OKAY, I ADMIT IT – I HAVE A THING FOR OLDER LADIES. Eleanor Rigby, bless her soul, was not the only one. I just happen to get on well with them and I always have. I find them interesting, so often for what they can teach us, and they’re usually quite happy to share their stories with you.

While some of the characters in my songs were real, others just spring from my imagination. In the instance of ‘English Tea’, she was based on a real person but, as with so many of my songs, once you have that initial spark for the story, the imagination takes a walk.

Here, we have an elderly lady called Dorothy, who lives in a town near me. She’s a posh older lady, not at all like the working-class ones of my Liverpool youth, who would start every line of a story with, ‘So, I said . . .’ followed by, ‘Then she said . . .’ and so on and so on as if they were narrating a play to you. Dorothy was a little more refined, maybe a little more eccentric, too. I remember her saying to me once, ‘Would you care for a cup of tea? Would you care to come in and have a cup of tea?’ Care? I thought, ‘I love that.’

As I reflect on my life from the vantage point of the many decades that have passed, I especially love some of these expressions that you just don’t hear so much these days. I can’t help thinking that as dated as they are, they are also so very elegant. The fact that I used to go in and have a cup of tea with her is what got me started on the song. And just for clarity here, tea to British readers will make sense. To international readers, it’s English breakfast tea. For us, tea is tea. But if you’re abroad, they’ll ask you, ‘What kind of tea would you like?’ In Europe, a black tea will often come with a slice of lemon instead of milk. So, travellers, take note.

Once the tea was served, I imagined myself being Dorothy. At least in terms of her diction, which I really liked. Now I’m the person saying to someone, ‘Would you care to sit with me / For a cup of English tea / Very twee / Very me / Any sunny morning / What a pleasure it would be / chatting so delightfully’. I am putting myself into that elegant English world. Think of the posh people, the ladies and earls, who inhabit Downton Abbey.

The opening verse is like reading a play and on the first page the scene is set in italics: It was a sunny morning. Then sunny becomes Sunday in the second verse. A little switch. I will often find that a small change like that can go a long way. It’s the same with music. You start with a chord that everyone else plays, but if you move one finger slightly up or down, you can get something new and interesting. A simple switch from sunny to Sunday moves the story along.

Then the bridge is, ‘Miles and miles of English garden / Stretching past the willow tree / Lines of hollyhocks and roses / Listen most attentively’. So, it’s a very English landscape. The English garden is a pastoral export. You can travel around the world and find them, just as there are Irish bars everywhere. There’s a huge Englischer Garten in Munich and it tries to re-create the sort of garden Dorothy might have. Rolling lawns, tree groves, maybe a quaint building or two.

So we have the nanny, the garden, the willow tree, hollyhocks. Like the kind of thing you might get in a John Betjeman poem. He was a big national figure when I was at school. We were more excited by the words and lines coming from the poets of the Beat generation in the US and Dylan Thomas at home. Betjeman seemed more representative of Victorian Britain, the country of our parents and grandparents. Back then, Betjeman’s books sold in the millions and Dorothy would have got on well taking tea with some of his characters.

The story moves on from drinking tea together to being out in the garden, ‘Do you know the game croquet’. It’s the kind of world in which you’d go to visit people and they’d like you to play croquet. ‘Yeah, alright. You haven’t got a football? No? Okay then, we’ll play croquet!’

Next we move onto a bit I used to like playing around with at our shows, ‘Peradventure we might play’. I discovered that word somewhere in a Charles Dickens book around the time of writing the song. I always have a dictionary to hand, so I looked it up to see if I could get away with using the word, and sure enough it means perhaps or maybe. ‘Peradventure I’m Amazed’. So I saw it and thought, ‘I like that word. Peradventure I’ll use it in this song.’ So I used to say to the crowd, ‘You will notice in this song that I use a word – peradventure – and I want to tell you about this word’, and I did a little bit of schtick about it. I remember, there was a girl in the audience – you sometimes recognise fans who appear at a number of shows – who would hold up a sign that read ‘Peradventure’ if I sang ‘English Tea’. It’s funny though, as it’s not a word I’d ever really use. But that’s part of the joy of songwriting: you can put yourself into the minds of different characters and imagine how they might see the world.

The last verse is another variation on the earlier ones and once more features a number of phrases I wouldn’t usually use, starting with, ‘as a rule’. ‘As a rule the church bells chime / When it’s almost suppertime’. I also wouldn’t use ‘suppertime’, I’d call it teatime. ‘Suppertime’ is a bit posh. It’s a subtlety of the English class system that people visiting our shores, or listening to us talk, might not fully grasp. But for those of us who grew up here, you can tell a fair bit about someone by the words and phrases they use. Sandwich or butty. Sandwich? Again, a bit posher than we were. It’s the same with pronunciation, such as whether someone pronounces the h’s at the start of a word. Dorothy would say ‘hollyhocks’, but her gardener might say, ‘’olly’ocks’. Dorothy would say, ‘hip hooray’, her gardener, ‘’ip ’ooray’. The gardener might also drop the g at the end of words – they might be gardenin’. There are hundreds of these little aural cues that give clues about someone’s upbringing and they’re also another writer’s tool that I like to play with.

A daily ritual (just missing the biscuit)

I used to do this song when it was relatively new with my band – in fact, the band I’m still playing with. We did it once at a show in Anaheim, California, when we had a link up so we could communicate directly with the International Space Station. NASA had said to us, ‘Do you want to link up with the two guys who are in the space station?’ – ISS commander Bill McArthur and flight engineer Valery Tokarev, who were something like 200 miles above the earth at the time. I remember watching the first moon landing with Linda in the summer of 1969, shortly after we were married, so it was exciting that I could now sing to astronauts while they were in space. And even though they were completing an orbit around every 90 minutes, we knew that we were going to wake them up. We were sort of their alarm clock. There was a countdown involved and I had my guy Scotty in front of me with cards and he’s going, ‘Five minutes to go.’ So, I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got to pace it.’ Then he goes, ‘Two minutes to go.’ I go, ‘Okay.’ And then he says, ‘Right: Five, four, three, two, one . . .’ He counts me in, and so I say to everyone in the audience, ‘Okay, I think you are going to be surprised by this. Because, right now, we are going live to the International Space Station and there’s a couple of guys up there and we’re going to have a link up on the big video screens.’ The astronauts came on the screens and we sang ‘Good Day Sunshine’. They danced by somersaulting around. Weightless, of course, but I’d like to think that our singing might have made them somersault just a little bit more than usual. The whole thing was fabulous. Then, we followed with ‘English Tea’, a fitting song for people waking up for breakfast. It’s quite a distance from Dorothy’s home, but everyone loves a good cup of tea, whether they’re in space or sitting at home in the garden.