Souvenirs and trinkets are to be celebrated as tickets to the past. But please, say ‘no’ to bald teddy bears
I had an aunt who never married or had children. There were suitors. Tennis partners that had been around for decades. They would often be at her house when we visited, dashing, and with stories from how they had met during the Second World War. But there were parts of her interior life that nobody was allowed access to. Even my dad, her brother, was always annoyingly ill-informed. But then he wouldn’t have made it on to a list of life’s big sharers.
Myrtle worked in the media. Her job was sending stories by telex, a skill – speedily and accurately dispatching information – that she had learned while working for the Royal Air Force during the war. I always liked being around her. She did her own thing. And one of these things was travel.
While my parents were securing the use of a caravan in Wales or perhaps – hold on to your hats – a cottage in Cornwall, Myrtle was heading to the airport. India, Canada, South Africa; off she would go. And I cheered her on because, as a young boy, I knew that she would bring me a souvenir from her travels. From Canada – I guess I was about eight – she gifted me a piece of varnished bark from a pine tree that had two plastic bears glued to its surface. A vignette from the wilds and clearly the best thing in the world when you’re eight. From India there was a snake charmer’s flute made from reeds and a dried gourd, a carved wooden elephant and a fan made out of peacock feathers (divine but not something that any young lad could use in public).
Myrtle purchased fancier things for herself that would find a place on her sideboard or bookshelves. And there they still were when I was a man, her gentleman callers long gone, and she was sliding into dementia. When the time came to clear her house, I kept her photo albums, filled with pictures from her travels in the late 1940s and 1950s. And I kept some of the souvenirs that had been sitting in the same spots for years. Items that, to the end, I hope, offered her a way to go back to a place and time that had long since receded over the horizon. I now have the white alabaster Shiva from India, a stone mountain goat from Canada, a woven bowl from South Africa. And while my gourd cracked long ago, so to speak, I still have the elephant and a tiny wooden giraffe.
The meander down memory lane this week has been in part promoted by another round of letting go. Neither me nor the other half have any parents left, both had child-free aunts who died (old age, not poisoned for the inheritance) and we’re both prone to sentimentality, so our garage is rammed with boxes containing things that nobody needs but which are hard to throw away. Stuff that just lingers. But this time we’re going for it. This week his aunt’s childhood teddy – bald, blind and with stuffing exiting the seams – has been given away for free to a woman who says that she offers bears a second chance at life. An ornamental decoy swan that belonged to my mother has also flown off to a new home after 16 years in a box. Ebay, Freegle, we’re on it. But those souvenirs from the 1970s and 1980s are going nowhere.
Last week I wrote about my visit to the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, about this place that houses a church, synagogue and mosque, and about its spiritual potency. I left out the bit where I went wild in the gift shop that’s run by the design company Fount. It has lots of nice things made in the UAE, including a series of simple wooden animals. I bought the oryx, which is now standing majestically on the kitchen table but might have to bunk up with the elephant in the coming days.
I know that it really makes no sense, forcing a swan and a bald bear to move out one minute, then guiding an antelope into the house the next. But I blame Myrtle. The souvenir is much maligned but, like her, I see in them a way of reaching back to a place and a moment. And perhaps, in my dotage, a way of looking up at a shelf and connecting to a different time.
