Grandmummy’s Box
I think it held stationery once. The name on the box is Doeskin Deckle. The box itself is covered in deep red paper, blood-red actually, but the name in gold and the gold deer in mid-leap are meant to denote elegance. Though the box is broken, the paper tattered and the gold faded, I can imagine that it might once have been called elegant.
I used to play with it when I was a child. My grandmother kept it in the bottom drawer of my grandfather’s round-the-corner desk which my grandmother used to type letters to her daughter in Canada and to put on her make-up. My grandfather was dead so he no longer used it.
The box contains things my grandmother thought worth keeping. I used to like looking at them.
“A ship named the Pioneer Glen Was due to sail Eastwards and then Thanks to wharfies and rain Reached Boston again In the year two thousand and ten”
I wonder why my grandmother liked that. It’s written in her handwriting, in pink ink on a scrap of paper. My grandmother voted Labor because in Hungary my grandfather had been a Social Democrat so why did she like something that criticised wharfies? Did she really care about wharfies? Did the rhyming scheme amuse her? Was she pleased with her command of English or did she like the idea of something projected indefinitely into the future?
A typed list of all fifty states of the US and their capitals. This I understand. Both my grandmother and I like knowing things: countries, capitals, strange facts about places and things. Knowing the capital of Vermont is Montpelier is like being special and smart.
A letter from my cousin in Canada written in 1962 when Mary Ann was thirteen. Mary Ann sent my grandmother lots of poetry:
“I flowed through valleys where ne’er a foot has trod; I flowed through cities where impatient colts are shod.”
My grandmother kept every one of Mary Ann’s poems. I used to like them and wanted to write poetry too. When I visited Montreal, my aunt told me Mary Ann wrote the poetry to impress my grandmother and earn her love. Apparently my grandmother considered me more intelligent and told Mary Ann so in a very unfriendly manner. At least that’s what my aunt says. Mary Ann is still angry with me because of this; she went to Spain while I was in Montreal. Since then, Mary Ann’s poetry seems puerile and pseudo-intellectual, aiming for effect rather than truth.
All the monarchs of England from 1066 to 1957 typed on my grandmother’s typewriter. Just the monarchs and the years they reigned. No details of dynasty or even mention of the Civil War, except a break and a heading: “The Commonwealth”.
A picture of Chinese children writing. Very cute but nothing special by today’s standards. Maybe such things were rarer when my grandmother received this.
Three-quarters of a page. On one side is an address of a relative in New York. Part of the address was missing. The other side has addresses of various galleries in New York in my grandmother’s handwriting. It might be a list of the galleries she visited, perhaps she got the address from the relatives she visited.
A laundry docket from the Parisian laundry in Woollahra with famous names written on the back: Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther, Alfred Tennyson, Johann W. Goethe. I don’t know what it was for but the paper is torn and only half the name Grant appears.
A list of basic wage fluctuations from 1946 to 1958, typed on my grandmother’s typewriter and listing male and female wages separately as they were till the early seventies. I remember women’s wages were lower. According to this list they were 50% of men’s wages in 1946 and rose in the early fifties till they were about 75%. A reminder of how far women have come, though I never thought of my grandmother as championing women’s rights I imagine she would do this sort of research to help increase her earning capacity. Though she might do it quietly, a word to an employer who valued her. She was not the sort to protest in the streets.
A browned piece of paper with the words to the song: “Go Tell ‘Em on a Mountain”. I remember liking that song and the words are in my handwriting so I must have written them out for her. I wonder why she kept that.
Programs from when I won prizes at school, calendars for years in the sixties, letters, sayings she liked, a short discourse on doors, a card from my mother. Each of these things tells me something about my grandmother and each time I look through I remember her or understand a little more about her. The poem I think she would like as her epitaph is this:
“I keep six honest serving men (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who”
It’s from Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child”. I think that she valued knowledge above all, but perhaps that is just something I think.