Blowing the dust off the bookshelf

After all the old books, family photos and ephemera got packed away in preparation for the works on our house, somehow they got pushed to the back of the cupboard and also to the back of my mind.

The bookshelf blog got a little dusty as other things took up my time: work, kids, volunteering...

However, during the summer holidays, I raided the homestead again and carried off photos, postcards and other bits and bobs and this has prompted me to get writing on the blog again.

One of the most remarkable things that my mother did for me was to collect every postcard I ever sent home from my travels. Sometimes I sent lots of cards, other times she had to wait months for a scrawled note from somewhere in the world but they all went into the albums and onto her shelves.  It was a life I was too busy to write down but now when I look at the cards I am prompted into recalling places and events that I had all but forgotten.

Today is her birthday but it was I that got the most wonderful present. Now as I sort them out, put them in date order and save them into postcard albums, I realise that she has gifted me the record of my life.

Advice to cure ennui

Sometimes you have those days where you just feel cheesed off for no reason at all.  Utterly normal occurrences seem like they are happening expressly to irritate you, perfectly civil requests grate on you and every little task seems a bit too much trouble.

These are the days when you need to dip into The New Illustrated Universal Reference Book for a little snippet of life advice from the chapter A Great Thought Every Day. Little did that (presumably) long gone, un-named compiler of great thoughts imagine that one day, 81 years later, a slightly grumpy middle aged lady would be pleased by their choice of a Chinese proverb for 7th November,

It is easier to know how to do something than to do it.

Never a truer word spoken this side of Beijing.

Equally pleasing, if a little more baffling, is the Russian proverb for the 8th November

It is better to be lame than always seated. 

I'm going to ponder that one as I limp off to do the washing up.

A Diwali card from the album

Mum wasn't much of a traveller but she loved getting postcards from people who were, people like me. She would pin them onto a notice board until it was full then transfer them to albums.  When I brought these albums home with me, took all the postcards out of the album and put them in date order, the (unkept) diary of my 20s was laid out before me. What a gift that was to leave me. My own life archived and passed on.

She was also interested in other cultures and religions and loved being given bits and pieces from my travels, many of which have returned to me now.  For a few years I lived just off Belgrave Road in Leicester - a road lined with Indian restaurants, shops and businesses and famous for its lights at Diwali and Christmas. I got into the habit of sending Mum a card for Diwali.

This is one that I found on her bookshelf, sent for the 2nd November which was the date of Diwali that year, and posted here for Diwali 2014.

Remembering Grandad on his birthday

It was my Grandad's birthday this week. He would have been 94. Although his name was Frank, he was always known as Jim. I have no idea why. No one seems to remember.

On Mum's bookshelf there are many pictures of him, which I will share over the coming months.

For his birthday, I'm going to put up one of my favourite photos of him.

Jim is about 8 years old and sitting in a garden in Ipswich. I don't know who Doug and Denis were - my Grandad was an only child. They have some charming metal toys which they are showing off to the camera. Two of them look like they might be in school uniform. The shadows look long, perhaps they were playing together in the garden after school one day when someone (my great grandad?) took a snap.

When I look at it, I see my own 7 year old boy in that  little boy with the big grin, captured on film in the late 1920s.

A handsome fellow from Norwich

Another delve into the Victorian album from Mum's bookshelf, and this time I wonder who this handsome chap could be.

He was surely a relative of mine since the picture was taken in Norwich but which of the great greats he might be is anyone's guess.

No date and no clue as to the sitter, but it was probably taken around about 1892, or maybe a little earlier as the Norfolk CC website suggests 1888, since the purple stamp on the beautifully presented cabinet photo indicates that the photo was taken in Gavin and Banger's St Giles' Studio (they had three studios in Norwich , according to earlyphotographers.org).

The old White Lion Street can be seen, as my great great might have seen it as he walked around the centre of Norwich, on this picture from the Norfolk CC website

Any further information about sitter or photographer gratefully received.

Breakfast in the 1970s

So far on this blog I've looked at cookbooks from the 1930s that emphasised the value of thrift, seasonal shopping and reducing waste for the 'squeezed middle' between the Wars. However, by the 1970s food had started to look more like the stuff we eat today, albeit a bit more orange in many cases. Moreover, the idea of eating and food as an aspirational activity rather than a re-fuelling exercise seems to have returned in earnest.

This book, published by Hamlyn in 1976 and sponsored by Brooke Bond/Oxo, shows how eating was reflecting a wealthier and more leisured ideal of family life.
 

Gone are the sections on feeding invalids who presumably with the success of the NHS were a rarity in the spare bedroom by 1976, and in come sections on entertaining at home. Dishes and cutlery are from brands, largely associated with 'groovy' new design, and name checked at the beginning of the book so you can replicate the tables you see photographed: Heal's, Habitat, Casa Pupo, Elizabeth David, John Barker, Selfridges, Conran, Josiah Wedgewood and Sons Ltd. Food is photographed as a package along with the accessories, with backdrops that include salmon mousse placed artfully on a jetty at Nauticalia, Shepperton that are meant to suggest aspirational middle-class lifestyles.

It's a far cry from meat paste sandwiches at a drop leaf table in the living room.

Let's start with our weekend 70s breakfast or brunch, which the book explains to an audience almost certainly unfamiliar with such a concept (actually late rising is also probably a fairly alien idea too) as a "combined breakfast and lunch which saves cooking two meals",  in which muesli makes a star appearance as well as the classic kedgeree.

Muesli would have been a hard sell to the men in my family, who in the 1970s still expected cooked breakfasts, and I'm pretty sure that coffee served instead of tea would have raised a few eyebrows.

However, cheap foreign travel and money to spare for the older members of the family meant that even families like mine became aware of the 'continental breakfast' as a roll, some butter and jam and a weak coffee was dubbed.

The blurb that goes with this also reminds us that by now the figure of the  'slimmer' had appeared at the table - a concept hardly necessary in the cash-strapped or rationed years of previous cookbooks in the collection.

I recall the women in my family going through all the faddy diets of the 70s and 80s to little effect (remember the F-Plan - obviously the family joke was what the F stood for). So while "hungry men and children" were still getting bacon and eggs at the breakfast table (in nicer dishes now - I rather like all the crockery in these pictures, I have to say) with fried bread, the ladies of the house were nibbling oats and apples and having tea with lemon.

The recipes for breakfast actually look quite nice despite the shoe-horning of Stork margarine and/or Oxo cubes into many of them - not thankfully the muesli- although kidney omelettes would be an unlikely breakfast find these days.

Time to don the kaftan perhaps and whip up some kipper toasts...

10 Norfolk Superstitions

Although I was born and raised in Ipswich, my maternal grandmother is a Norwich lass who grew up on Long Row, off Angel Road. My mother spent many happy hours in Norwich and her speech was peppered with Norfolk dialect words, despite her strong Suffolk accent. Perhaps that's why she particularly liked an old book that sat on the bookshelf for as long as I can remember - The Land of the Broads by Ernest R Suffling, published in 1892 (based on the date of the Great Eastern Railway timetable at the back of the book).

Ernest, living in West London, but Norfolk born and from the Broads sets out to guide the Victorian traveller around this little known district. Here, he says, you may still hear pure Saxon words - little did I know that when I used a 'dwile' or was called a daft 'mawther ' as a child that I was speaking pure Saxon too. 

Here is Ernest's description of the "natives" (his quote marks), although I have to say that our branch of Norfolk stock are small and dark - we used to joke we were descended from the Iceni- rather than broad shouldered and  "all bone and muscle."

The "natives" are a fine race, usually with the flaxen or tawny beards, fair skin, straight noses and blue eyes characteristic of the Norse or Danish type. They are noted for their hardihood and endurance...

As you'd expect from a race that lives in the wilds where no motorway has ever penetrated, Norfolk people are "exceedingly superstitious" (my mother certainly was), "even in these days of enlightenment:" Ernest continues, "doubtless much of this is due to ignorance, which the Board schools will probably assist in dissipating." 

He then goes on to list 10 splendid Norfolk superstitions

1. If a crow croaks over a house, someone will die there within twelve months.
2. Nobody ever thinks of buying or selling, or commencing any new undertaking on a Friday.
3. When going to market to sell corn or oxen, if you meet a cross-eyed man or woman you had better return, as your dealings will not prosper.
4. Poppies brought into a house cause the occupants headaches and fainting.
5. Primroses carried into a house bear ill luck with them.
6. If a bow of yew be brought into a house at Christmas, one of the inmates will die ere another Noel comes round.
7. If a red bee flies in at the open window, a male visitor will call; if a white one, a lady will call
8. St Mark's night (April 5th) is considered a favourable time for spells to be cast and for sights (uncanny) to be seen. If one has the courage to go alone to the porch of the village church on St Mark's night, he will see pass before him, at midnight, the shadowy forms of those who are to die before next Easter. Some also say, that those in the village who are to have a serious illness during the same period will be seen.
9. If an unmarried girl, or young woman (mawther) goes into the garden at twelve o'clock on St Mark's night and uses the following spell, her future husband will appear with a scythe in his hand. She must sow some hemp-seed and as she sows must keep repeating these lines:- 

Hemp-seed I sow-

Hemp-seed, come grow! 

He that is my true love, 

Come after me and mow

Then the ghostly lover mows - or would do so if he ever appeared.

  10. Here is another charm: The maiden sits before a mirror in her bedroom, in which must only be            one candle shedding a dim light. At twelve o'clock she says:-

Come lover-come lad,

And make my heart glad;

For my husband I'll have you, 

For good or bad.

Then the future spouse looks over the maiden's shoulder into the glass.

Ernest rather ominously warns that "several fatal jokes have been the outcome of these ghostly incantations" but doesn't elaborate further.

So be warned...