Philanthropic Food: Fetefulness

The Chair of the W.I accepted my offer to help at the Devon 'Pie Fete', but I was unaware of the hierarchical toes upon which I was about to step. Fetes, Fairs, Fayres, Fests and Festivals; I was as naive as Lucia thinking that "the fete would be an admirable occasion for entering the arena of activities" (Mapp and Lucia 17).
For I too was an interloper, merely a transient resident of the village; I was a female trespasser and my urban ideology could be scented at a thousand paces.

Beneath canvas, in open fields, playgrounds, church halls and libraries, a trestle table resplendent with cake simply refuses to be ignored; it will simultaneously satisfy both your Freudian pleasure principle and at least one of the three Virtues: Charity. The economy of cake has built church roofs, floors, organ lofts and pews....

It began with one of the pleasantest French imports to form a marriage with the British cake, the Fete.

La Fete a St. Cloud 1775-8
Jean Honore Fragonard

Henrietta of England staged legendary Fetes in the 17th century at St Cloud.

Horatio Walpole

Taking up his quill in 1752 Horatio Walpole caught the French Zeitgeist and wrote to his friend Sir Horace Mann about the Fete phenomenon. Of Lord and Lady Coventry Walpole gossiped: "They were pressed to stay for the great Fete at St. Cloud", and thus returning movers and shakers anglicised La Fete on the English side of La Manche.

So, I crossed the threshold of the village hall to serve tea and cake from behind the division of the trestle table. It is a rare man who ventures behind the trestle table, for men, along with cakes which fail to pass stringent 'committee' quality control standards, are not infrequently requisitioned to the back kitchen. I busily swept up scattered cake crumbs and criticisms about the portion control of my cake slices.

The Women's Institute in my London home town has an enormous waiting list, and this is providential, if Georgie's caution to Lucia is correct: "I wonder if you're wise to join the committee" (Mapp and Lucia). Committee membership can be a poisoned chalice; one which has often been passed around a circuit of 'same olds, until somebody yields.
Lucia prepares a tableau to receive the honour, and deceive the giver, of her invitation to 'join the committee', within the "Shakespearean scope" (Mapp and Lucia) of Perdita's garden. The illusion is complete, she would be chanced upon cherishing Pepito's poetry; enter stage left Daisy Qantock: "...so good of you to see me, and I'll come to the point at once. The Elizabethan fete, you know. You see it won't be till August. Can't we persuade you, as they say, to come amongst us again? We all want you: such a fillip you'd give it" (17).
A wiser Lucia might have anticipated the sting in Daisy's tail: "My dear, none of us thought of asking you to be Queen Elizabeth" (17); Lucia was still not 'one of them'.
The spotlight refocuses on Lucia when, like a moth to a flame, she cannot resist the lure of the camera lens: "...the clic of cameras throughout the whole performance had been like the noise of cicalas in the south...(Lucia was most indulgent), and she was photographed at her piano and in Perdita's garden, and musing in an arbour..." (Mapp and Lucia 88).

I too turned to camera, when the photographer from the local newspaper pointed his lens, and I crunched the hierarchical toes of my W.I 'country cousins'; a 'fillip' I was not!