Look at these beautiful parasols. My mother doesn't know where they came from or who they belonged to.
They've evidently never been used; they're in beautiful condition. I'm guessing they were presents from someone's foreign trip. I don't know when they date from, but they belonged to my grandmother, and maybe someone before her. I remember enjoying them as a child. The pink one was my sister's, because she loved all things pink, and the blue one was mine, because I hated all things pink. I can't say that they kept 7-yo entertained for long, but she did prance around the garden with them a little. It's good to have the opportunity to teach children to look after things. In today's throw-away world, it's important for them to learn that things have value, by virtue of being old, or beautiful, or interesting. I taught 7-yo to open and close them carefully and gently, treating them with respect, as I was taught to do by my own mother.
The blue parasol lives in a parasol-shaped tin. The pink one lives in its original brown paper wrapping.
I love the curly writing, and the idea of the "modern shape" of sunshades. Lovely.
Here's another item that I remember from my childhood. It belonged to me.
It wasn't my everyday piggy bank. That was pink, with a removable stopper. The disadvantage with this pig is that it has no stopper. It's also very small - about 3 inches long, so it wouldn't hold much money. But it did have a few coins in it, and the children set about trying to get them out. They succeeded (that used up quite a bit of time), and were thrilled with the achievement of it. 10-yo presented the empty pig and the coins to me with pride: "We've got them out for you, after all these years!" What they don't know, is that I remember being perfectly able to get money out of that pig, sliding the coins out on a knife. I did it loads of times. I didn't tell them that, though. "Gosh, how clever!"
The coins were pre-decimal, so date from my early childhood (decimalisation was 1971, I've looked it up). There were a couple of sixpences - "these are what the tooth fairy used to bring" - and three threepenny bits.
10-yo is the magpie of my family. He loves collecting things, and is fast developing a taste for old items. Yesterday, he bought two farthings for 20p each in a local bric a brac shop, to add to the sixpences and threepenny bits. That's the beginning of an old coin collection (he already has a foreign coin collection). I'm not a collector or a hoarder by nature. I'm minimalist in what I keep. 10-yo is both a magpie and a hoarder. It's a dangerous combination, and it was quite an effort to ensure that a large proportion of the contents of the loft didn't simply end up in a big pile marked "keep for 10-yo". He's already made my mother promise to keep the typewriter.
Back to the pig. I remember being fond of this pig too, but look at it close up.
Don't you think that's a rather sinister grin? This loft clear-out could turn out to be the Return of the Evil Pig.
.
That is one weird looking pig!
ReplyDeleteI always thought that an attic was properly finished, and possibly used as living space, while a loft was unfinished, and often had to be accessed by a drop down ladder rather than proper stairs.
Aw, I quite like the pig's expression; don't think it looks evil at all.
ReplyDeleteFunny; my definitions of "loft" and "attic" are almost completely reversed from Expat mum's. A loft is an open, finished room on the upper floor (almost like a balcony overlooking the rest of the house) or a kind of apartment/flat. An attic is the room directly under the house's roof, finished or unfinished, accessed by door-and-stairs or ladder, depending (ours in Wisconsin was unfinished and - we found out in later years - didn't even have a proper roof; just tar paper under shingles. Eek!); used either as a spare room and/or storage. And then there are "crawl spaces", which are a type of attic or basement (storage space) that really is unfinished and not even tall enough to stand up properly.
My maternal grandparents had a musty, attic-y room behind a door in the upstairs bathroom. It was the done thing for us grandchildren to pull things from there for play. And the refrigerator ALWAYS had Klondikes that would mysteriously replenish after we thought we'd eaten them all. Grandparents' houses are magic!
A friend would say, "And so we forgot the point of emptying the loft." Lovely story.
ReplyDeleteI rather like the pig....Beautiful parasols, definitely worth keeping and preserving.
ReplyDeleteI've never thought about the differences between loft and attic before - in fact, I think they are probably just different terms for the same thing. But somehow loft sounds as if it ought to be bigger.