Baby Love: House Clearance as Heritage
I have been clearing my great uncle’s house with some relatives. He was born in 1920 and lived in a world where sealing wax, the Britannica Encyclopaedia and a record player were everyday items in life. This 1950s kitchen cabinet with inbuilt pastry board represented a thoroughly efficient and necessary part of the kitchen. Even just a few photographs show how life has moved on since he was my age!
Text from a really old first aid handbook!
The house-clearers represented three generations of family with three different perspectives on what we were doing. For the oldest generation the objects we were sorting did not represent anything exotic or unfamiliar; they were quite everyday and not worth keeping. For the middle generation also, objects were not valuable due to their aesthetic or tangible worth. The objects the middle generation chose to keep were based on intangible, emotional connections bundled up in the physical object - the record he used to play as they danced around the front room (Baby Love), the tea towels from exotic holidays, the hat he always wore. For this generation salvage was communing with (the memories of) their uncle; as was the upkeep of his garden, one of his favourite pastimes.
For the younger generation, at one more remove from 1920, many of the objects seemed exotic by way of their unfamiliarity. The stamp album with the old fashioned spellings and all sorts of kitchen implements which looked almost alien they were so unfamiliar. The distance from the emotional connection for this generation also made room for experimentation. I took the china collection for a friend’s wedding where the cups became one off candle-holders; several other kitchen items went to form the staple objects in my cousin’s new home. The writing desk joined my collection of wooden furniture in my room and now happily holds, amongst other things, a laptop. For this younger generation objects from the house were not viewed as objects for veneration but candidates for reinvention, of use in the future world.
One of the objects that had us all intrigued was my uncle’s wartime diaries. The subject of what he did in the war was always kept hidden; deemed too painful to be on public display and discussed in public. But it transpired that throughout his very busy period of active service he kept diaries; detailing every film he saw, the towns he visited and the situations he found himself in. Some of the entries were funny; ‘Italian dies from drinking antifreeze’, ‘won a cow, milked it’ and others were profound in their simplicity, ‘Our Wedding Day’. The detail provided enough information to trace his steps across Europe and beyond. Something felt a little bit transgressive in reading that which was always deliberately kept hidden; it is morally ambiguous to read the diary of a dead man; akin to clearing out his underwear draw! I still wonder whether it would it have been more honouring to burn them on sight?
I’m not sure, but they made some jolly good yarns and explained why he’d kept a copy of ‘Algiers to Austria’ on his bookshelf.
Wedding Day, 1945
All of this reminded me of some of the things we’ve been thinking about on the course for my MA. Lowenthal’s attitudes towards the obligations and behaviours of family and legacies; Pearce’s On Collecting; the many philosophical musings on the necessity of treasuring the past for our present mental health. Does collecting/ curating /saving things from the past inhibit our moving on in the future? And how do we keep our memories of our own pasts without the objects? What happens when we run out of space in the (family) archive? What filters can we put on that collecting process? I don’t have that many answers...yet!
In part II I will discuss the impact of time on what is impressive digitally, our own aging and some more insights into my current work. For now, have lovely weekends everybody!
Lovely piece Becs, I particularly like your observations of the way each generation reacted to the experience.
ReplyDelete