Dad’s Drawers Part 7:Fat Grawers, Manky Rulers and the Generous Gift of the Oil Spill.

This blog was only ever intended to be a photographic record of my dad’s drawers before the big clear out, but the photos have extended beyond the drawers and the writing way beyond that which I ever intended.

One of the things I have found fascinating about blogging is the ‘stats’ page where you can track how many people have ‘viewed’ or ’visited’ on any given day/week/month and from where in the world they have looked.  I am quite astonished that having intended this as a slightly humorous piece, for friends and family to enjoy, I have had 1500 ‘views’ to date.

The ‘stats’ page also tells you how people have found the site; whether they have been referred by links, (Facebook, Twitter etc.), or whether they have come via a search engine.

I recently discovered that you can actually see what those ‘accidental’ visitors typed into their search engine box when they stumbled across my blog.

…….…… and it was at this point I wished I hadn’t looked quite so closely.  On first glance I found it quite amusing that the searches for ‘manky rulers’ (that one’s for you David(1)), and ‘fat grawers’ had found me, and I suppose I should have guessed that having the word ‘naked’ in the title of one of my blogs may have enticed a few extra viewers.  What I didn’t expect was that the words ‘fat’ and ‘bubble-wrap’ would have added to this.   A small selection of the searches (that must have resulted in much disappointment) follow: ‘naked daddy fat’; ‘bubble-wrap nudes;’ ‘Japanese fat naked dad’; ‘old fatty porn naked daddies in rooms’; ‘bubble nude’; ‘fatty naked at sea-side’ and my all time favourite: ‘naked fat person in plastic bubble suit’.

It reminds of a search (mentioned in a previous blog) that I did some years ago, when we returned home from holiday to find a dead and festering muntjac deer in the garden.  I innocently tapped into Google  ”What do you do with a dead deer?”  I can’t repeat some of the things I came across, but you may be interested to know that it is not illegal to have sex with one!.   Fortunately, I did eventually find a nice man who disinfected the site, put the carcass in a body-bag and took it away (for a price of course).

My dad would have loved to blog.  But in the last few years as it became easier to do, his failing memory meant that he sometimes struggled with the computer.

He was a great lover of words and was never without a pencil and notebook.  I have yet to go through all the scribblings on serviettes, backs of shopping lists, bus tickets etc (which I have of course kept).  Below is a small selection of the mass accumulated over the years.   They will make a great scrap-book one day……….

Over the years dad had been a member of several writer’s groups.  I have already mentioned the one that was run by concrete poetry artist, Bob Cobbing (2) in a previous blog.  He also attended one that took place in the home of Stella Gibbons, author of ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ (3), (and whose daughter later became my aunt, after marrying my mum’s brother).  He was a member of a Cambridge writing group when he started on his book.  He had already had a couple of his short stories published and had been persuaded by friends and family to pen his life story. It was a ‘work in progress’ for several years and he would often send a completed chapter for my opinion. (To be honest, by the time the book did get published I had read through some chapters so many times, that I didn’t get around to reading it in its entirety for some years).

Having no success in getting a publisher, he spotted a competition being run by Heinemann and Eastern Arts.  What attracted him to it was not the cash prize, but the promise that the winner would have their book published.  There was one slight hitch, the competition was for fiction.  No problem thought dad, I will just change the names, add a couple of stories and no one will know any better.  Nobody was really fooled into thinking that this was anything other than a thinly disguised biography; nonetheless one day when he rang me for a chat he casually dropped into the conversation that he had won the prize and his book was going to be published.  He was 75.

His book, ‘Gravity is Getting me Down’(4), was published in 1994 to good reviews and much media coverage.  You will not be surprised if I tell you that, as well as all of the press cuttings, I have found a box of cassette tapes with recordings of some of the interviews that were aired on both local and national radio.  The strange thing about listening to them now, is that I can finally hear what people have been telling me for years; that my dad had an accent. Of course he did you may say, he was Austrian.  I suppose that having grown up with the accent I never noticed it, thinking that he spoke just like the rest of us.  The book was also translated into German. ‘Die Lust der Schwerkraft. Roman eines Lebens’(5) translated, courtesy of  ’Google Translate’, as ‘The Pleasure of Gravity, Story of a Life’; doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as the English title, but it did well and actually made the bestsellers list in Austria.  The book also went on to win the Society of Authors ‘Sagittarius’ prize (the award presented to him by Laurie Lee).  Sadly, the book is out of print now, and another thing on my ever-lengthening list of ‘To Do’ items is to see how easy it is to get it re-published, or make a digital version available for download.

One of my favourite chapters in the book is about my great-uncle Walter, an Austrian Jew, who was the brother of my dad’s mum .  Walter was the king of “If I can do something for nothing, why pay?” and if he did have to pay “I’ll give you half of what you’re asking”.

Sound familiar?  I have been with dad when has negotiated down a price for just the ‘bed’ part of  bed and breakfast. (Without any consultation with me I might add!).

Usually though, dad’s was more of a ‘What can I do for you in return?’ type of approach and no money would actually ever change hands.  It worked well both ways for him and I always thought that he must have done a pretty big favour for the ‘Klose’ family who lived in the next village and who mum and dad were friends with.  Whatever he had done, in return their sons (between them) taught me the basics of the guitar.  For a whole summer I was dropped off at their house every Sunday morning (with the guitar that dad had built for me in his workshop) and one of the four brothers, whoever was around, would give me a lesson.  It wasn’t the best way to learn an instrument and I do seem to remember sitting around waiting  a lot of the time (watching the bush-baby that was caged in the kitchen being fed live locusts as I recall); but at the tender age of 15, spending a morning around four good-looking  young men between the ages of 18 and 24 wasn’t such a hardship.

Anyway, back to Walter.  He found his niche in the Viennese furrier district, selling and buying.  I say ‘selling and buying’ rather than ‘buying and selling’ because he would never pay money for anything until he had already sold it.  Each morning he would do his rounds, crumpled brown paper package under his arm; making sales and collecting payment for items that he would, later in the day, buy.  Never having to put any money up front or take any risks.  At the same time he would pick up the off-cuts of fur thrown out because they were too small to do anything with.  When he had enough of these off-cuts he would sell them as a bundle, often back to one of the furriers he had collected them from in the first place.

He used to seek out oil spills on the road and rush to rub the soles of his shoes in them as he said that it extended the life of the leather.  Once, when walking along a Paris street with dad he stood by a spill in the road and gestured magnanimously “Here, Freddie.  This one’s for you”.

He had the foresight to get out of Austria before the ethnic cleansing began and he set up in Paris, hardly losing a day’s work and continuing trading from his small brown paper parcel.  When, in the wake of Anschluss, half of Vienna’s furriers turned up in Paris, Walter was ready and waiting and business picked up where it had left off.

Foresight again took got him out of Paris before the German’s arrived and into the UK where he sat out the rest of the war in the British army as a store-keepers assistant.  This incidentally qualified him for free NHS care even when he was no longer a UK resident. While I was growing up he was a frequent visitor despite living, first in Canada, then Switzerland.  Not surprisingly each visit just happened to coincide with some hospital check up or other.

I visited him and his wife Trudy in Switzerland while I was on holiday there in the ‘80’s. The habits of a lifetime had not changed.   He was most welcoming, offering us all cups of tea and yoghurt.  He then proceeded to make one tea bag stretch for all six cups and he opened one small yoghurt carton which meant we just about managed a tea-spoon full each!

His penny-pinching finally caught up with him in the end.  After years of shopping around for cheap food, which often meant bread, cheeses and fruit with their own micro-cultures, he died at the age of 72  from a tropical disease (diagnosed  courtesy of the NHS) that had only been previously found in the slums of third world countries.

Finally, just in case you wondered where I am with the sorting.  The pictures above are just a small section of the workshop.  I have already spent some considerable hours clearing the floor just to be able to get to the shelves, and as you can see have many more to go.

To make any further progress I have realised I can put it off no longer; the time has come to venture into the shady world of scrap metal dealing.

Also, for those of you who have been asking.  The Fat Nude will be up for auction at Christie’s on June 11th as part of their ‘South Asian, Modern Contemporary Art’ sale.  I will be there!

Notes

1. I have said before that this process of going through my dad’s stuff has led me into some strange situations, and odd conversations.   I would never have contemplated writing a blog, a clandestine meeting in a car park, selling a painting at Christie’s or handing a gun over to the police.  Nor would I have ever thought that I would have an email discussion with my daughter’s guitar teacher (and coincidentally an old friend of my dad’s) on the use of the word ‘Manky’; which incidentally doesn’t figure on the Microsoft Word spell check.  But this is the strange road I have traveled over the last year and long may it continue…..…)

2.  Bob Cobbing – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Cobbing 3. Stella Gibbons – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Gibbons 4. Gravity is Getting Me Down – Fred Plisner ISBN: 0 434 59078 9 5. Die Lust Der Schwer Kraft. Roman Eins Lebens – Fred Plisner ISBN:3 351 02333 2

The Japanese ‘Big-Eyes’ and the Car Park Deal

A few months ago during the clearing process I found a large wooden box containing an equally large pair of binoculars.  Ugly things, painted a military green and so heavy that I could barely lift them.  As with all such items, they went into the boot of my car to return home with me.

My family is now well used to my return from a clearing session with a full car load, and have progressed from the  “Ooh, is there anything interesting in there?” to the sarcastic “Oh good, more junk!”   There are constant moans that I have cleared our old junk, from drawers and cupboards in our house, only to replaced it with ‘Fred’s junk’.

This particular junk/treasure went straight into my garage for dealing with a later stage. Never let it be said that putting off today what you can do tomorrow is not the best policy.  It enables you avoid making decisions and, more importantly, means you don’t have to do it today!  Procrastinators Unite! (tomorrow).

I was reminded of the binoculars some weeks later when I was getting something else out of the garage.  I can’t remember now what I was going to get, because once I saw the binoculars I decided that they needed to be photographed straight away.  Whatever it was will probably come to me next time I go to the garage for something else, which in turn will be forgotten, and so it goes on.    That’s pretty much how my life works.

Photographing the binoculars in their box was fairly straightforward, but I thought that it would be much better if I could get a picture of them on the tripod.  Cue comedy scene in driveway:

My first mistake was choosing the gravel driveway as a suitably stable surface.  You know that voice at the back of your head that tells you “You should really work out how you are going to do this before you start”.  Well, I always ignore it: a) because it seems too much effort and anyway, I want to do it now – not later - not another day; and b) because life is too short to read instructions.  I hasten to add that I don’t apply that same logic to household chores or really anything that actually needs doing; those tasks obviously need very careful planning and can only be done under the right conditions (blue moon, pigs flying, dry English summer).

Sometimes this approach works for me and sometimes it doesn’t.  It didn’t work very well when, in an attempt to repair a dripping shower, I ended up with a high pressured, horizontal spurt of water that resulted in a call-out by the emergency plumber, a bathroom that you could paddle in, and a promise to my husband never to attempt any plumbing repairs again.

One of the many drawers of lids that I found!

Back to the tripod that, even before the voice had finished, I had cleverly erected and which appeared quite stable; even on the gravel.

With difficulty I lifted the binoculars out of the box and balanced them on the top of the tripod while I looked for the  hole on the underside which would secure them in place.  As I was feeling for the hole (I knew there was one, but hadn’t had the foresight to check exactly where it was before I had started) the tripod started to slowly sinking towards the ground; legs splaying outwards like a sick giraffe.  Determined not to let go of my new-found treasure, I was slowly sinking towards the ground myself trying to place my body between binoculars the ground.  It was only the assistance of a sharp-eyed son who had looked out of the window come to my rescue that stopped me being part of a tripod and binocular heap on the driveway.

I wasn’t too sure how the binoculars had been acquired, but I had my suspicions. Dad, being a jack-of-all-trades, was often the recipient of items in need of repair, or knives in need of sharpening.  He was always happy to help somebody out, but wasn’t particularly speedy about the process and it would be quite normal for the broken item to hang around the house for a year or so.  Eventually, the owner would turn up and dad would usually do the repair there and then, chatting to them over the lathe/welder/sharpening stone as he did so.  The trouble was that in his later years he couldn’t always remember who had given him which item to repair, and if said item wasn’t collected promptly it could quite easily have been given to some other needy person.  Dad was a generous man and couldn’t see the point of having two of something when he only needed one (and yes, I laugh at the irony of that now), and so he gave anything he considered surplus to his requirements away.  There was an awkward moment once when a friend returned for her newly sharpened knife to find that it had been given away only the day before.  This may or may not have been the case with the binoculars, but they had been lying around the house for about 30 years and in that time nobody had laid claim to them, so we will never know.

Incidentally, as a jack-of-all trades dad resented having to pay for something that he felt he should be able to do himself.  He could put his hand to most small jobs: electrics; plumbing (unlike his daughter); car maintenance; bricklaying (that one I can do) and welding to name just a few.  If he had to buy help in, he would watch that person at work to see how the job was done and by the time the need for it came around again he would have the tools and the expertise to do it himself.  It was something he found very hard to give up in his older years and at 92, only a few months before he died, he was up a ladder at the top of the stairwell replacing a broken light fitting.

Credit cards, train tickets, cigarette cards, and phone cards; they are all there. If you look carefully you should be able to spot one of the early cashpoint cards, with the punched holes for the computer to read, and my incomplete set of Monkees cards that I thought had been thrown away long ago.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the binoculars.  They didn’t look particularly old and I wasn’t really sure eBay was an option; given their weight postage was likely to cost way more than they were worth. 15 minutes browsing of the wonderful World Wide Web I was able to establish that the binoculars were most likely to be WW2 Japanese ‘Big Eyes’ and that they probably came from a captured Japanese warship at the end of the war.    I found out that the word “Kohgaku” which was written by one of the eye-pieces was the company name (later to become Nippon, then Nikon).  Although I wasn’t able to find an exact match, it did look like they would be worth a bit more than I first thought.

Further investigation was needed.

Let me tell you that several tins of Brasso and much elbow grease has been expended in the process of getting these pictures to you

I sent an email and pictures out to some specialist dealers and to some auction houses who offered free valuations.  One auction house said they would probably “fetch between £300 – 400”, another said I would be “sadly disappointed” and the third said they were of “little value” and “not the type of item we would sell anyway”.  Out of the two dealers I had contacted.  One offered £800 – £1,000 and another £800 – £1200 depending on the condition.  My children rubbed their hands together with glee.  (If I haven’t mentioned before, any money made from selling the bits and pieces was to be divided between the six grandchildren).

…..and that’s how I found myself in the car park of Duxford Imperial War Museum counting a wodge of £20.00 notes.

I had established who would give me the best deal and, using the wonders of digital photography, a fixed priced was agreed before exchange.  Getting the binoculars to the dealer was not straightforward.  I wasn’t particularly keen on driving all the way to Notting Hill and there was no way I would be able to carry the binoculars on the train.  The dealer had already offered to drive to my home to collect, but I wasn’t to keen on that, what if he was a crook and caught a glimpse of all my other treasure?

The next time I was close to the M11 junction I did a recce for suitable spots for the exchange.   I ruled out the McDonald’s car park as I know they had closed-circuit TV.  I had this awful thought that anyone who saw us might think there was a drug deal going on.  Why I then decided that wouldn’t be the case in the car park of the Imperial War Museum I don’t know? Anyway, that is where I chose.

I did a bit of checking before actually agreeing to meet up and, at the insistence of Paul (husband), requested a photograph – after all no serial killer would send you a picture of themselves would they?
Not experienced in meeting strange men in car parks, I was accompanied by my own personal bodyguard (son Ben) and armed with a picture of a man who looked like everyone’s favourite uncle we pulled into the car park ready for the drop.

After all the nervous anticipation the transaction proceeded very smoothly.  Ben made himself useful by counting out the dosh while I chatted to the dealer and handed over the goods; yet more junk was converted into cash and the six grandchildren were £200 apiece better off.

All this talk of things Japanese reminded me of an incident many years ago when dad decided that it would be amusing to poke a little fun at local bureaucracy.    The Parish Council at the time appeared to be a ‘closed shop’ populated by local landowners.  Planning permission appeared to be determined by who you knew and how much money you had.  Whether there was any truth in that I don’t know, but while mum and dad were refused planning permission on several occasions, the local farmers appeared to build wherever they liked.

Anyway, dad had a brother-in-law who worked for the AA, in the department that made up signs for special events.  Dad thought it would be amusing to get him to make up as sign that said “Twinned with Yokohama”.  I can remember helping him attach this to the village sign in the dead of night (well just after dark really, but dead of night sounds much more dramatic).  The sign survived for a few days before being taken down by the village powers-that-be, tut-tutting as they did so, and tabling an urgent agenda item for the next meeting to discuss: a) whether planning law had been breached; b) by whom, though they had their suspicions; and c) to agree that even if they wanted to twin with a town, it would be they who would choose it and it would most definitely not be Yokohama, but somewhere much more fitting for dignitarial (I think I just made up that word) visits such as Provence or Tuscany!

A little story about the picture above.  I found these tools in a container on a shelf; I didn’t know what they were used for so posted a the picture on Facebook and asked if anyone had any ideas.  One friend suggested that they could be apothecary tools, and looking at the various shaped ends it  looked like a distinct possibility.  The next day I was moving some of dad’s old books and came across one that was a 1901 textbook about wood-turning, pattern making and sand casting;  there was a bookmark sticking out and the book fell open at the marked page ……..

We were of course completely wrong; the tools are finishing tools used in the process of sand casting but if I had believed in communication from beyond the grave, this would have been a pretty sure sign.

I leave you with two more pictures: one a photo that I found a couple of weeks ago that just about sums up my dad’s unique sense of humour.

….and this, which having been inspired by doing the Christmas Tree, could be the start of several creations using items from the drawers.

Episode 4: The Pig Chase and the Pheasant in the Brown Paper Bag

I have noticed two things over the past few months.  The first is that I have inherited the ‘might-come-in-useful-one-day’ gene.  While sorting through dad’s things, I can’t bring myself to throw away anything that looks like it might be a part of something else even though I know that the likelihood of me recognising that ‘something else’ is fairly slim.  In true Plisner fashion I now have a pile of these almost-useful objects waiting for their long-lost counterpart that, for all I know, could be lying  in the very same pile.   One day it will have to be dealt with…………..but not today.

The second is that my once-large garage appears to be shrinking; strangely dad’s looks more spacious than usual.

 

 

A couple of blogs ago, when I told the tale of the guns there was a suggestion that dad may have had them to try to shoot a pheasant.  This is the story of the pheasants at the end of the garden and one about the Agnes the pig; interspersed as usual with more drawers and collections.

After moving into the house near Cambridge, dad harboured ideas about using his one acre of land to become self-sufficient.  For inspiration a visit was paid to John Seymour, the 1960’s Self-Sufficiency guru on whom the TV series ‘The Good Life’ was said to be based, at his small-holding in Suffolk.  Mum recently told me that she and dad had been disappointed with the visit. While they were there, John’s wife returned from a day’s shopping in London having purchased lots of fancy cheeses.   This was not a model of self-sufficiency that mum and dad were particularly interested in subscribing to and anyway my mum always hated blue cheese.

Not to be deterred from the ideal, in the years while I was growing up, dad used the garden to house beehives, pigs, one sheep, geese, ducks, chickens and rabbits and there was always a vegetable patch full of leeks and potatoes.  Having  lived off the land for several years, whilst hiding in rural France during the war, dad was quite a dab hand at killing, plucking and gutting most things and, apart from the occasions when my pet rabbits appeared as Sunday lunch, we were all quite happy to go along with it.

Agnes, our first pig appeared when dad realised that the school where he taught was disposing of large volumes of food on a daily basis.  Anyone who experienced school dinners of the 60’s and 70’s will remember why more was thrown away than was ever eaten and I am sure that a large proportion of the pigs-swill was tapioca and re-hydrated cabbage which at my school seemed to be on the menu every day. True to form dad decided that he could put this waste to good use.  He purchased a pig, two plastic dustbins and some wire fencing.  A pen was constructed in the back garden and before too long Agnes was in residence.  Each day dad would return from school, the two plastic dustbins in the back of his Austin 1300 full of the still-luke-warm food, along with that familiar school-dinner aroma.  Agnes would snort with delight as the dustbins were emptied into her trough.  That same pattern continued for several years, during which time we bred pigs and ate pork as an alternative to chicken and my rabbits were spared.  Then new regulations came in that stated all such food had to be re-processed before it was fed to animals.  At which point the pigs were recycled into the freezer.

Much of my childhood was spent rounding up said livestock from other people’s gardens in the village (neighbouring villages in the case of the sheep).  The geese were the worst offenders and it was a regular occurrence for my brother Peter or I to have to go up to the village shop, where we would find them hissing away at anyone who passed.  One unforgettable occasion was when I was about 15.  My friend (Splodge) and I were going to a party and, armed with our 30p bottle of cider and dressed in the latest fashion of long wrap-around cheesecloth skirts, we were waiting for a lift.  Just as we were about to get in the car a pig wandered by. The next half-hour was reminiscent of a Benny Hill comedy chase, minus the scantily-dressed women: Pig; followed by Peter; followed by me; (with restricted movement in my long skirt and one hand on my head protecting the curling-tongued hair, that had taken several hours to perfect); followed by dad, who was shouting directions at everyone (including the pig); followed by friend also in long skirt and with curling-tongued hair).   The chase continued around the garden several more times: pig; Peter (who was now armed with a board to try to steer the pig in the right direction); me (skirt now embellished with leaves and twigs and hair slowly un-curling); dad getting louder and louder; friend who by now was wondering how she came to be chasing a pig in her new cheesecloth skirt on a Saturday night.  Eventually the pig was cornered and steered back to her pen.   Though slightly late, we did get to the party sporting a new rustic, unkempt look with just a mild aroma of pig.  Needless to say our pulling power was severely handicapped that night.

Always on the lookout for menu variety and free food dad had always had his eye on  the pheasants at the end of the garden.  They never came anywhere near the house and you rarely saw them, but you could frequently hear the squawking and fluttering as they moved from ground to tree.

Dad described the pheasant in his book:

“He allows me to get within ten paces, pretending not to notice the stealthily approaching homo ineptus, after which he deposits a dropping and withdraws lethargically.  Should I start running, he would lift himself angrily over the hedge, swearing while airborne”

Over the years he tried numerous tricks to entice the pheasants closer to the house so he could bag one for the pot.  One recommended method involved sewing raisins onto a thread, which in turn was attached to a brown paper bag.  The idea was that the pheasant would eat the line of raisins one by one until it got to the last raisin in the bag, by which time it would be inside the bag.  Being the stupid creature it was, once it could not see where to go it would stay put on the ground and could be easily caught.  Unfortunately for dad, nobody had informed the pheasant of its role in this plan and it gaily ate the thread and raisins, shook the bag from its head and disappeared with its raisin-filled gullet back to the hiding place at the end of the garden.  Dad also tried leaving out bowls of brandy in an attempt to make the pheasants too drunk to run or fly away.  The brandy was drunk, but the tolerance for alcohol clearly higher than expected as there was never any sign of an inebriated pheasant.

And, here is the strange part of the story (cue title music to ’Tales of the Unexpected’).  The morning after dad died, just outside the kitchen window, closer to the house than they had ever been seen before, were 5 or 6 pheasants strutting around.  You could almost hear them calling to all their friends “He’s gone; it’s safe to come out now”.

 

 

I add the following four pictures in response to comments made on my blog and an article on Hidden Museum (http://www.hiddenmuseum.net/ihre_post.html).  The article makes references to something that I had always thought was one of my dad’s many eccentricities.  He enjoyed playing with the postal service and as well as sending letters and postcards (mostly addressed back to him) with minimal address details, he would also try various stamp combinations.  For example, he would cut a stamp in half to represent half of its value or he would use foreign stamps in the wrong country or a combination of different country stamps on one envelope.  He would also stick something in the corner of the envelope that wasn’t a postage stamp at all.    If ever I went abroad I would be given a batch of postcards with the request to post them when I got there.  Dad would have already stuck on his assortment of stamps and added odd message.  A lot of these cards and envelopes form part of  ’the hoard’ and that has enabled me to illustrate his actions and quote a couple of the messages.  ”We have left the cat in the oven with enough food and tranquilizers for five days”  was closely followed by “No need to look after the cat, the tranquilisers ran out and she did not survive the trip”.  I can confirm that no real cats were ever subject to either the oven or the tranquilisers.

This postcard shows the use of both Australian  and German stamps  for postage within the UK

This one shows the usage of stamps cut to show a new value

A ‘To Pay’ stamp is used here amongst the more usual postage stamps.  These stamps used to be added to the envelopes by the Post Office if the correct value of stamps was not put on the letter.  In this case the ‘To Pay’ stamp has been franked  as if it were a valid postage stamp.

This is my favourite.  A  letter posted and franked with a Green Shield Stamp.

For those of you too young to remember, Green Shield Stamps were not postage stamps at all, but loyalty stamps, issued by many shops and petrol stations each time a purchase was made.  They were collected and stuck into a book (I’m sure I’m not the only person of my age who remembers being responsible for all the licking and sticking that required).  They could be  exchanged for items that were chosen from the Green Shield Stamp Catalogue and there were  shops of the same name dotted around the country.   I don’t remember anyone who was  patient enough to save up the 375 books required for a colour television, but in 1965 you could exchange just one book for  ’A set of six mugs in pastel colours’, ”Stainless steel salad servers” or ‘A set of six lager glasses with gold rims’.  All vital items for the 1960′s households!

I leave you with the good news that I have found the stash (I knew there would be one!)   A neat little bundle of damp fifty pound notes was retrieved from under a floor board and came just in time for mum to pay the man for trimming the trees.

Dad’s Drawers Part Three – The Fat Nude and the sea of bubble wrap

The Fat Nude (with the uneven knees)

….. and, how I ended up in Christie’s Auction House surrounded by a sea of bubble wrap, with a fit of the giggles.

The Fat Nude (my title, not the artist’s) is a pen drawing measuring approximately 100 x 60 cm framed.  It was drawn by an Indian artist called Francis Newton Souza [i] in 1962 and it has spent much of the last half century face against a wall.  You can see why.

Poor woman appears to have some terrible deformity in her left calf

This isn’t the best photograph, but I had to take it through the glass to avoid any risk of damaging the picture.  Actually, at one point I nearly ruined the picture and the story.  It’s really difficult to take a photograph through glass without getting a reflection of yourself, lights or windows.   I carried the picture around from room to room to find a light place with the least reflections and finally settled on my bedroom.  The room was light and there was a white duvet cover.  There I was standing (wobbling may be a more accurate description) on the bed, one foot either side of the picture (remember it’s size) so that I could get a shot directly from above. My camera slipped from my hand and with a fine tuned, ninja move I caught it  only to come perilously close to landing in the centre of  the ‘work of art’.  All that effort and you can still make out the shadow of my arm holding  the camera above the picture.

So, some background first…..

Dad fancied himself as a bit of an artist and the house and the garden were full of his creations and sculptures. Following his waste-not-want-not philosophy, all of these sculptures were made out of re-used materials.  Nothing ever went to the rubbish tip from our house, in fact other people’s rubbish seem to find its way there.  In the garden were upturned washing machine drums with items placed strategically on top.  Attached to the ends of old curtain rails that were stuck into the ground were plastic dolls heads, skulls (usually animal), pieces of flint and the ever useful two-pint plastic milk bottles.  In fact walking in the garden in high winds could be a hazard without a hard hat as the curtain rails would waver quite violently from side to side throwing off their chosen adornment.

Inside the house there would be creations made from polystyrene packaging, stones, bits of wood, plastic lids, old cd’s and yet more two-pint plastic milk bottles.  These creations would be pinned to the notice board, suspended from the ceiling and glued to the walls, as well as filling  any gap or free surface in the house.  Now, even I recognised that there was a limit to how much of dad’s stuff I could keep so, sad to say, many of the creations from plastic and polystyrene were duly recycled.  All that remain now are a few small items dotted around the house and some of the metal structures in the garden.

I don’t think this one, made from old plug pins, would look particularly out of  place alongside the Carl Andre’s Bricks or Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal (Fountain) in the Tate Modern 

Some time in the early seventies my dad organised a Bring-and-Buy sale to sell some of his sculptures and raise money for charity.  As was the tradition with these sales (many years before charity shops took off and well before boot sales),  people who attended these events also brought with them things to donate for sale.

……..and that was how I came to have the Fat Nude.

Dad’s poster, that I found amongst his papers (I told you he didn’t throw away anything) was duplicated in foolscap on the school Gestetner.  Anyone under 50 will probably not remember foolscap-size paper or duplicating machines.  Foolscap was the irritatingly-sized paper that was too big for A4 ring binders, so at school you ended up with a bit of your sheet sticking out of either end of your folder and it eventually became so dog-eared it was useless.  Duplicating machines (Gestetners) were what we had to use before photocopiers were widely available.  I can’t remember exactly, but there was something pink involved and you had to type on a special bit of paper which was attached to the duplicating machine.  You then turned a handle and your copies came out of the other side like magic – oh yes we really knew how to live in the seventies!

Bob Cobbing  [ii] was one of dad’s old friends who had made the journey up from North London.  He brought with him the eponymous drawing, as well as some of his own works, to donate to the sale.  I only recently discovered, when trying to find some link between Bob and the drawing, that he was one of the movers and shakers of  the London poetry, writing and arts scene in sixties London and quite probably rubbed shoulders with Souza.  Dad had met Bob through a writing group  which was run under the umbrella of the Hendon Experimental Arts Group and later led to the formation of the Writer’s Forum.  Among dad’s papers I found a programme from a play that had been put on by the group and in which my dad had appeared.

Check out the Producer!

On with the story….

Christie’s have a page on their website where you can upload a photograph of an item and request a free valuation.  I have to say I wasn’t expecting much of a response; I had previously sent them details of a pair of binoculars and they had not considered them to be of any value.  That’s another story, but I eventually exchanged them in a museum car park for over £1000, so what did they know?

Anyway, they were apparently Souza experts, having sold a large portion of the Souza estate some years previously and they were really interested in seeing the picture.

So, that is how Paul and I came to be sitting in Christie’s in London; drowning in a sea of bubble wrap and brown tape, and not taking  proceedings with the seriousness befitting of such a grand place. (Yes, we were giggling like schoolchildren).

As yet another aside to this story, I have to tell you about the bubble wrap.

This bubble wrap represented a hoarder’s success.    A few years ago, much to my mum’s horror Dad had gone for a browse around  Staples and had exited carrying a roll of bubble wrap that was nearly as big as him (not too hard when you are only 4ft 11ins).  “It will come in useful one day” he told her.  The roll then remained in the living room of the house for several months, unsuccessfully blending in with the furniture and not having come in useful on any occasion so far. Eventually when mum could stand it there no longer, I agreed to take it away to store in my garage “until they needed it”.  Needless to say it had sat in my garage for several more years again without ever  “coming in useful”.

It was while I was rolling out metres and metres of the stuff onto my hall floor to wrap the picture ready for its journey to London, that I had to smile and say out loud “You were right dad, it did come in useful”.

Christie’s is one of these places that when you enter through the doors that have been held open by the doorman, you feel like you have stepped from reality into an alternative universe.  Objects of desire are sold for vast prices, by people from privileged backgrounds to people from privileged backgrounds.  It felt somewhat surreal and vaguely comical.  Here we were with our bubbled-wrapped fat nude, sitting in the lobby watching projected images of paintings that had been sold for millions of pounds.  By the time Anastasia and Damien  had escorted us into a room to unpeel the numerous layers of bubble wrap and enthuse about the drawing,  the giggles could be suppressed no longer.  They clearly hadn’t spotted the deformed calf  when  gave us a guide price of  £3 – 6,000 and I wasn’t going to be the one point it out.

Some more drawers for you…..

…and more collections

I leave you with my Christmas card photo which this year is made up of an assortment from Dad’s Drawers.  Anyone visiting the house over the last few weeks would have found it laid out on the floor of the conservatory with a rather complicated ladder structure to enable me to get the best aerial image possible.  Don’t tell Paul, but I was up a ladder when nobody else was in the house and there was lots of leaning involved. (I am not allowed a chain saw either).

I will leave you to play ‘I Spy’ the ‘Ban the Bomb’ badge, the razor blades, the farthing and the florin…

Oh, and just to keep you posted.  Gun number four was found yesterday.  Fortunately, it has ‘Starting Pistol’ written on the handle so no panic needed.

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[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Newton_Souza

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Cobbing

Dad’s Drawers: Episode 2 – The Gun

Dad’s Drawers: Episode two and the story of the gun.

Some background first and then the gun.

My dad was an Austrian Jew, born in Vienna in 1919. Hoping to keep one step ahead of Hitler he, in his own words: “Dressed in 1938 rambling outfit; Lederhosen, hobnail boots, rucksack and Mandolin I set forth from Vienna’s Westbahnhof into the unknown[i]”; he made his way over the border into Switzerland, then over the Alps into France and later over the Pyrenees into Spain.  I can’t imagine what it must have been like to ‘up stumps’, leaving your family and worldly belongings behind; but maybe that alone was the influencing factor to his hoarding habits later in life.  I know that dad found it impossible to part with anything.  As far as he was concerned everything would have a use someday (though not sure what plans he had for the Austin 1100 that is, as I write, slowly sinking in their garden 40 years after it last saw a road).  Growing up, my brother and I had bicycles made up from wheels and frames that had been ‘rescued’ from lay-bys and rubbish tips. Living as we did in the flat countryside of Cambridgeshire; there was never a need for any fancy gears.  Just after I was married, and living in a house where the previous occupants had taken all the curtain rails (and light bulbs), we passed a rubbish tip on the edge of a building site. After some rummaging, dad presented me with a very dirty curtain rail.  “Bit of a clean and it will fine” he said.  We took it back to the house, but never made it inside as Paul, my recently acquired husband said: “I am not having that junk in my house”.  This was to be a familiar pattern in our household over the next 30 years!

Dad couldn’t even throw away plastic containers and in his kitchen the storage jars were cleaned out, 2-pint plastic milk bottles stacked very neatly on top of each other (quite attractive in their own way once filled with rice, lentils and beans).  Well before the green revolution encouraged us to ‘recycle and reuse’ my dad was doing so because he could not bear the thought of any moulded plastic item going to waste.  To date I estimate to have thrown away (into recycling bin of course) several hundred of these plastic milk bottles!

Some of those plastic milk bottles in use

I already knew about the air rifle.  It had belonged to my brother and as children we had spent many an enjoyable afternoon firing air pellets at coke cans in the garden.  Some years ago dad had put the gun under his bed, along with the flash gun from his camera, in case of intruders.  I am not sure what he would have done with the gun had he ever needed to use it.  It wasn’t loaded and too far under the bed for him to reach, maybe the fact that it was there gave him a sense of security.  The flashgun, however, was closer and charged ready for use.  He told me that if anyone entered the bedroom he would fire it off, temporarily blinding the intruder while he made his escape.

Having cleared a corner in his workroom I was ready to shift some furniture (still looking for that elusive stash of money which I was sure I would find somewhere.)  I moved a shelving unit away from a wall and, lo-and-behold, no money, but a handgun!   Now, I have no knowledge of guns but it didn’t look very interesting, was going to add nothing to my growing collections or displays; nor did it look like something I would be selling on Ebay.  I threw it in a box destined for my house and the rapidly growing collection of ‘Not-sure-what-to-do-with-this-so will-deal-with-it-later’.  ‘Later’ meaning that it would sit in a box for several years until space ran out or, as in the case of one house we lived in, until the surveyor warned us our ceilings would fall in if the loft wasn’t lightened of its load.

Anyway, I digress; back to the gun.  A couple of weeks later I was chatting to Julian, a neighbour, who had come over to look at the various ‘large items’ in the workshop (One lathe, several drills, three saws, two grinders, an engraving machine and some machinery as yet to be reached and identified).  We were looking at the remains of a third gun, an old rifle riddled with woodworm, when I told him about the handgun.

He said “Check on the internet, it may be worth something”.

So I did.  I found the make and model of the gun and duly tapped ‘Saxby Palmer Revolver’ into Google.

Imagine my horror when one of the first search items was headed:

“PENSIONER NARROWLY ESCAPES 5 YEAR PRISON SENTENCE FOR POSSESSION OF ILLEGAL FIREARM”

(Not since I had used Google to search the sentence “What can you do with a dead deer” have I been so shocked, but that’s another story altogether).

Further reading of the article told me that: a) The gun was illegal and b) It definitely would not be advisable to try and sell it on Ebay.

What to do next?  Clearly I couldn’t leave it where it was.  Some suggestions on the internet were to saw it to bits with a hacksaw or bury it in the garden; neither of those options was particularly appealing.

Then paranoia set in.  If I took it to the police station, would I be arrested there and then for illegal possession?  What would happen if I got stopped or had an accident on the way to the police station?  My friend Ann, a magistrate, offered to accompany me to the police station and vouch for me.

But, as paranoia faded an over-active imagination stepped into its place.  What if this gun had been used in a crime and my dad had hidden it for somebody?  Would they have to search the house (that my mum still lived in)?  It wasn’t such an outlandish thought.  For most of his working life in England, dad had been a metalwork teacher and, as a teacher of a non-academic subject he attracted the ‘drop-outs’. They would, instead of going to Maths or English hang around the metalwork room pretending they had a free lesson.  Dad never asked any questions, giving them jobs to do to keep their idle hands busy.  After leaving school these same boys (it was always boys as us girls were not allowed to do metalwork in those unenlightened days and I am still very bitter about that!)) would regularly drop by the house for a chat with dad.  He always had time for them and vouched for them when he could.  Education had chewed these boys up and spat them outwith no qualifications or skills, and several of them ended up in borstal or prison.  It crossed my mind that if one of these boys had turned up at the house with gun in hand asking dad to hide it, he probably would have agreed.

I now wanted to be rid of the gun as soon as possible so telephoned the BASC (British Association for Shooting and Conservation).  Julian had told me that they would be able to advise me.

They confirmed that: yes, the gun was illegal; no, I couldn’t sell it; but yes they would be able to dispose of it for me and better still they would arrange for it to be collected.

So this is how I came to be visited by a very friendly Firearms Officer from Essex Constabulary who, much to the relief of us all, took the gun away saying “Happens all the time, if you find any more just give me a ring”. It turned out that the gun was an air pistol that until recent years was quite legal until they discovered that the cartridges could be adapted for more lethal purposes.  I still don’t know when and why dad came to have the gun and why it was hidden; maybe, as my friend Heidi suggested, it was for the pheasants (that’s another story), but we will never know.

Next week off to Christies of London with the fat nude….

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[i] ‘Gravity is getting Me Down’ Fred Plisner. ISBN 0434590789

Dad’s Drawers: The Story

It was nearly a year ago when I started to tackle, what I lovingly refer to as, ’Dad’s Treasure’ and the rest of my family refer to as ‘Fred’s Junk’.  It has been an interesting journey with much humour and many a surprise.  One that has seen me exchange goods for cash in a museum car park, has  involved a house call by the local police firearms officer,   has seen an accumulation in my own house of much of the aforementioned junk/treasure, and which, later this month, will see me delivering a ‘work of art’ (otherwise known as a vulgar drawing by a famous dead Indian artist) to Christie’s of London for auction next year.  All I can say is thank goodness we have the internet; it has helped me to identify objects, find and speak to specialists and unload unwanted items.  As I write this I have been watching bids on a couple of old brass handles (Dad’s Treasure) on Ebay raise to the astonishing sum of £107.77.  Quite a nice price for junk, thank you very much.

My father died on the 28th December 2011 at the grand age of 92 and soon after, on a bleak January morning, I started to address the problem of my dad’s accumulations.  The first assessment was that I was dealing with the result of a lifetime of the hoarding of anything and everything,  with drawers and boxes full of random bits and pieces.  As the weeks and months have passed it it is clear that, although some of the things I that have found are unusual (why would anyone collect the silver foil seals from the top of plastic milk bottles?), there was much more order to the chaos than I had first thought.

As well as being spread around  the family home, where he and my mum had lived for 45 years, the hoards took up one (quite large) room which dad used as his office/writing room and  a workshop that had been designed as double garage but that had never  even caught a glimpse of one car, let alone two. To date I have just about finished the ‘office’ but have a long way to go with the workshop which is full of all those bits of machinery no self-respecting engineer could do without, in addition to all those bits and pieces that a self-respecting engineer could easily have been done without but did not.  Many of which bear no relation to engineering of any type, shape or form!

The very first search was to look to see if there was any money stashed away.  Dad would occasionally hand out money to any of the six grand-children and crisp £50 notes would emerge from the finger of a rubber glove or a bag of oily rags.  I was certain that I would discover money secreted all over the house.  There was one hiding place that my mum knew of; a small hole by a light fitting, in the ceiling of a store room.  With anticipation I tentatively put my hand into the hole.  BINGO!  A heavy bundle wrapped in rags and a supermarket carrier bag was pulled out.  Big disappointment when it turned out to be a collection of manky looking, cutlery oddments.

 

Why this particular ‘treasure’ was hidden away we will never know.  It doesn’t appear to have any sentimental or monetary value that I know of.  My suspicion is that it was a decoy in case the house was ever burgled; if these were the prize possessions of the house it would be unlikely that there would be anything of any value anywhere else.  For many years that dad walked around with a ‘dummy’ wallet in his back pocket in the hope that a pick-pocket would steal it and find only cut up newspaper and dummy credit cards.  It had been a standing joke that said wallet was never stolen.

Further searches for cash in oily rag bags and all the rubber and gardening gloves in the house revealed nothing, so with some disappointment and apprehension the real sorting begun.

What follows are pictures from one small set of drawers and a few of the various collections to whet your appetite.  There are more to come…

Who knew padlocks could be so beautiful?

……or meters

That’s why he always carried a screwdriver around with him!

This is a very small selection of the bones he had collected there was also an assortment of skulls

What follows is the first chest of  ’Dad Drawers’

 

There are more…..many, many more…..