Plastic picnic bowl

I noticed the bowl had been put in a pile ready to take to the recycling centre, and felt a surge of quite primitive panic, as if something precious was about to be lost. So I rescued it, at least for long enough to spoon out the memories it contained. For this bowl is the last remaining item from my parents’ picnic set, which I am sure they had from the earliest years of their marriage in the 1930s – it may even have been a wedding present.

The picnic set was in a wicker basket, the size of a small suitcase, with a hinged lid. Two loops were woven into the basket that corresponded to slots in the lid and a dowel was passed through to hold the lid shut. By the time I was old enough to remember, the hinges had been replaced by string, the dowel by a length of bamboo cane. There was a burn-mark on the lid which suggested an accident, probably caused by the little meths stove my father used to boil a kettle. On family outings he would often hunker behind a hedge, in the lee of some rocks, or even next to a hole dug in the sand, doing his best to shield the stove from the wind and rain and make my mother a cup of tea. The tin kettle that went with the stove was blackened around the bottom from years over the flames. It had a screw-on lid and stopper for the spout so it could be taken on picnic already full of water – the stopper was long gone in my time; instead, the spout was stuffed with a roll of newspaper.

This picnic set was complete with a set each of six large plates, small plates, bowls, cups (I don’t remember saucers), containers with screw-on lids for sugar and butter, all made of the same green plastic. There was, I imagine, also a cutlery set, and salt and pepper shakers, and straps to keep things in their proper place. But all these were gone or by the time I remember it. And I am sure that Mum packed a tablecloth and napkins, folded neatly over the top to stop everything from rattling.

When I turn the bowl over and examine the bottom, I can make out the word Beetleware moulded in italic script. An internet search reveals that Beetleware household items were made of urea formaldehyde, first manufactured in the 1930s, as I suspected. So this picnic set was a modern and exciting product when my parents acquired it! I also find that I might buy a ‘Green Plastic Beetleware Set, circa 1940s’, from eBay which ‘Comprises a cup, saucer and two plates’ and looks very much like the set I remember – and so yes, there were saucers, of course there were saucers!

The picnic set accompanied us on many family outings and holidays. In the late 1940s we all – five in my family plus our grandmother – crammed into the pre-war Morris 10, with me as the littlest sitting on a plank of wood between the two front seats. When the Morris became unreliable, Dad bought a Standard Vanguard, a great lump of a car in which everyone had their own seat. We used to drive quite regularly from our house in Wandsworth Common to a field near Windsor, taking the car right down to the bank of the River Thames. Mum would pack sandwiches and tea and would sit quietly next to Dad while we children messed about in the river. One day I cut my big toe badly on broken glass; on another Dad broke a tooth on a stone in a fruit cake. When we were bigger, we took the boat my brother John built and so explored the river further. These trips just stopped happening at some point. I don’t know why, and now I am sad that I would not be able to find that spot where we went.

On family holidays to Devon and Cornwall the picnic basket was one of the many things that Dad would have to lug down to the beach. Mother would insist we went to the water’s edge and rinsed our hands before we ate, but however hard we tried, the sandwiches still crunched with sand between our teeth.

Maybe the most memorable picnic was on the drive home from holiday in Cornwall. I must have been six or seven. Mum and Dad had decided to drive from Cornwall to London in one go – quite an epic trip in the 1950s. We were woken and bundled into the car while it was still dark, then stopped for breakfast in a layby, I suspect somewhere on the A30 in North Devon – this was before it was ‘duelled’. The plan was for Dad to boil some eggs, but the little meths stove was not up to the job, and at the last minute, Mum realized we had no egg cups and no egg spoons. I squatted disconsolately by the car, struggling to find a way to eat a very soft-boiled egg I was holding in a paper napkin. I suspect I complained loudly.

I am not quite sure how the picnic set was passed on to me. Maybe Dad kept it for sentimental reasons when Mum died, and he came to live near us in Bath. We held on to it for many years, taking it on our own family picnics and boiling kettles – not on the meths stove, which had rusted away, but on a more effective (but much more expensive) Camping Gaz stove. At some point we decided the basket was impractical and took too much space, so with some regrets got rid of it.

And so back to this last bowl. It’s a rather hideous shade of green, scratched and stained on the bottom. When I look carefully, I see it is cracked nearly all the way around the base. It is fit now to hold nothing but memories. It does that rather well.