Stuff and objects

Today I went with my dad and my brother to my grandmother’s cottage to pick over what was left and identify any things I might like to take for myself. My grandmother is not dead, but she has reached an age (99) where living on your own in a 400-year-old stone cottage in the middle of nowhere is not an especially good idea if you’re planning on reaching your centenary. After one fire and one flood my poor harassed father finally put his foot down and insisted she go somewhere warm, clean and safe with round-the-clock medical supervision.

This all happened back in August, and I hadn’t been inside her house since then – had been avoiding it, in fact. My relationship with my grandmother is not good. I don’t much like her and judging by comments made at our last meeting the feeling is mutual. I try not to take it personally. She doesn’t seem to like anyone. In fact, famously, she once told my father that she much preferred things to people. Oh yes, the acquisition of things has played a big part in my grandmother’s life – antique furniture especially. As a child I used to earn extra pocket money by visiting her fortnightly and polishing the many old wooden chairs, desks, tables and chests of drawers in her house, a task that could take several hours depending on how diligent I was feeling. Although the pieces in her house were quite beautiful I took very great care never to covet any of them. Early on I took an intense dislike to what I saw as her inhumane placing of things above people. God knows as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to understand it better. People are infinitely unreliable. They let one down most awfully. Pieces of furniture, on the other hand, well they don’t turn their back on you in a crisis. All they require is an occasional coat of beeswax, and a good rub down. The best pieces even increase in value as time goes on. Who wouldn’t prefer a beautiful old bureau over a gambling husband, an over-talkative servant, an unmarried granddaughter with a bizarre career in some new-fangled technology you can’t understand so feel compelled to reject?

If I sound a touch bitter it is because I am. And so it was in a highly disgruntled mood that I traipsed along to her house this afternoon. When we unlocked the door and went in I found a place both oddly familiar and quite unrecognisable. The rooms had once been worthy of a spread in an upmarket interiors magazine, but the flood had ruined one end of the house and the rest was in considerable disarray. Damaged furniture had been removed, other pieces distributed to various family members and named beneficiaries. Some had gone with Grandmother to her new home. Amusingly, her collection of ornamental owls, which I have never wanted but which she has nevertheless seen fit to bequeath to me, were all arranged on a counter top, mocking me with their wise old eyes. There are forty or fifty of the darned things and I have no idea what to do with them.

My initial response was to reject the lot of it. I am feeling especially angry with my grandmother at the moment, and everything she has touched seems imbued with her particularly potent form of negativity (I have one of her teapots at home in London – again unasked for – and just the sight of it can bring a crease to my brow.) However, it doesn’t do to allow mere objects to assume such power. Better to treat them casually, even mockingly, to drive some of the evil away. In the end I settled on some lamps that would actually have some use for me, and an old table that is the only thing I know of that relates to my grandfather in any way (she relegated it to the greenhouse rather than keep it indoors).

In what was her bedroom, we found some traces of the old interior walls of the cottage, as it was when my brother and I lived there as little children. My grandmother’s presence in that house was so strong that I often forgot that I had spent the first eleven years of my life playing happily under its heather thatch. We stood there, reminding ourselves of where the old rayburn used to be, how the door to the bathroom was positioned, where my old hand painting of a monster had adorned the wall for years. It felt like an exorcism for me – to reclaim this house where I had spent many happy years from the memory of my grandmother and the pretty but miserable museum she made of it.

In the time she lived there whole trees grew up and cast a shadow over the house. My dad has cut many of them down now, and the place feels like it can breathe again. I shall feel happier still when someone new moves in there, hopefully filling the place with cheap and cheerful IKEA sofas and kitchen units, and chairs they have opportunistically plucked out of a skip.

Meanwhile I shall do my best not to be troubled by my lamps and teapot, and to think of something amusing and inappropriate to do with my collection of ornamental owls.