After she died, Mum gave me some of her things. The mirror, the petticoat Nan wore on her wedding day, a silk bridge jacket, a shawl, some jewellery, a collection of perfume bottles and a few other things. Over the past few years, I’ve started to give them away to my nieces. I have a son, but I wanted these relics to go to the female line of my family. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here they are. The little silver-topped jars, the scissors, the button hook and nail buffer, the tiny brush that was used to groom one’s eyebrows. They’re things, objects. For my mother, they would have brought images of younger mother, in happier times. For me, there’s the older, stroke-affected Nan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n And for my niece, there’s no real Nan at all. Nan is at a distance; she’s a great-grandmother, someone on a family tree or perhaps an old photograph. When my niece looks at these things, perhaps she will think of me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My grandmother – my mother’s mother – died when I was 14. Her name was Phoebe. According to my mother, she associated her name with the cheery black maids you often saw in Hollywood films back in the 1930’s. Her … Continue reading
\nMost recently, I gave what used to be called a ‘toilet set’.Nothing to do with toilets – it’s really toilette<\/em>, the French word which means, I suppose, something like ‘grooming’. I took some photographs – but of course since I dropped my external hard drive I don’t have all of those any more. Just a few.
\n![\"DSC_0323\"](\"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/DSC_0323.jpg\")
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