Tea Sets - Celebration Cuppa

 
Aunt Tillie’s Silver Tea Set

“Take it,” Aunt Tillie insisted.
We sat side by side, our bare legs
Sticking to her plastic-wrapped couch
In that hot apartment on 34th Street.

“An heirloom,” Aunt Tillie said,
Showing the ornate tray in our laps.
“To pass down to your children.”

Who had absolutely no interest
Forty years later, to waste even
A minute with a polishing cloth.

So Aunt Tillie’s silver tea set
Goes to Goodwill
Along with my vintage china.

Aunt Tillie had been so sure
Generations would treasure
The chance to entertain in elegance.

But she spent her life, like I did,
Accumulating things that would one day
Be dumped for a tax donation.

Unloading my car, I see I am not alone.
So many others my age, discarding
Knickknacks we once though we needed
But now wish to unstick from our skin
Like the plastic on Aunt Tillie’s couch.

                                                   Jacqueline Jules

Jacqueline Jules is a poet and writer of children’s books. She lives in Long Island, USA. When I read this poem and realised that was exactly ‘it’, I felt relieved that I’m not alone and I need not feel guilty for doing a similar thing.

We had to pack things away to make space for our damp course to be replaced. This task also became a down-sizing project ready for that move we keep talking about. Emptying a display unit and a cupboard, I made the decision that the tea sets had to go. By tea sets, I mean family heirlooms and not items we had acquired for ourselves. A china tea set, painted gold, made up of cups, saucers, small plates and a sandwich or cake plate, with a milk jug and sugar basin, was a gift from the family to my maternal grandparents for their golden wedding anniversary in 1972. I remember the party and buffet taking place in their pub and I always thought I remembered my mother being there, but she had passed three years earlier. She must have been there in spirit. We had toasted the ‘bride and groom’ by drinking tea from the gold cups, some of us, anyway, and congratulating them on reaching fifty golden years of marriage. Or fifty golden years of constant bickering, but that’s another story.

The other tea set, also china, ivory coloured with tiny gold detail, belonged to my maternal great-grandmother. I don’t think it marked an occasion, it was hers and the two sets were kept together after they were passed down to me and my sister. I don’t know who had them first, they’ve been backwards and forwards, more recently ending up with me and nicely displayed in a glass cabinet. Until the great clearance.

My sister was quite sure she didn’t want them back and I could do what was best for me. Looking on Ebay and other online sites, I learnt that we weren’t dealing with treasure here. I would have to donate them to a charity shop where they would sit with other rejected heirloom tea sets for years. It was a very sad thought, but with the date for the start of the damp proofing looming up, there wasn’t much time for sentiment and the tea sets were bubble-wrapped and packed into boxes.

During this time, I had a welcome visit from a close friend of many years. We were overdue a catch up and a good gossip, which we did before moving into recent things like the state of our poorly house, the cost of the remedial work and being ruthless in getting rid of things. Someone in her family was about to have the share of a charity shop for a week, so she gladly took a box of DVDs and some clothes. When the tea sets were mentioned, it was music to my ears to learn that her sister did afternoon teas and might be able to use them, she would ask.

A few weeks later, on the other side of one of our trips away, I was happy to wash and re-pack the heirloom tea sets and send them to their new home where they might be used. Thank you so much, you know who you are.

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Harlequin - A Knitted Memory

From Wikipedia – ‘The oldest versions of the word harlequin – the Middle Dutch hellekijn and the Old French hellequin, reference hell and a mean kind of demon. In the translation from French to English, the harlequin lost his demonic quality and became a clown.’

My maternal grandmother was college educated, bright and well-informed. I would doubt that she was aware of the above, but I would love it if she had been when she knitted my grandfather a slip-over in the harlequin pattern. The subtle sentiment would have suited her. She was an exemplary knitter. The colour changes of grey, bottle green, navy and maroon were perfectly matched and blended, the end result better than any shop-bought machine-made knitwear. My grandfather wore it nearly every day.

By the time I was on the scene and taking notice, Nanna had worked as a secretary, left to marry Grandad and raised a family. By now they were running a pub and later helping my aunt to run hers. They bickered constantly, only being polite to each other when they were downstairs in the bar. There was never an obvious cause for a fall-out, not to me anyway. They had an active social life as a couple, they went away on holiday or on trips and the usual things that people do. They took me to Butlin’s a few times when I was a child, often with my aunt’s extended family from Ireland. We were a close family. I remember Nanna having the upper hand and Grandad conceding in their everyday spats.

When I was older, I learnt from my aunt that Grandad had given Nanna the run around on more than one occasion during their marriage and she held him on all sorts of ultimatums. They were married for fifty-three years. Up to now, I have been unable to prove any of the misdemeanours. Everyone has passed away, so no one to ask and only me who is interested enough to have another search occasionally. Truth or fiction, it hardly matters really.

What does matter is that I adored them and I knew they loved me, and of course, my sister, too. Nanna taught me to knit, something I do all the time. I mastered crochet after she’d died, though could never do it when she tried to teach me, with more patience than she ever had for anyone else. I’ve tried harlequin pattern and I can do it, but it’s fiddly, time consuming and better off left with the lady who turned it into a work of art.

Nanna was a strong minded woman, northern grit.  She’d survived two world wars, an errant husband, the death of a three year old daughter and the death of a thirty-five year old daughter (my mum) and somehow kept going. I’ve said many times that I wish I had a fraction of her strength, and that of my great grandmother.

I have my grandfather’s rocking chair. It’s a shame that I don’t have his slip-over.

My Haiku poem,

Grandad’s rocking chair
Now lives upstairs in our house
Recovered to match,

But not re-varnished,
So my hands rest on the arms
Same as his once did,

While he read his book
Or scanned the morning paper,
Keeping to himself.

My nanna was cross,
I’d heard her berating him.
It was just their way.

I’m sure she still cared.
She knitted his slip-over
And kept tabs on him.

She kept her tongue sharp
Behind Golden Wedding smiles.
Hiding the heartbreak.

PMW 2022

(As I typed the year, I realised it is 100 years since they got married, bless them.)

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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