My Aide-Memoire...
When I was little, my favourite picture book was "Out of My Window". Each verse began..."Out of my window, I can see..." and went on to list such domestic staples as the milkman, the postman, the little boy on his way to school, the baby on its mother's knee ending with, in typical fifties-fashion, "my Daddy coming home to me".
I loved that book, picket fence and all. It's still on my bookshelf alongside my mother's Bobbsey Twins, my Buster Brown piggy bank and Funny Bunny, a pop-up book full of cuddly creatures and cottontails. Anthropomorphism aside, it was "Out of My Window" which taught me I could bring the outside world in.
Several decades on, I use a small bulletin board instead of a picture book to jump start my imagination. It sits on a desktop easel just behind and slightly to the left of my computer screen and displays, in no particular order, the following items:
An "oilette" postcard from 1904 depicting London's Ludgate Hill. Pedestrians gingerly share the street with horse-drawn vehicles, motor cars and omnibuses; a steam engine roars across the Ludgate bridge and the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral looms in the distance. On the reverse is a half-penny stamp, postmarked London. The card is addressed to a Miss Brooks on the Woodhouse Road in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. The script is bold and loops to the right, but there is no message. I wonder what it means.
Also on display are a 14ct, gold-filled pocket watch circa 1908, and a brass watch chain and fob from roughly the same era. I have no idea who in the family once owned the fob and chain or how they came to be mine, but they dominate the centre of my bulletin board, the chain held by three pushpins to simulate how it would hang on a gentleman's waistcoat.
Tucked in the corners are photographs from last month's trip to the U.K. including a picture of me and Heather, Susan's daughter, taken on a beautiful day in Hyde Park after a morning's research; a long shot of Oxford Street West with its eclectic mix of tiny shops and grand department stores; there's a small map of the Paddington and Bayswater area where a large part of the action takes place, and a "paper" hallmark I made at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
But perhaps my most tantalizing piece rests on the edge of the easel. It's a silver vesta (matchstick) case which I bought at a local auction last winter. It's marked with the Birmingham anchor and the lion passant, and its letter code dates it as 1915. The case was made by C. E. Turner, a firm working in Birmingham in the first half of the 20th century. And, it's engraved: From Mac to Frank, London, 1917.
An inscription which teases my imagination daily...
I won't go into all the post-it notes and other aide-memoire which clutter an otherwise carefully-ordered arrangement, but there is this one piece...
It's my horoscope from last year which says, if I don't make my mark over the next 12 months, it's because I'm "not breathing". That's the good news; the bad news is there's only fifty-two weeks in a year. My birthday's in three. But I am an optimistic Scorpio – and, if all else fails, I'll still be two months younger than Susan.
We are each other's aide-memoire.
f & f Anne
