I was cleaning out an exterior cupboard in our back porch the other day and, in a dufflebag hanging on a nail, I found this receipt from 1982, revealing the fate of various familiar household items - most of which I had grown up with.
The tea set and the cruets could well have belonged to my grandparents, recently inherited by us upon their deaths, because I'm not quite sure which ones they were. The mirror, sewing machine, table and log box, however, had all accompanied me in my journey through childhood and my teenage years, right up into adulthood, and are still sorely missed by me. I have photos of them somewhere and shall dig them out at some point and add them to this post. (The table and log box, though, have popped up in previous posts on this blog.)
However, it's strange to be able to put an exact date to their departure after all these years. And the £40 my parents were paid for the items is nothing short of robbery, even for 1982. I sometimes wonder where they are now. Did someone eventually buy them from the robber - oops, I mean dealer - in a single acquisition, or were they subsequently bought separately and now residing in different homes all across the country? I don't suppose I'll ever find out, but, if I could, I'd buy them all back again.
The survival of the receipt is surprising. The fact that it must have come with us when we moved away in 1983, then back to this house when we returned in 1987, boggles my imagination. Lying in a Duffel Bag for 30-odd years, waiting to fulfill its destiny of revealing to me the exact date when fondly cherished items from yesteryear were untimely ripped (at poor recompense) from my company.
That means, of course, that they've been absent from my life far longer than they were ever a part of it. Only in the physical sense though, because, truth to tell, they're never far from my thoughts and sometimes, for brief periods, I forget that they no longer inhabit my home, and aren't more than just an arm's reach or a room away.
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"Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays
of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart."
Washington Irving.
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I should add, in the interests of historical accuracy, that the log box may not have been the large one I'm thinking of, but rather a smaller one we 'inherited' from my grandparents when they moved into an old folks' home at the end of the 1970s. The larger one may have been dispensed with at the beginning of '81 when I was staying down in Southsea for a few months. Age, alas, prevents me from recalling exactly which one it was with my customary precision. However, the smaller box was also a feature of my childhood, as it was from this that my brother and myself were each given two bars of chocolate on our weekly Sunday visits to my grandparents.
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