Dennis is showing me his camellia, tea plants, about thirty of them, in pots in the large greenhouse built against the side of the barn he has turned into his garages and workshops.

He has just brought them in for the winter.

“I make green tea and black tea. Do you want to try some?”

“I didn’t know you could grow it here.”

He came back with a tray a few minutes later.

“Yes,” he said, “I grow both variants, sinensis and assamica. There’s history in those names.”

“Tell me”, I said.

“For two hundred years the British, Dutch and Portuguese knew absolutely nothing about how tea was prepared. They had to buy the leaves from intermediaries called hongs on a single wharf in Canton. Then a guy called Robert Fortune got inland and identified the plant and the preparation process. A short time after that they found a slightly different strain growing wild in India, which they called assamica.”

“Tea was a huge business and the East India Company, which had a monopoly for a long time, became a giant corporation. It researched the fastest and best routes and built the best ships for the trade.”

Dennis must have already told me that while in the Navy he trained as navigator with a view to serving in the Merchant Marine. But he changed track when he met Sue.

“Where is Sue?”, I said.

“Visiting the family whose daughter was murdered.”

“Oh. I didn’t know you knew them.”

“It’s terrible. She is so sorry for them.”

The girl’s picture. As so often, it’s the graduation photograph.

Dennis went on to tell me about the Opium Wars, how the East India Company grew the poppies and prepared the opium, then sold it on to rogue traders in exchange for silver to pay for tea. When the Chinese tried to prevent the trade which was so ruinous to them the British treated it as hostile act and declared war on them.