical work, and the traditional routine included two smoko breaks, one in the morning—often around 10:30—and another in the afternoon. Historical accounts describe strong tea accompanied by cake, buns or biscuits.

That makes smoko rather different in spirit from the English afternoon tea of the drawing room. It belongs to the shepherd, shearer, farmer and farm household, rather than the porcelain-and-sandwich world of formal tea.

One stops.

One has tea.

One eats something.

One talks.

One resumes one's existence.

The cake here matters almost as much as the tea. The traditional spread can be

remarkably generous. Menues from the Falklands include plain or slab cake, often with currants or sultanas, buns, biscuits, scones, homemade cakes, and other baking, occasionally more elaborate iced confections.

The Falkland Islands' tourism material itself describes smoko as tea with home-baked treats, and explicitly presents it as part of the experience of staying on a farm.

Smoko is hospitality, not merely refreshment.

There is even a particularly Falklandian biscuit tradition surrounding "scorpions", also called smoko biscuits, hard-tack biscuits or Uncle Joe's buns. Scorpions have become an iconic smoko biscuit, with numerous competing recipes and stories surrounding the name.

That is precisely the sort of thing that interests me: a humble tea break acquiring its own folklore

Darwin House offered precisely this sort of welcome: tea or coffee, freshly baked cakes and biscuits, with sandwiches available as well. The house itself has a cosy sitting room and a conservatory looking towards the surrounding country and the mountains to the north, including Mount Usborne.

I entered and, within a surprisingly short time, found myself wondering why civilisation had ever invented restaurants.

The place had the comfortable air of a house rather than an establishment. This distinction matters.

A hotel tells you that it has been designed to receive guests.

A house sometimes makes you forget that you are one.

The sitting room was warm. The conservatory seemed almost to dissolve the boundary between indoors and the Falkland landscape. Beyond the glass lay the extraordinary spaciousness of East Falkland: water, hills, vegetation, sky and the occasional movement of wildlife. Visitors have repeatedly remarked upon the views and the warmth of the welcome, with one describing the conservatory as the jewel of the house.

I was not alone.

There was a lady with me.

I shall not tell you who she was.

This is partly because discretion is one of the few virtues which improves with age, and partly because certain memories become less valuable when one pins too many labels upon them.

Let us simply say that she was not an accidental companion.

She knew how to look at a landscape without immediately photographing it. She knew when silence was preferable to conversation, and—more importantly—when conversation was preferable to silence. She also possessed the dangerous ability to notice when a gentleman had finished his tea before the gentleman himself had noticed.

I have encountered this quality before.

It is not to be underestimated.

We sat together in the conservatory.

The tea arrived.

There is a particular pleasure in being given tea when one has not asked for ceremony.

The cup appears. The pot is warm. There is something on the plate which has been made by someone rather than assembled by a machine. Outside, the weather continues its ancient argument with the Falkland Islands.

And then there is cake.

The Darwin House smoko is not intended to imitate the grand afternoon tea of an English hotel. Its ancestry is more practical. The Falkland tradition of smoko belongs to working life: a pause during the day, associated with tea, baking and conversation. Darwin House's own descriptions have long presented smoko in precisely these terms.

I find this immensely sensible.

There is something slightly ridiculous about requiring a man to be surrounded by silver before permitting him a biscuit.

A farm worker does not need a silver salver.

He needs tea.

Preferably strong tea.

And cake.

The cakes at Darwin House seemed particularly appropriate to their surroundings. They were not trying to be fashionable. They did not appear to have been designed by a pastry chef suffering from an advanced case of self-importance. They were simply the sort of cakes one wishes to find when sitting in a remote house at the edge of the South Atlantic.

There were biscuits too.

I have always regarded the biscuit as a test of civilisation. A civilisation which cannot produce a decent biscuit has clearly lost its way.

Darwin House had not lost its way.

My companion, meanwhile, was enjoying the occasion in a manner which suggested that she understood something I was only beginning to appreciate.

Smoko is not merely about eating.

It is about stopping.

That distinction is easily missed.

The world outside Darwin House is immense. The distances are deceptive. The roads are rough. The weather can alter the character of the landscape within minutes. The islands carry their history quietly, sometimes poignantly, beneath the ordinary business of farming and travel.

But inside, for half an hour, none of this requires immediate attention.

The kettle has done its work.

The cake has done its work.

Conversation has done the rest.

We talked about the islands.

We talked about travelling.

We talked about people whose names I shall not record here.

We laughed at something which, had I written it down afterwards, would probably not have been funny at all.

This is one of the principal disadvantages of writing memoirs: the things which seem most important at the time rarely survive the journey home, while the most insignificant details—an expression, a particular sentence, the sound of a cup being placed upon a saucer—remain with astonishing persistence.

I remember the light.

I remember the landscape beyond the glass.

I remember the warmth of the room.

I remember the tea.

And I remember my companion looking out towards the country with an expression which made me wonder whether she was seeing the same Falklands that I was.

Perhaps she was.

Perhaps she wasn't.

I shall leave that question where I found it.

The Falklands possess a peculiar talent for making one aware of distance. Distance from Britain. Distance from Europe. Distance from the Continent. Distance from almost everything which calls itself central.

Yet there, in Darwin House, with tea in front of me and a plate of homemade baking between two people, the distance seemed temporarily irrelevant.

Indeed, I began to think that this might be the true purpose of smoko.

It is not simply a break from work.

It is a small rebellion against urgency.

For a little while, nothing needs to happen.

The sheep can wait.

The weather can wait.

The road can wait.

History, which has already waited rather longer than most of us, can certainly wait.

One drinks one's tea.

One eats one's cake.

One finds oneself speaking to a lady whose Christian name—Christian in the most literal sense—shall, for reasons I shall leave to the discretion of the reader, remain unwritten.

And for half an hour the Falkland Islands seem not to be at the end of the world at all.

They seem to be precisely where one ought to be.

When we finally rose, I discovered that I had been there considerably longer than intended.

This is the danger of a good smoko.

It begins as refreshment and ends as memory.

There is even an interesting Australian and New Zealander connection.

The word itself is not uniquely Falklandian. Smoko belongs to a wider southern-hemisphere working vocabulary, particularly Australian and New Zealand English. New Zealand historical material, for example, describes smoko as an established tea break for manual and farm workers.

So the Falkland smoko is as a tradition introduced from Australia and New Zealand, while noting that it subsequently became part of Falkland life.

Originally, smoko was associated with a smoke/smoking break, although the word came to mean a general short work break and in the Falklands does not require smoking.

Modern Falkland descriptions simply use it for the tea-and-baking ritual.

Which gives us a wonderfully British piece of linguistic evolution:

smoke → smoko → tea and cake

Civilisation, apparently, eventually wins.

At the end of this delicous break, I thanked our hosts at Darwin House and stepped outside.

The wind met me immediately, as though it had been waiting impatiently for my return.

I looked back at Darwin House.

Behind its windows was the warmth of the sitting room, the conservatory, the tea, the cakes, and one particular conversation which I shall not describe any further.

Falkland Smoko: a working break that has become an important expression of Camp hospitality.

Some memories deserve documentation.

Others deserve tea.

I have always preferred the latter.