Sifting through the past

So, I have a theory that most of you lovely, loyal people who regularly check in to read this blog do so chiefly to find out what novelty excuse I've come up with for not posting for ages. Usually they're a bit lame - obsessively writing/deleting, having an existential crisis, cat ate my laptop, that sort of thing. Today's excuse is a lot more original, but a little bit sadder too.

Two weeks ago my adored godmother died. She was 86, and wasn't ill exactly, but had been struggling since having a really nasty fall earlier in the summer. She was feisty and brave, but having fought hard to get back to normal after she came out of hospital, was getting tired and the fight was ebbing out of her. The last time I saw her she told me that she hadn't been sleeping well because, for the first time in ages, she was having vivid dreams. Nice ones? I asked. People who'd been dead for years, talking to her, she replied, shooting me a look. She died that night, just as she was getting into bed.

My brother and I had known her all our lives. She and her husband had lived next door to our parents when we were born, and they provided us with a sort of local grandparenting service, as our real relatives were spread out between Scotland and Dorset. They had no children of their own so it was an arrangement that suited everyone, and their house, with its china figurines and 1950s furniture, became part of the landscape of our childhood.

When we came to clear it out last week I wasn’t expecting any surprises. All was neat, orderly and familiar – except for the row of Walkers Crisp boxes (circa 1977) in the garage, which were neat and orderly but not familiar. We assumed they were full of rusty tools and old tins of paint and took them down to put in the skip (I didn’t do that bit, obviously – you should have seen the size of the spiders in there). We checked inside first, of course. Some of them were indeed full of rusty tools and old tins of paint, and the others certainly contained a lot of old tins which, when opened later at home, were found to contain letters, photographs, birthday cards from the 1930s, the crumbling and bleached remains of wedding corsages, diaries densely filled with scrawled writing, gramophone needles, ration books and war medals. 

So, that’s where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing – sifting through the past, and through the lives of people that are not even distantly related to me, and yet who I spookily now feel I know. Most of the stuff belongs to my godmother’s mother-in-law, who I distantly remember as a large and formidable old lady with swollen ankles whose visits meant we had to be quiet and unnaturally well-behaved (unnaturally for us, anyway). Now I have a different perspective of her as a woman called Sarah, who was unhappy in her marriage, whose week was ordered around the ordeal of wash-day and who never threw ANYTHING away. 

Everything was very jumbled up, with receipts for ‘Removing Goods’ (4ft walnut sideboard, jardinere (sic) stand, enamel hearth plate etc) mixed in with death certificates, insurance policies, property deeds and photographs. The things I have discovered include…

A complete archive of Sarah’s wedding paperwork from 1925, including receipts for the dress, flowers and rings, and the engagement ring itself...

The mementoes she kept of her brother who died in 1920 - photographs of him in uniform, a postcard showing a picture of a French bar, a silk handkerchief embroidered with '1919 Souvenir de France' in large letters, and - most poignantly of all - his memorial card. Inside she's written 'My brother Harry. Died of wounds.'

(I wonder if the jardiniere stand that cost 16/11 to move in 1926 is the one in the photograph beside Harry?)

The menu from the dining room of the White Star Line's MV Georgic, in 1932...

(Saute of Veal Belle Meuniere and Puree of turnips, anyone?)

And this rather good news/bad news postcard from the British Red Cross, dated 16th August 1940...

'Very many thanks for the bedsocks - we now require 30 000 day socks...'

(Poor Sarah.)

There's so much else too - ordinary items that somehow seem extraordinary because of the story they tell. The thing I'm going to miss most about my godmother is listening to her stories and raiding her storehouse of memories (as well as her biscuit tin, which was always stocked with the very best Foxes chocolate biscuits) to hear about the past. She couldn't have left me a more valuable legacy than those stories... except perhaps the possibility of new ones I discovered in the tins in the garage.