Every so often, for no particular reason other than it’s a day too hot or too rainy to do anything else, one is liable to find oneself in one’s attic rootling around and finding things that have lain unlooked at for ages. I’m sure it’s happened to you. Well, it did me the other day, and amongst the suitcases, the old cricket bats, the carpet offcuts that’ll be useful one day I found two boxes. One, labelled Bits and Bobs, belonged to me, the other, Ephemera, was Rosie’s. Mine (in a tatty Badger’s original Chinese figs box) contained all sorts of souvenirs from early childhood onwards: bus tickets from an era when the conductor punched holes in them with a ‘ping’, several 5-year diaries filled with such twoddle as would have me platformed these days, a JetEx speedboat (‘the fastest boat for its size in the world’), an autograph book that once contained the signatures of Jim Laker and Tony Lock until daughter Sophie axed them in preference for the autographs of her school friends, a miniature Toby jug (souvenir of a Cornish holiday), a packet of Joss sticks, a Dinky model of my first car ( Morris Oxford LGC436) and a plastic Muffin the Mule (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZwubBK78nw). Amongst much else of little value other than sentiment.
Rosie’s Ephemera box (large, sturdy, bearing Bradleys, Chepstow Place WC2 signage and 2 x George VI 8d stamps) on the other hand was very much more interesting and seriously valuable. As well as fascinating personal memorabilia from previous generations were rare lithographs, an original cartoon by Gillray, Victorian watercolours, a page supposedly from Degas’s sketchbook and numerous prints including this one by Alfred Bestall called Spring Cleaning, drawn in 1932 for a calendar and probably included in the box because of his friendship with the family:
Alfred Bestall was, of course, the artist who wrote and drew Rupert Bear in the Daily Express from 1935 till 1965 and continued to draw the covers of the annuals for another twelve years. He was also Rosie’s godfather and used to visit from time to time. In 1980 Sophie made him a special soup using waterbutt stock, grass clippings, some mud for thickening and a couple of crushed earwigs for flavouring and Uncle Acky, as he was known, said he enjoyed it very much.
But while Ephemera in the attic boxes hasn’t proved ephemeral the sort of flowers that Uncle Acky took as his inspiration for Spring Cleaning certainly are. Here for instance are the spectacular array of poppies that this year’s June rain helped to produce in the garden, sadly here for a day but gone the next:
Thinking wistfully though it could be that, on our departure from this mortal coil, the ephemeral poppies could outlast the contents of the Ephemera boxes. The latter could end up on a skip while the poppies might remain forever on my computer’s hard drive. A nice little irony, n’est pas?