After my mother died and Stephen (my husband) almost went as well, my brother and I briefly made friends. It was the bare shock of it all that enabled this revised friendship, and it didn’t last for long. Long enough to be sorting our mother’s possessions and dividing what was going where and to whom. Long enough for him to persuade me to let him take care of the most valuable and special possessions, that I would never see again. There were so many things in my mother’s house, it wasn’t untidy, in fact quite the opposite really, but it was stuffed with treasures and objects overflowing with memories that were hard to dispose of.
One of my mother, Jenny’s most prized possessions was a cabinet of curiosities, a cabinet of small and miniature things that acted as an aide memoire to the special or unusual moments in her life. It was an odd box and some of the contents were unexpected. Most remarkable perhaps were a few things that were totally fabricated, fictional I mean like a hand-written letter from a Mr Chou in Hong Kong chanting sweet nothings in red pen on cream laid writing paper. It was short and obviously made up as it was in her handwriting. Other notable things were: some massive teeth – presumably belonging to my brothers and I; a girl guides badge from the 1950s in blue enamel; a basket made out of a walnut shell; a wine label from an expensive bottle of wine with a note written on the back of it saying that my brother could not believe that they had drunk it and a miniature book no more than 3 cm high, with a handwritten story inside it, authored by my mother and charting the history of her neice’s life, written before she had had a life.
Compelling as these objects were, the most interesting thing was that each object had been numbered with a small circular sticky label 1 – 100. Some of the labels had dropped off but some remained and on the back of the cabinet attached with off white garden string was a small book. The cover of this book had been made out of brown labels and inside the light-weight creamy coloured paper had been properly bound and stitched and each page was written on in black ink. Jenny’s writing was distinct, she had been a graphic designer specialising in typography and her writing style reflected this. Strong and spiky the ends of each letter pierced the pages of this intriguing dictionary telling short details about each object. Also on the back of the cabinet was a short note saying that the cabinet was to go to her niece.
Jenny had a thing that she did each time any of us left her house: she would run out after the car, letting you feel that you had forgotten something, you would wind down the window and she would reach in and touch you then run back to the house shouting “last touch”.
3 months after she died a professionally made garden bench arrived on my doorstep accompanied by a letter written on beautifully laid cream paper in an envelope lined with brown tissue – inside it simply said:
After my mother died and Stephen (my husband) almost went as well, my brother and I briefly made friends. It was the bare shock of it all that enabled this revised friendship, and it didn’t last for long. Long enough to be sorting our mother’s possessions and dividing what was going where and to whom. Long enough for him to persuade me to let him take care of the most valuable and special possessions, that I would never see again. There were so many things in my mother’s house, it wasn’t untidy, in fact quite the opposite really, but it was stuffed with treasures and objects overflowing with memories that were hard to dispose of.
One of my mother, Jenny’s most prized possessions was a cabinet of curiosities, a cabinet of small and miniature things that acted as an aide memoire to the special or unusual moments in her life. It was an odd box and some of the contents were unexpected. Most remarkable perhaps were a few things that were totally fabricated, fictional I mean like a hand-written letter from a Mr Chou in Hong Kong chanting sweet nothings in red pen on cream laid writing paper. It was short and obviously made up as it was in her handwriting. Other notable things were: some massive teeth – presumably belonging to my brothers and I; a girl guides badge from the 1950s in blue enamel; a basket made out of a walnut shell; a wine label from an expensive bottle of wine with a note written on the back of it saying that my brother could not believe that they had drunk it and a miniature book no more than 3 cm high, with a handwritten story inside it, authored by my mother and charting the history of her neice’s life, written before she had had a life.
Compelling as these objects were, the most interesting thing was that each object had been numbered with a small circular sticky label 1 – 100. Some of the labels had dropped off but some remained and on the back of the cabinet attached with off white garden string was a small book. The cover of this book had been made out of brown labels and inside the light-weight creamy coloured paper had been properly bound and stitched and each page was written on in black ink. Jenny’s writing was distinct, she had been a graphic designer specialising in typography and her writing style reflected this. Strong and spiky the ends of each letter pierced the pages of this intriguing dictionary telling short details about each object. Also on the back of the cabinet was a short note saying that the cabinet was to go to her niece.
Jenny had a thing that she did each time any of us left her house: she would run out after the car, letting you feel that you had forgotten something, you would wind down the window and she would reach in and touch you then run back to the house shouting “last touch”.
3 months after she died a professionally made garden bench arrived on my doorstep accompanied by a letter written on beautifully laid cream paper in an envelope lined with brown tissue – inside it simply said:
