Breaking Up The Happy Home

 

Together we look at the things she has in two glass fronted cupboards. There are a few things there which I really love and as she has now decided to sell her house, she wants me to have them. There is the black cat tea pot from the 1920s, with a badly glued crack in its red collar. ‘You broke that when you were a baby,’ she says accusingly. I look at it and wonder whether I do really want it. I haven’t been allowed to touch it since the age of two. There is a china pig I bought her from Bellick after a holiday in Ulster, while the troubles were still on.

 I slowly wrap up two tea sets, one given to her by her grandfather, real Coalport china, quite beautiful, the other a blue willow pattern doll’s tea service she and I once played with. Their fragility is very worrying and I know from past experience that when I take things from my mother’s home and put them into my own, it doesn’t work somehow. Out of context they lose their value to me. This whole business of choosing things is tricky too.

 ‘Not that. Leave me something,’ she says crossly, and I feel like a thief. Am I helping my mother or helping myself? Not sure. But I must take some of these things, they are part of my heritage, and hers. I hold in my hand a tiny chipped milk jug, a bit bigger than a bird’s egg, one of three sent as a wedding present in 1949, by her friend, Miss Mac(Donald) who she knew in Inverness during the war. This lady, who I imagine looking like Margaret Rutherford, was always called Miss Mac, as she was slightly older than my mother and her friends.

 Unfortunately Miss Mac didn’t pack the jugs well and they arrived smashed and broken. They were put in a cupboards with their cracks turned to the wall and naturally  my mother never told her friend about this.

 ‘She was a strong Macdonald,’ she says. ‘Would never speak to a Campbell.’

Her family once lived in a cottage right by the Culloden battlefield. After the battle one of her ancestors ‘baked a whole batch of meal’ for the escaping Highlanders. Another ancestor, the original 'whisky Mac' owned a still and once ran with a keg on his back for four days to escape the excise men. The cottage is now an information centre. I am probably the only person who hears Miss Mac’s stories now and I am obliged to take away these shards and chips of other people’s memories as well as my own.

There are also two pretty tea sets in the cupboard, which belonged to aunts. They’ve never been used since they came to us and I will never have room for everything so they’ll  have to go to strangers, although that seems so disloyal. Then there is something I  must have, a stout blue Delft vase with a silver screw top lid, given to my grandmother by the Dutch family who sheltered my father and other British soldiers in their house in Oosterbeek, after the Battle of Arnhem. They set up a field hospital in their cellar, and my father was among the men who tried to look after the wounded there, with hardly any medical supplies. They visited my grandmother in the 1960s and gave her the vase and a spoon, but I only heard about what happened to  my father when he was with them at his funeral. After he died we lost contact with the family.

‘Only the older generation were involved,’ says my mother, ‘the younger people wouldn’t be interested.’

It seems a pity that the contact was let slip as I often visit Holland, but it’s too late now, and I can’t even be sure of the correct spelling of their name. We move from china to cutlery. The drawers below  reveal treasures now almost as redundant as a quill pens; varnished oak canteens, lined with satin, holding  twelve fish eaters with bone handles. They used to dine large in those days, even in ordinary homes like ours. There are also six solid silver tea-spoons given as a wedding present. They are an exception as everything else is EPNS, silver plate, the ignominious metal of the lower middle classes. We have  boxes of shining knives with serrated edges, some of the blades turning blue from use and cleaning, by people long dead. There is also a box of beautiful round dessert spoons just right for eating tinned peaches at Christmas. ‘They all have to be cleaned,’ says my mother with mock horror.

We haven’t even got around to looking at her brass candlesticks yet. Who has time to spend tending silver plated sugar bowls and tongs, and who takes that much interest in sugar? Who wants to use delicate tea cups rather than mugs, or needs heavy glass ashtrays. Everything speaks of smart Sunday meals and distant dinner parties for large groups of relations in a much more elegant age, when even quite humble people demonstrated their respectability with what now seems extraordinary refinement.

While we are sorting through these things I have a slight but definite queasiness, a feeling of what is the point? My mother now has ovarian cancer, the same cancer which hit me in 2010, and we are probably both going to be dead soon. This greatly reduces the charm of any domestic objects. I try to squash it down as we move outside to her bin store and  hecatombs of terracotta pots, jam jars and a life time of flower vases and that green stuff that goes in the bottom of arrangements.

 I remember her skill at flower arranging, making any tatty bunch suddenly look good. There are also her hyacinth vases and bowls for planting bulbs in the dark in October, to bring out in full bloom near  Christmas. When I was a child all the mothers and grandmother I knew took part in this ritual. In the 1970s I tried to buy a hyacinth vase in Woolworths and was really shocked that the sales girl had never heard of them.

The family china which has passed through the hands of so many worthy women, is now parcelled up and stored in two large green bins. When I return this Christmas, if she is still alive, if I am, who knows, we’ll start on the photo albums with their tiny black and white snaps inside large black pages, the jewellery boxes containing garnet collar studs and cuff links and elaborate opal necklaces handed down by distant Edwardian aunts, the cookery books dating back to the 1940s, giving advice on cooking in an air-raid, and the pans, circa 1950, when things were still built to last.

My mother was built for long service too. I would like to take her a cup of tea in the mornings, but I cannot sleep well in the uncomfortable narrow bed in the hot room, so I fall asleep in the early hours and don’t wake up until nearly 8am. By then she is down in the kitchen making breakfast, always ahead of me.

On Sunday, the last day of my visit, I sit for awhile in the garden on the old rotting seat, thinking about my own forthcoming move out of London after living there for thirty five years. Rather than all these things from my mother’s house which I am taking with me, there are things about myself, pointless emotions, old patterns of thought and useless anxieties that I really want to leave behind.