WHEN WALKING

When I was 8, walking back up the road from Avril’s, carrying an old chocolate box full of stamps my dad had given me to start my collection, a gust of wind took off the lid and the whole collection I had so proudly gone to show off to my friend, filled the air and fluttered into nothing. I don’t remember crying or old Mr Matthews from across the road finding me, but I remember his appearance at our front door the next day. In a bag, he carried his stamp albums, and he handed them to me. My joy was unbounded, but now I also recognise, the gift I gave to him.

It’s a wonderful gift, the gift of taking appreciatively other people’s much-loved things. My flats have always been the haven for these precious things of others. Others whose guilt was cleansed away by seeing their unwanted treasures, treasured again. So, it’s with relief and gratitude when my time came.

The place is a shop of treasures, loved and cared for until they are wanted again. Even if unsold they have a proper place, out in the public gaze, to be seen and admired. Little tags give provenance or comment, raising each object to an exhibition piece. I know my treasures stay treasures here.

So I went in with my grandmother’s medicine cabinet in dark wooden Germanic style. For years it was on the bedroom wall at 4 Hawksworth Road, part of the massive, ornate German furniture that filled her Accrington end-of terrace, transposed from the lost bourgeois Rhineland home. My father always said “It’s not quality, you know.” But as a child I saw it as an echo of a marvelous other world. Now I am older than my father was then, and it will go.

Next, my grandparents’ butter dish from under the stairs in Wednesfield, Wood End Road. On visits I would play hide-and-seek just so I could spend time looking at it. I’d never seen a butter dish shaped like a country cottage, or anything that so cleverly mimicked something else. But those little details get greasy on my windowsill and I do not like to clean.

Also in the bag, a prayer book stamped with my grandfather’s prisoner-of-war camp numbers. Not the Bible he carried as he marched away from the liberating armies, proudly saved, kept hidden as dysentery ran through the column. “Paper was gold dust!” he would recall. “Selfish ***,” my grandmother would add as an aside. And one day, when I find it, that too can be prised away.

The fur hat I kept for lack of a cat; the plastic rosary, handed over solemnly as I was called to the front at a Spanish village mass; the mass- produced portrait of a backcombed beauty, which my nephew loved, declaring it the image of his future wife, and my mother hated, pained by the impossible proportions of her head… all these are now the beloved property of the shop.

The flat is still far from cleared, but the precious stuff, at least, is gone to a better place. I apologise that this is starting to feel more like a decluttering blog, but walking is quite tied up with understanding the weight of things. I promise I too will go somewhere better soon.