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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The Most Boring Place - Sunday Afternoon, Age 6

I’ve always got something to do or something to think about.  I like to be alone with my thoughts but equally, I like to enjoy good company. There have been things I’ve had to endure that could be called boring, or made me feel extremely fed up. These would be events out of my control, not going according to plan and causing frustration.

Flying back to the UK from the USA should have been an exciting adventure. It was winter time in the early ‘80s and I was fortunate enough to be waiting in the Club Class departure lounge at New York’s JFK airport.  I was travelling alone and on a registered stand-by ticket, happy to wait, sitting on a comfy armchair by the window, watching the snow. Flights came and went. Hours passed. I had everything I needed and felt looked after, but I was tired, jet lag without the jet. I didn’t want to fall asleep and miss a flight I could have taken, though I’m sure someone would come to get me. O’Hare International, Chicago, had redirected their UK flights to JFK due to heavy snow, so planes became full. By the time I was called, I was dead on my feet, but happy to get a place anywhere, on any plane that could fly me home. I had a seat in the centre block of a 747, next to a pleasant German gent who kept trying to make conversation with me. No common language between us, so we occasionally smiled at each other instead. He was going to Heathrow, then on to Frankfurt. He went to sleep. I’d finished my book, couldn’t get into the in-flight movie and probably slept a little, but I remember sitting there, annoyed with the drone of the engines and willing myself home – there was a long train journey to come next. I think I was more fed up than bored. Boring is what I’d call some winter Sunday afternoons of my childhood.

I was an only child until age seven and a half when my sister arrived, so I was used to being doted on by both sets of grandparents and any number of aunts and uncles. Nothing changed, my family was her family and she just slotted in and got passed around for a cuddle. Being a baby, she didn’t spoil whatever I was playing with. I was a well-behaved little treasure, most of the time. Our family ran pubs and in those days licensing hours meant that they were closed in the afternoons and for longer on Sundays. This was family time when we’d all get together for a meal. This is when it got boring. It started well, lots of fun and me being made a fuss of. We would all get round the table to eat, which was always good. At one set of grandparents, I would eat jelly and fruit with a small, shell-shaped spoon, sitting up straight on a high stool. At my other grandparents, homemade rice pudding which was deliciously creamy. Once, as the roast dinner was being served, I rudely remarked, “Oh no, not peas again!” I was swiftly removed by my mother, taken out of the room for a wallop on my bottom, left to cry for a bit then brought back in to apologise. I must have been having an ‘off’ day from my usual sweet little princess self. After dinner, everyone sat in the lounge and eventually fell asleep. I hated it. This was the most boring place in my world. My nanna would sit down, smoke a Park Drive, pick her knitting up and go at it frantically until she nodded off. My dad might go outside to check something on someone’s car first, but soon I would be in a room full of sleeping relatives. It seemed like ages, but probably wasn’t. I’d have a colouring book to do and one of my grandmothers didn’t mind if I turned the contents of her sideboard upside down. Sing Something Simple would come on the wireless which made it even more boring. If I hear Sing Something Simple nowadays, it fills me with happy memories of my idyllic childhood.

My poem:

Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding,
And why did we always have peas?
Apple pie or sometimes trifle,
Fond thoughts of childhood, fam’ly teas.

The nearly quiet afternoon
In the fading November light
Those all around me are sleeping
And they are such a boring sight.

Like book-ends, Nanna and Grandad,
Snooze cosily on the settee.
Grandad’s Brylcreem’d hair all messy,
Nan’s knitting slipped down on her knee.

Has my auntie just stopped breathing?
Uncle Bill has started snoring.
I’m looking for something to do.
Flipping Sundays are so boring!

Sing Something Simple has come on,
It’s time for us to go, hooray!
They’ll all wake up for opening time,
Running pubs is our family way.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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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        

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More precious than gold

This week we are looking at treasure, which, of course, means different things to different people. I have reached the conclusion that my memories are my greatest treasures, for they contain all the people and occasions that I hold dear in life.

 I’ve always been rubbish at photos. At every photo-worthy occasion I can be relied upon to forget my camera. Even when I’ve remembered to take it with me, I can easily leave it in the car, on the coach or just forget that it’s in my bag. With such a cavalier attitude to preserving noteworthy occasions for posterity, it is no surprise that my photo collection down the years is not a neat pile of albums, all thoughtfully populated with photos carefully annotated and in date order, so that some sense can be made of the decades they commemorate. No, it is an ungainly jumble of assorted packets and loose pictures, all rammed in a cupboard somewhere at my previous home and spilling out whenever the door is opened. This chaos is no doubt symptomatic of a disordered mind!

To me photographs are not the vital treasures that they are to many people. For some it feels almost like the occasion didn’t happen if there is no photographic evidence to prove that it did. I think there’s sometimes a tendency to use all one’s energy in getting the perfect shot and, in so doing, enjoyment of the moment itself can be lost. My treasures rely on memories of happy times, rather than the photographs produced for them. In recent times, I can think of a couple of brilliant occasions, for which the memories mean more to me than the commemorative photos.

My graduation day last year was one of the happiest of my life. I have a professional set of photos of me and my family, posed and somehow static and lifeless, which is rammed in a cupboard etc. It in no way reflects my memories of that day, which are of me and my family, sitting for hours in the glorious sunshine outside the No. 5 café after the ceremony, chatting and downing unseemly numbers of bottles of Prosecco. All around us were my college friends with their families doing the same, all united in pride at our achievement and relief that it was all over, getting gently sozzled in the warmth of a July afternoon.

Another occasion was Blackpool FC’s highly memorable promotion to the premier league. I have the programme to remind me, copies of all the press clippings of the event, the commemorative issues of newspapers, the match ticket stubs. None of them are necessary to enable me to conjure up at will the memories of a glorious sunny day, when the world turned tangerine; every service station on the long journey to Wembley thronged by singing, happy Blackpool supporters and neutrals wishing us well; milling around the ground in apprehensive anticipation and bumping into every Blackpool fan you’ve ever known; the breathtaking first sight of our end inside the ground, a sea of tangerine semi-hysteria; the noise and the heat of the remorseless sun; the match, the growing incredulity that we were going to win; the final whistle, the disbelief; the surprisingly muted atmosphere as we all trouped out of the stadium; the daunting realisation that we would actually have to play in the premier league!

Memories – more precious than gold, rammed in the cupboard of my mind. Hope they never spill out.

To finish, here are a couple of quotations about treasures that I enjoyed reading.

“Nothing in the tangible word that isn't living has any value beyond a dollar amount. Considering that dollars can only buy more tangible and inanimate objects, it would seem a far more worthwhile goal to instead learn to place value on the treasures of the mind. Memories, knowledge and skill together are the only things we will ever actually own.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.”
― Oscar Wilde

Thank you for reading,

Sheilagh

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Something helpless

Guest post by David Riley.

I know some who write humorous poetry. Good humorous poetry but only humorous poetry. 

Why? 

Some of these people also don’t read other poets. They give their reasons but what do we think? Are they frightened of what might happen if they try other sorts of poetry? Is it fear - that they won’t be able to do it? Find they have nothing to say? It can’t be because other poets have said more profound things than them - how would they know? They don’t read other poets. Is it that humour is enough, in their eyes, a security blanket that keeps them away from the challenge, keeps them safe?

Does thinking frighten them? A fear that they won’t be up to the task? I’d advise everyone to follow Rilke. Confront those fears.  Try out different styles of poetry and see what your fears are guarding. If that old so and so is right, it’s your most treasured possessions. 

Go on, dig them out. Be a poet.  Don’t just say you are.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet 

Portrait of Rilke by Leonid Pasternak

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