Five Things (including a virtual cello)

with guest contributor Marilyn Francis

Posts on Objects&Lives have mostly focussed on one object and its story. In this post, Marilyn Francis, by way of contrast, gives us prose and poetry vignettes of five objects, each with its own wry memories and meanings

Gateleg Table – this originally belonged to my father’s mother. He inherited it. My mother loved it probably because it had belonged to Annie, her mother-in-law. When I was a teenager it was my Saturday morning chore to dust and polish. I had to make sure that all the twists in the barley sugar legs were properly cleaned before being allowed to go out and meet my friends. It is now my table and not nearly as beautifully polished.

This is part of a poem I wrote about it.

The gateleg table came with the son.
I know its scratches and stains
its worn-out gentility, its faint aroma
of Mansion polish and discontent.

Chair – this chair belonged to my other grandmother, Mary Jane. After the war she was allocated a spacious ground floor flat in a mansion block in Luxborough Street (near Madame Tussauds) because she had so many children. All the family including me and my mum and dad lived there. There was a huge kitchen which still had the bells (disconnected) that were once used to summon servants, and a large scrubbed table with lots of unmatched chairs. This one was once used as my high chair. It ended up, years later, battered and paint-spattered at Mary Jane’s old person’s council flat in Aylesbury. I rescued it.

Slate Figure – a fine piece of socialist realist kitsch awarded to my dad for his service to the Transport and General Workers Union. I’m very proud of it, and him, despite his gradual turn to the right in later years. The figure was made in Blaenau Ffestiniog which was appropriate as he was born in Wales, though not in Blaenau, in Trethomas, Monmouthshire. He wasn’t a miner. He was an upholsterer.

He worked somewhere behind Marylebone Station
in a lock-up that stank of mildew and sweat
where fibres floated in low-watt light

He wore an upholsterers apron
cross-tied, multi-pocketed
bristling with bradawls and bodkins
and scissors with crocodile teeth.

Shelf – this is part of the shelf where we keep our most ‘tasteful’ mementos from holidays etc. All the family contribute to this. I’m still seeking a sacred heart ashtray which I saw once, many years ago, in a shop in Dublin, but didn’t buy.

Cello – this wonky, stringless, cello was found in our loft when we moved in. Our next door neighbour said it had been one of the instruments played in the local church – a bit like the band in Under The Greenwood Tree. We regard it, more or less, as a conceptual cello and imagine what it might have sounded like. It’s been sitting at the top of our stairs for forty years

Marilyn Francis is a member of Bath Writers and Artists