As most of you will know, clearing your home is a sobering task. I have been putting it off for months but, with a potential buyer in sight, I must empty the filing cabinets and photo drawers of 22 years and unroll the black bin bags. Easier said than done. They say “nostalgia never goes out of style”. The word comes from the Greek word for return, nostos, and algos, meaning suffering. So, nostalgia is “an unappeased yearning to return”.
Do I want to return to those 1996 tax documents and those pages of figures from the Woolwich building society? Am I not happier to kvell over my grandchildren now, rather than look at endless beaches and birthday cakes from the birthday parties of their parents?
Either way, the process of dividing the contents of one cabinet into one pile for shredding and one for retaining took several hours and left me gazing into space worrying about the vanished whereabouts of those precious years. Why is it always Friday night and always ruddy Christmas? How can my best friends be 80 years old? Eighty… Why have my added wrinkles not added any wisdom? Above all, why did I not realise that I was a pretty girl not a plain one? And would the knowledge that just because my mother was better looking than I was mean I wouldn’t have to work quite so hard at being Miss Congeniality?
Then there arose the question of the silverware. Oh Lord, have I got silverware. Teapots with wobbly lids, coffee pots with blackened lids, sugar tongs, milk jugs, goblets – did our mothers had to have them on display otherwise their circle of friends might think they were not making a living? Fish knives in dozens, dessert spoons, serving spoons – I must add before you tip off the burglars, because who knows how many burglars read the Jewish Chronicle, my inherited collection of silver is not actually silver but the more durable and less saleable E.P.N.S. or electro-plated nickel silver.
It sits with the elegant but incomplete, fine bone China tea set, which my father bought from a tattooed seaman in need of hard cash outside his Monument Bridge outfitters in Hull. Who would want such things if I advertised them on Vinted?
Then there are Jack’s, my late husband’s rhinoceroses. Sigh… He loved the Dürer “imagined” sketch of the species, so we bought him a bronze resin rhino for his birthday, which he loved. He didn’t love it quite as much when a constant flow of rhinos flooded into his next 15 birthdays and celebrations. I have lined them up in the lounge. Green glass rhino next to ceramic rhino, soapstone rhino, silver rhino, ebony rhino… I quietly play with them, moving them into family groups and giving them voices… “she’s gonna destroy us you know… we need a Rhin’union mate, you’ll see… maybe a meeting with the tortoise famiglia?” Oh yes, Jack loved and collected tortoises of all types too, including our real one, Zuckerman.
Then there is Guido’s elephant collection. Sigh… Guido made a bucket list of countries to visit on his retirement and he doggedly visited every one, save Papua New Guinea and Belize, including Mongolia, Ethiopia and the Antarctic. His favourite was a trip to see elephants in Botswana where he spent hours gazing at and interacting with the noble beasts. Thereafter he became a collector, by proxy, as he got showered with myriad pachyderms of all type and texture.
His graveside contains a dozen or more and the rest are on my shelves, snuggled up with the rhinos. There is the collaged one I did during my paper and glue phase – (there is a four foot by five brightly collaged mirror over the fireplace that will be shortly looking for a home) – and the pewter one in mid charge and the alabaster and the carved Burmese wood – look, I could go on and your editor would yawn and cut, but you get the anthropomorphism of the flat as it stands, and what’s to be done and I haven’t even mentioned the life-sized stuffed tiger and the furry sloth collection. Sigh.
My husband of four and a half months is no minimalist. We live in Tchotchke Close. There is not a surface which is not rendered unusable because of its mega display of framed photos, painted vases and ceramic bowls. Few of them are mine. I came to the marital home bearing my clothes, my make-up and a tagine. Oh, and Jack’s bronzes. Home-crafted, clay-cast bronzes of Bobby Charlton, Don Bradman, Eric Cantona and Ryan Giggs (or Giggsy as he was known around the house). Should anybody wish to have a replica – I still have the large casting moulds and what the hell I’m going to do with those is anybody’s mess.
Which brings me to Zelma, my late lamented mother and muse. The fur jackets that played such an important part in her social life. One was the blonde mink and the other the dark brown version. I think I axed the stole. Still, 21 years after she died they sit in my wardrobe waiting to be exonerated from blame culture. They are sooo warm and cosy, but equally sooo inappropriate and therefore useless. Friends say, “If you’re worried about people throwing free range eggs at you, why don’t you have them made into a lining for your raincoats and the only answer to that is that I’m already a middle-aged size 14. The addition of a mink lining would turn me into one of the puppets from Avenue Q.
I sit there daydreaming. It was 2004, and the production team had come around to my Muswell Hill kitchen to research my family for the first series of Who Do You Think You Are. I knew nothing about our family background, as it was never discussed. Neither was the Holocaust. The team suggested I called my mother, then a fit, feisty and meticulously tidy 80-year old in Hull. “Background?” she cried, “Us? No one ever talked about background. I’ve got no idea.”
“Would your Auntie Mary know?” I asked her.
Her response was perfect: “She’s in LEEDS!”
I sighed, “That’s OK. I’m sure she has a phone. Give me her number.” She did, I wrote it down.
“What about your Uncle Victor?” I asked. “He’s in GRIMSBY!”
But she gave the number. Thence followed cousin Malcolm in Hendon, cousin Arnold in Toronto, cousin Stanley in Hull etc, and we said goodbye. The team went home and decided David Baddiel’s story was better. I never heard from them again. The following morning, however, in her smartest suit with a hat, court shoes, gloves, patent leather handbag, in the lobby of the flats she loved and on her way to shul, she had a massive heart attack and died. A righteous Shabbos death if ever there was one. Great for Zelma, not so good for the rest of us.
In front of me, at least, I had every number in the family to call with the sad news. Her final tidy. As that erudite scholar “Unknown” would have it, “the tears of yesterday are the smiles of today”.
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