Some years ago, I put together The Letters from Mexico, a sequence of sonnets telling the story of the love affair between a Victorian governess, Claire Daffard, and her married employer, Sir William Henreysen of Acombe House. In one of the sonnets, Claire is using the family collection of foreign curiosities as part of her pupils' education but, as you can see, her mind is not only on her work.
I use the wunderkabinett to teach your sons The variety and strangeness of the world. The egg, the skull, the shell, the knife, the ring, Tiny embroidered shoes, the broken stone Bottle-trapped on a painted plaster sea Beating before a wind that never was. They close their eyes to learn the truth of touch – Texture, serration, closure, opening – While I caress the things you chose to keep – A needle made of bone, a tiger’s tooth, An ancient coin. You came to the schoolroom Carrying a rose. ‘Relish its scent,’ You told the boys. ‘Then study its sharp thorn.’
The older boy in The Letters from Mexico is heir to a stately 'golden-tempered' Palladian house overlooking the River Dart. He will also inherit his father's wealth of plantations in Mexico. For several generations, Henreysens had been enjoying their Grand Tours and bringing back curiosities for their wunderkabinetts.1 My own inherited collection of curiosities is not housed in a glass fronted display cabinet of the kind Claire Daffard and her pupils studied in William's extensive library. Nor did my collection travel back to England in the hooped trunks of a rich young man indulging himself in the pleasures of foreign parts before settling down to the serious business of spending the fortune generated by his ownership of cotton and sugar plantations worked by slaves.
My collection of memorabilia, objects and photographs belonged to my Chiswick grandfather and was housed in a mixmatch of cigar boxes, tobacco tins and albums in the back bedroom in St Mary's Grove. This had been John's room before the war. After 1943, it became the room where my grandfather shut himself away to mourn among the pitiful souvenirs of his second son's sad journey to North Africa. A woven straw purse. A modest tie pin. A betel nut. A pack of miniature Fortune Telling cards. A swimming certificate. Scout badges. The small postage box from the Air Ministry containing John's only wartime medal, a lion standing wanton on the head of a dragon, proving not that my uncle had performed any heroic feat, but simply acknowledging that, for at least twenty eight days of the war, he had been there.
My grandfather also had the photograph album John put together while waiting with his RAF air-sea rescue unit to be scrambled for another emergency take-off in a flimsy plane, climb the burning sky and – after not many months – die in an air accident which meant it was never possible to say truthfully which were his remains and which were those of his comrades on the plane.
In time, I inherited my grandfather's collection. John's death inhabits everything he left, like the sharp thorn waiting in the scent of rose which is part of the secret language of the two anguished lovers in The Letters from Mexico. But the objects in a wunderkabinett seldom tell us much about the people who collected them. My Chiswick curiosities are pitiful and begging to be heard, but, if they speak a language, it is not mine. Only the incomplete album of carefully curated photographs seems willing to speak to me about my uncle John. Here I learn the names of the girls he liked and left behind. Joyce. Joan. Freda. Diana. How he enjoyed his time in the training camp in Bulawayo. The names of friends who 'went missing'. The camel and the zebra in Cairo Zoo. Sailing on Lake Timsah and accepting a dare to swim round King Faroukh's yacht. So many fit young men larking around, collecting their rations, scrubbing themselves clean in tin basins and rudimentary showers, playing bridge, waiting to be scrambled. Hoping to live. Waiting to move on. Jack at the bar. Norman with his dog Rex. The Air-Sea rescue mascot tuxedo cat.
Because of my inheritance, I feel that I know John better now than I ever knew his brother, my father, but I also think this sense of kinship is chimerical. What true meaning can there be in a thing that has actually lost its story? When the last wild tiger has vanished, what do you learn by running your finger along its impotent pillaged tooth?
Like William Henreysen in The Letters from Mexico, John sailed to a distant continent to protect the interests of his family and his world. Like William, John was fascinated by the strange culture he encountered, the doors of undreamt experience which seemed to be opening. Like William, John would not come home.
When he was in the second form at Chiswick County School for Boys in Burlington Lane, my uncle copied Housman's Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries into his extract book.2 The word 'mercenaries' is rather misleading. Housman is believed to have written this for the English Expeditionary Force sent to Belgium in 1914, whom the Germans dismissively called 'mercenaries' because they were a volunteer force who fought 'for pay.' John might have been twelve when he copied this. Ten years later, he would be dead.
These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
Cabinet of Curiosities by Domenico Remps (1620 - 1699) is owned by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and is on view in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence.
Epigraph for an Army of Mercenaries was published in AE Housman's Last Poems in 1922.