it finally fits

28Jul10

When I was a little girl I stayed over at my maternal grandparents most weekends. I would have home made chip with slices of wafer thin bread and butter for tea, all served on my own little tray. I would dance around the sitting room putting on shows for my grandparents and then at a ridiculously early hour I would demand we all went to bed. I would sleep with my grandmother in a high bed made up with sheets, blankets and a quilt. My grandfather (I called them by their first names, infact when I first began to talk I called them mummy & daddy because that is what my mummy called them). If I close my eyes I can see the curtain pull hanging down, I slept on the window side and was unused to the streetlights outside. In the mornings I would sit in the middle of the bed, and whilst J was getting dressed, I would look through her jewellery box. I remember a coral necklace (lost now) and sovereigns on a chain. There was a pearl necklace, and a necklace with a gold pendant that looked like a claw. And there was a Welsh Dragon brooch, and one with a ring of moonstones. Best of all though was the charm bracelet, with its charms to examine and play with; there was a little church which opened up to reveal a bridge & groom, a £5 note in a little case, a St Christopher, a Welsh Dragon, a key, a cart, and, amongst others, two heart lockets. Open these and there are tiny pieces of paper with dates written in blue ink, the year they met, and the year they married and their 25th Wedding Anniversary. Not in the jewellery box, as it was always on her finger, was J’s engagement ring. I suppose she had a wedding ring too, but I think it was a plain gold band. Her engagement ring was a dazzling (to my little eyes) affair, a big garnet surrounded by opals, which in turn are surrounded by little garnets. This was always going to be MY ring, as long as I grew my nails.

Things changed, my grandfather L dropped down dead one Sunday lunchtime. I remember walking with daddy to the farm where my other grandparents lived,being hugged by Nana B & then my cousin coming to play. I also remember wetting myself the afternoon of the funeral – I had gone to play with a friend after school, but it was at a house I didn’t know and I was too scared to ask where to loo was. We (other girls had come over to play too & my cousins) were playing with apples & water on a concrete slab and I pretended that I had sat in the water. Mrs G the mother knew what had happened, but I felt mortified.

I stopped staying at J’s. It wasn’t the same without L, and J aged overnight – theirs had been a very happy marriage and she was lost without him. My grandmother didn’t drive so we couldn’t go swimming on a Sunday anymore unless my mother stayed too, which of ruined the fun. And I was getting older (8-9ish, can’t really remember). But mummy & I would go over at the weekend, I would happily play with the bears (mummy, daddy & baby bear, all with their own furniture, but no house), and the garden (plastic flowers that you poked into the plastic beds). And I would get the Victorian dresses out of the trunk & wear them around the house. And J would come and stay with us at Christmas, and if I am being brutally honest, I begrudged her coming over – I was set in my ways and used to being a gang of three at home, not three plus a sad old lady. But on the plus side I had two stockings for a few years (one to open with M&D, one to open with J!) (shit I sound a mercenary child, was really not). I think one of the reasons I found it difficult when she  staying at ours was because I liked it best when I was at J’s in town, without parents there, just me & her. She indulged my childish games, would play “Bank” with me for hours, and would collect paying in slips from the TSB for me to play with. And we would sit for hours just looking through the drawers of photos, or sorting out the reels of cotton that were in the little cupboard next to her sink. And she would let me just have roast potatoes & yorkshire pud for Sunday lunch, with gravy in a glass for me to dip my yorkshire into. There were always jelly babies in the tin above the fridge, leaf tea in the box from India, and butter on a black & white stripy plate by the bread bin.

And then I was even older, not working as hard at school as J would like,  but to her I was still wonderful. She would check my hands to see how my nails were growing, and put money in my birthday cards. The summer tea parties that we used to have with my cousins became a thing of the past, she stopped making her own bread as much, and had fallen over & broken her wrist and was rapidly becoming white haired. Mummy would wash her hair over the sink in the kitchen & put it in rollers, and J would mock scream “don’t let Sian comb it” as I was rather rough! She would pretend to quiver & shake and we would just laugh. When I was at college I would walk to J’s if I was ever feeling ill, and just let myself in & go straight up to bed to sleep (not hungover, just every so often I feel sick & if I don’t go to sleep I am sick, been like it for years). And of course I started going out with the Ex, so if we were driving through town I would zoom into see J & zoom out again.

For my 18th birthday J gave me a beautiful amethyst & gold ring, oh it was lovely. And then she got the disease that killed off my paternal grandparents, and got older and smaller and frailer. And I saw her less & less as I was gadding about with the Ex. I remember going to see her in hospital, she was curled up in bed, looking like a tiny dormouse, sound asleep. The lady in the bed opposite told me to wake her up as she would be so pleased to see me, so I did. But I just didn’t go and see her often enough, and to this day I can’t forgive myself for this. One day Mummy phoned me (by this time I was living with Daddy in Ludlow, my parents didn’t split up, just my mother wanted some time to do her own thing after we had sold the house & she didn’t have to clean caravan loo’s everyday – thats a whole other blog post) and asked if I had spoken to J. I said no, & mummy said that she was at J’s but there was no sign of her. I didn’t think anything of it, even though J was pretty much housebound & had a carer & my ma popping in all the time. I carried on making a pasta bake, to take over to my Ex’s. I think I may have had a nap or popped out, because I remember Daddy coming up to me in the flat & saying something like “I’m sorry love” etc etc. He was the one who told me about L dying too. And I was upset, and couldn’t eat the pasta bake. I went and ordered flowers for the grave myself, almost crying in the florists, writing my favourite latin phrase on the card (lux et umbra vicissim sed semper amor). And I cried through the funeral, especially at this bit, for a highly un-religious person quite a lot of the bible makes me cry. I had said that I didn’t want to see the coffin going into the earth, but after the ceremony it felt like the right thing to do. And then we went back to her house and sat in the kitchen drinking tea, and my Bat was there and her pa, and we talked to second cousins about dams being built in Africa.

And I got the ring. I won’t go into the undignified arguments that went on with regards to her belongings, I will just assume that not everyone has Mad Aunts who make everything worse. I won’t mourn the loss of the elephant table, that went to my cousin instead of me as promised, because I have all the photos. And I won’t rail against the injustice of my aunt taking as much of the money as she could, including a lot of cash from the bedside cabinet, because I have the black & white plates (2 of them) and the jelly baby tin. And the Victorian dresses are in the trunk at the end of my bed, along with a quilt that I can’t bear to get out too often as it still smells of my grandmothers house. And I got J’s cookbooks, and my little tray. And the blue blanket that I would snuggle under, and the mummy, daddy & baby bear, and the plastic garden (oh but I wish I had the red & blue plastic tea set from mothercare). But I do have the ring.

And when I lost the stone from my amethyst ring, I tried on my grandmothers ring, but it just didn’t feel write. And then I had a nice silver ring from the Ex, and the ring looked too showy & big next to it. And then I took off all my rings and only wore fun rings, like my knitting needle ring, or my squirrel ring, so the garnet ring just looked to old fashioned and proper.

And next weekend my lovely friends are getting married. And I have bought a 50′s style dress to wear, and some funny sandals that look like something that might have been worn with the dress when it was first made. And then a discussion on twitter about charm bracelets made me dig out my charm bracelet, perfect to wear with the dress, and perfect for a wedding, with its little church charm, and wedding anniversary dates in hearts. And then I remembered the ring, and found it, underneath my bed in a dusty shoe. And, do you know, I think it looks right now, it fits me.

This wasn’t meant to be a blog post about me, but about jewellery, but once I had started it, in the words of Arthur Ransome, it almost wrote itself. I keep my memories in boxes in my head (compartmentalised to the hilt) and don’t open these boxes often – in my head my dead are still alive, I just choose not to visit them. Remembering things just makes me a big sobbing mess.

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Tags: family, love, rings, wedding