The Sweets on Grandma's Sideboard

Sideboard - it’s a funny old word, isn’t it? Hardly used these days.  Apparently, the definition of a sideboard is 'a flat-topped piece of furniture with cupboards and drawers, used for storing crockery, glasses, and table linen.'  Do people still have sideboards?  Or are they just cupboards with drawers these days? I wouldn’t know. I’m not well up with the world of modern furniture, and never have been.  

When I grew up in the fifties, sideboards were quite the thing.  I don’t think my parents or grandparents knew the true purpose of a sideboard.  We weren’t posh enough to have table linen - apart from the odd tablecloth, usually handed down from some Great Aunt, who had probably spent hours, under poor light, religiously embroidering the four corners, only for us kids to wipe our messy hands and faces across the delicate handiwork.  Most days we used raffia mats to protect the table. They were loosely woven and caught every last piece of spilt food. Squashed peas, grains of rice, custard, all nestled in the gaps - there was probably a whole meal in there somewhere. And, if not, some festering virus.

If I remember rightly, the sideboard in our house was a bit of a dumping ground. It did have a drawer with a miscellaneous collection of cutlery, and two more with random items such as sellotape, old birthday cards and pens that didn’t work.  But the top of the sideboard was the place where everything was abandoned.  Half eaten bars of chocolate, library books, crayons, odd dominoes, and any number of used cups and plates.  I don’t ever remember having a buffet spread out on the top, which, of course was the original purpose of the sideboard.  In those days a buffet was something you had at a wedding or a funeral and never in your own home. The nearest we came to it was a Jacob’s Join, but even that went straight to the table.

Christmas was the time the sideboard came into its own.  Each year we alternated between sets of grandparents, and I can remember the thrill at the first sight of the sideboard, laden with the sort of food any child of the ‘50s found magical: bowls of peanuts, tangerines and grapes, sweets in shiny wrappers, Liquorish Allsorts, Ritz crackers and, of course, the inevitable tin of Quality Street - which made secret eating a bit of a challenge: for most of my childhood the lid on the Quality Street was far too big for my little hands to open. 

Occasionally, I would go to stay with my maternal grandma, something I loved for three main  reasons: firstly, I got spoilt rotten; secondly she used to take me to jumble sales; thirdly she lived by a railway line, and I loved to lie in bed, listening to the trains rumbling by. Getting spoilt rotten was categorised by one thing in my young eyes.  The bowl of toffees that usually lived on the sideboard - and lasted for weeks - was ceremoniously placed in my lap as I sat and watched TV.  At the time, my pocket money was one old penny every other day - for sweets after school (four blackjacks/fruit salads or a sherbet dab if anybody’s interested), so to have a full bowl of toffees at my disposal was like a dream come true to my greedy little mind. Grandma went out to the kitchen to wash up and granddad disappeared into his shed.  I was left alone with the sweets.  I didn’t give a thought to making them last.  One after the other, I gobbled them down, leaving just a bowl full of wrappers.  In a panic, I put the bowl back on the sideboard, sat back down, and, as the door opened, pretended to be asleep.

My last encounter with a sideboard was about thirty five years ago, when we hadn’t long moved into our new house.  This house was twice the size of the old house with large rooms and high ceilings.  Our furniture looked lost.  One day I was doing the rounds of second hand furniture shops when I spotted the perfect piece.  It was huge, with a giant mirror, three drawers, two doors and lots of fancy wood carving.  I loved it.  I can’t remember now how much it was but I do remember wondering whether we could stretch to it.  Before telling the husband I decided to rope in an antique dealer friend to tell me whether it was worth it - or if I was being ripped off.  Martin arrived and promptly took me to one side to hiss that this was the bargain of the century, worth twice the price and to snap it up.  I bought the sideboard, Martin transported it in his van for me, we presented a united front to the husband who stood in the doorway looking bemused (his default expression whenever anything new appears at the door) and we installed it in its last resting place. 

So you see, from that day on, I’ve been a grown up with a sideboard.  It’s been a buffet area for thirty years of Christmas dinners, laden with mince pies, crackers and cheese, Christmas pudding and trifle.  It’s been a makeshift baby changing station when the grandchildren were tiny.  It’s been a display shelf for family photos, and now, finally, I’ve come of age and it’s become a dumping ground for dead candles, the plastic novelties out of crackers, old till receipts and children’s pictures that I can’t bear to throw away.  I daren’t even open the drawers, although I do know, in there somewhere amongst the playing cards, Mastermind and Monopoly, is a beautifully embroidered table cloth passed down from Great Aunt somebody, just crying out to be used.

Grandma’s sideboard by Jill Reidy

Amongst the bowls of fruit 

and photos of children 

Frozen in time

Is a small dish

Full to the brim 

Shiny Golden wrappers

reflecting orange light 

From the two barred fire

They wink at me, those toffees

Grandma bustles in

Picks up the bowl

Places it in my lap

and bustles out again

I hear her humming in the kitchen

As I take each toffee

Unwrap its golden casing 

And pop it in my mouth

Greedily chew and swallow

The humming stops

Silently I reach across 

And replace the bowl

There's a kind of sadness now

About those wrappers

The insides don’t glow

As the outsides did

I feel a little queasy

The door opens

I close my eyes and pretend to sleep

Thanks for reading........Jill