We have a rather forlorn chest of drawers in the bathroom that has been sitting there for years with my clothes bundled up inside it...standing on the top is a really nice sort of over-mantel thingy with a big mirror...that was a gift from someone who just wanted to be rid of it.
As there is half a pot of paint left-over from the dresser in the sitting room, I've started to paint the chest and the over-mantel...they were both not very well stripped pine. They have their coat of undercoat on...
But it made me think a bit about where they came from and who was it who owned them when they were new...
The chest we bought while we were in Norfolk, from a chap who had a huge warehouse stuffed to the hilt with furniture he'd stripped of the old paint...it's old I suppose, because it doesn't have any nails to hold it together...it's all dove-tailed and the back is as good as the front.
It has brass handles...much corroded now...and there's a lock for every drawer. The keys are long gone of course.
I wonder who made it and who bought it when it was new...what did they put in the drawers...lace tablecloths perhaps or linen sheets smelling of Lavender...starched pillow cases maybe.
We have another huge mirror in the sitting room...that was once on an old fashioned dressing table which my cousin gave us...she lived in the house once owned by James Herriot who had left most of the rooms furnished when he sold the place to Ginny...did he buy the original dressing table in a sale or did he inherit it from his family...don't suppose for one minute he ever thought the mirror would end up on the wall of a traditional Irish cottage...
And we have a wooden cradle.
I spent too much money on that during a reckless afternoon at an Antiques Fair many years ago...it's perfectly plain...weighs a great deal and looks beautiful when I get around to polishing it. The seller told me it came from one of the great Norfolk houses but that could have just been sales talk of course.
How many babies spent their first few weeks wrapped up in shawls lying in that cradle...who made it... a man handy with tools, who gave it as a gift to his wife when she was expecting their first child perhaps. I've no idea whether it's very old...or just quite old.
Millie sleeps in it now.
Then there is the Famine Soup Spoon.
There used to be a man from the North who came to the car boot sale every Sunday. He had such lovely things. And he knew the provenance of the Donegal Spinning wheel and the history behind the Salmon basket...I bought that...he had huge china platters and pretty Fairings...then one day he had a big wooden spoon. The bowl is roughly hewn...the long handle carved out of the same piece of wood.
He saw me looking at it and told me it was a Famine Soup Spoon...used to dole out the soup to the starving people during the Great Famine from the road-side 'kitchens'...there were some old men looking and chatting...they knew what it was as well...
The bowl of those spoons were more or less the same size so everyone received the same amount of soup, no matter which soup kitchen was in their vicinity...it was an amount set by the British Government. Just enough to keep you almost alive.
From the early days when the soup was made with beef bones and Turnips to the later days of the Famine when it was Chickweed and grass in hot water...I wonder how many lives my spoon saved...did that spoonful, emptied into a cracked china cup, mean the difference between life and death...
Was it handled by a Quaker perhaps, who'd sailed from England...horrified by the famine and the amount of poverty...or was it the village priest...desperate to save the lives of his parishioners...
I rather wonder if all the oddities we have contribute towards the ambience of our little cottage...do they give something of themselves I wonder...does their history seep into our lives. Of course furniture and Salmon baskets woven from the reeds on the Lough shore are not sentient beings...the Famine Spoon hanging by the range is unlikely to recall its history...
The wooden cradle can't remember the babies who slept within it...it can't can it?
doesn't have the same ring to it does it?
