Rocking Chair

Call me a softy if you like, ‘The Woman in Black’ is the scariest film I’ve ever tried to watch. I’ve had a few attempts. One was at the cinema with my daughter. I think she begged me to take her, only to discover how fearful it is.

 “Tell me when it’s gone,” she whispered.

“I can’t, I’m not looking.” I had no idea what ‘it’ was.

There’s a particularly creepy scene concerning a room full of clockwork monkeys playing musical instruments and an empty rocking chair, rocking. Too spooky and reminds me of something chilling my son said when he was little.

I have my grandfather’s rocking chair, I’ve probably mentioned it before because it is special item and means a lot to me. I remember him with fondness, gently rocking as he read the paper or his book, often sharing an orange with me when I was a child. After he died, the chair was untouched in the house he’d shared with my aunt since he was widowed. My sister had children before me and I think our aunt gave her the rocking chair to nurse her first baby. When I bought my house, the chair came to me and for a while, it was the only furniture I had to sit on. It moved with me when I got married and had a special place in the back room. I don’t know if our son, a young child at the time, was teasing when he told me that he’d seen the rocking chair rocking on its own. The thought of it gave me shivers. I felt sure I would be aware if there was anything odd. Over the years, the chair began to look tatty. Covering it with a throw and a cushion wasn’t enough. I had it repaired and recovered, and moved it into my bedroom.

As for ‘The Woman in Black’, I’m told by a friend that the stage play is more scary than the film. I can’t imagine that, but I’ll accept the opinion without the need to see for myself.

Robert Service had the right idea,

My Rocking-chair

When I am old and worse for wear
I want to buy a rocking-chair,
And set it on a porch where shine
The stars of morning-glory vine;
With just beyond, a gleam of grass,
A shady street where people pass;
And some who come with time to spare,
To yarn beside my rocking-chair.
Then I will light my corn-cob pipe
And dose and dream and rarely gripe.
My morning paper on my knee
I won't allow to worry me.
For if I know the latest news
Is bad,-to read it I'll refuse,
Since I have always tried to see
The side of life that clicks with glee.

And looking back with days nigh done,
I feel I've had a heap of fun.
Of course I guess that more or less
It's you yourself make happiness
And if your needs are small and few,
Like me you may be happy too:
And end up with a hope, a prayer,
A chuckle in a rocking-chair.

Robert Service

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Miniature - Small and Perfectly Formed

I’ve been fascinated by my friend’s collection of dolls houses since I first saw them a few years ago. They take up the longest wall in one of her upstairs rooms. I think there are six of them, various sizes, set out on a deep shelf with drawers beneath. The drawers hold all the tiny bits and pieces not in use and items to make things or decorate with. Some of the houses have beautifully made gardens. There is a kitchen garden with vegetables growing perfectly. The inside of the houses are set out and decorated according to the time of year. It was summer one year when I was calling in to water plants and keep an eye on things while my friend was on holiday. The miniature street looked warm and sunny with open windows and a picnic on one of the lawns. I’ve seen it all decked out for Christmas, complete with tiny coloured lights and the whole thing looking splendid. It is a fabulous hobby and I used to fancy getting an Edwardian townhouse and setting it up in ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ style, or making an old-fashioned pub with a nod to my background.

The area I was keeping free for such a project became the ideal place to house the gerbils. We had two in an open fish tank filled with wood chippings, fluffy animal stuff like cotton wool and usually an empty loo roll or kitchen roll to play with. They liked running through them as if they were tunnels. When fed up with them, they ripped them into strips and added them to their nest. My children were still at primary school. The cats had gone to cat heaven, as had a couple of hamsters and we hadn’t yet introduced a family dog.

By the time the gerbils expired, so had some of my eyesight and twiddling with miniature furniture and tiny household items was beyond me. I was and still am interested in my friend’s hobby and I find pieces to gift her. One of the many Christmas trees is a present from me and we found some cakes and bakery things in a specialist shop while on one of our jaunts.

A special gift from my friend to me is something I will always treasure. She turned an ordinary shoebox into a miniature living room for me, putting in my favourite things, even a photo of my husband and I hanging on the wall. I was speechless at the time and I still love it as much as I did then. It is me. I think the knitting has fallen off the chair a few times over the years, but it’s fine, and the DVDs, CDs and books, she knows me so well.

Jane Eyre. Good choice. It would be that or Wuthering Heights, or Rebecca, but I’m glad she chose a Bronte for me. I’ve loved all of their books and I’ve been fortunate to enjoy many visits to Haworth Parsonage. One visit was in the summer of 2005. It was 150 years since Charlotte’s death and a special exhibition displayed some of her clothing and personal belongings. At only 4’6” tall and slim, she was very petite. Her outfits were almost miniature versions of her sisters’ attire. Her boots and bonnets, like those of a child’s. Luckily for me, the hand-written miniature books, at least some of them, were on show.

When the Brontes were children, their father, Rev. Patrick Bronte, gave them a box of wooden toy soldiers. Each child chose their own soldier, gave them names and made them into characters for what became the stories of Glasstown. The children branched out, Charlotte and Branwell wrote about Angria, and Emily and Anne wrote about Gondal. They wrote their stories in tiny script using fine nibs and magnifying glasses then made them into little books for the toy soldiers to hold. Not all have survived, but I’m glad for what has been saved.

I need another visit, when we can.

My poem,

Perched on the chilly window seat
She looked down, watching the mourners
Moving slowly with the coffin,
Listening to the solemn drum beat
For the second time that morning.
Squinting through the grey, wint'ry mist
Beyond the gravestones to the church
Her whispered prayer clouded the glass
And she drew a 'C' in her breath,
Just as Branwell beckoned her down
To write Angria's next chapter
For their soldier's miniature book.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading, stay safe, Pam x

Read More

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 

 

 

Read More

Sideboards - Thanks for the Memory

 

I wonder what happened to all the sideboards, those massive pieces of highly polished furniture that half-filled most dining rooms. Someone is going to tell me that they exist, in everyone’s home except mine. I won’t be surprised.  I’ve got what is loosely called a ‘unit’, sort of cross between a sideboard and a display cabinet, with a pull-down drinks bit – used by me as a sewing cupboard – in the middle. It is a much-loved wedding present. Actually, I've got two now, there's posh.

Thinking of the blog theme being sideboards has put me in mind of the ones I grew up with. My childhood homes were pubs and the private accommodation was usually spacious, offering plenty of room for a sideboard, and a piano, even. My mother was in charge of our sideboard. I had many warnings to keep out, nothing in there for me. It must have been jam-packed with family secrets and skeletons in the cupboard to need such fierce protection. I was allowed one thing, with permission, which was an old chocolate box full of black and white photos from when my mother was a girl. I would spend hours looking through them. I still have the collection, mounted in an album now and I really wish I’d kept them in the old, tatty box. It was part of the magic. Someone gave my mother a small packet of Thornton’s chocolates and she kept them in the top drawer.  Over time, one by one they disappeared. I learnt the hard way that there are only so many times you can get away with ‘they won’t miss just one’. Oh, how I’ve missed my mum for most of my life. I'd replace every chocolate ten-fold if it were possible for her to nip back for five minutes.

Sometime in the ‘60s we had the novelty of a house. The new furniture included a teak dining table, chairs and matching sideboard. The sideboard filled the length of our dining room and had thin, spindly legs. Cupboard and drawer handles were made of wood, chunky and round, unlike the dangly brass loops on the other one. We kept the new table mats and the best cutlery in the drawers.

My grandmother’s sideboard was huge. I don’t know how old I was before I could see the top of it. I remember that it filled the end of her lounge. It had three cupboards in a row, three drawers, one above each cupboard and legs that I referred to as curly in shape. The most important thing to me was that I was allowed to rummage in it to my heart’s content, as long as I didn’t make too much mess and I put everything back. And I mustn’t touch Nanna’s knitting.  There wasn’t much to play with, but I enjoyed tidying everything up. Some items came to be mine over time. I still have a set of electro-plated nickel silver fish eaters with matching servers and a set of cake forks. On top of the sideboard used to stand a couple of bookends with a matching vase. I don’t know what happened to the vase, but I treasure the Bosson’s bookends, despite their theme of Hunting Scene.

Here are a few memories as Haikus,

Like a lifelong friend

Silently storing secrets

Behind locked cupboards.

 

Dark and imposing

Child-size fingers folded round

Your barley-twist legs.

 

A framed photogragh,

The once-happy bride and groom.

A short-lived marriage.

 

A sideboard cupboard,

Whiskey, brandy, Bacardi,

Cinzano and gin.

 

Flowers, past their best

Not quite ready to throw out,

Last week’s thoughtful gift.

 

I hate the subject,

Bosson’s ‘Hunting Scene’ bookends

Are cherished by me.

 

Fleeting memories

Of a lifetime of sideboards,

Bygone furniture.

Thanks for reading, keep safe and well, Pam x

                                                                                                

Read More

Upheaval - Moving House

My father’s job meant that we moved house a lot in my younger days. Sometimes, to me, it seemed like we had just got settled and we were off again. This transient lifestyle took us from pub to pub, or pub / restaurant or residential hotel and on one rare occasion to our own private house when he worked for Scottish & Newcastle looking after several premises. I can’t remember the layout of our living accommodation everywhere, I only remember the adventures of exploring our new home and whether or not I had to share a bedroom with my younger sister. Some places were vast, others were pokey and hotels usually meant no kitchen to call our own and bedrooms down a faraway corridor with views out on to a scruffy yard or a brick wall. Sometimes we didn’t need our own furniture and kitchen things. It would all be stored away in a spare room, ready packed for the next move. More than always being ‘the new girl’ at school, making new friends and meeting new staff, my ever lasting memory is the upheaval of  relocating.

In later years, I loved the independence of buying my own house, just mine. It was compact, tiny, even, and not perhaps in a favoured area, but it was my home and I loved it. How I managed to collect so many belongings and squeeze them in to my two-up-two-down, I can’t imagine now, but when my husband and I were planning our wedding and starting to move my things into our house, what an upheaval that was. I declared then that I was never going to move again, ever. Up to now, we haven’t, but if someone handed us the keys to a delightful bungalow in Kirkcudbright, I would cope.

Recently, my father-in-law moved into permanent residential care. Our family have been busy emptying his house of a lifetime of stuff which he doesn’t need anymore. In a way it seems wrong to be sorting out his belongings and making decisions on his behalf, but it’s the way it has to be and it’s a job which is certainly better to be done by his family rather than a house-clearance firm.

Again, it’s an upheaval but it will soon be done and in all the sorting out, there was family treasure to be found. An anthology of children’s poetry which includes a poem by his late grandson, David, aged eleven.

 

     Split Worlds

Eyes large with colours of the town.

Looking up, looking down.

Arm trying to grab a drink.

Fist ready to punch, angry. 

Body in purple.

Body in orange.

Split personality.

Red city, yellow lights.

In the blackness of the sky.

Confusion like the litter.

The world is drunk inside. 

I drink some more.

I have a fag and drop to the floor. 

David Winning (1982 – 2009)

 

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x        

Read More