On ephemera
Or, why am I dressed as a Victorian orphan?
What do you hold on to? Recently we’ve been decluttering. We’ve taken bags and bags of too small children’s clothes to charity shops and finally got rid of broken plastic toys. We’re negotiating the future of a toy garage with cars that play annoying jingles.
Some things are easy to get rid of. Others are not. Will we ever re-read old university essays? What do we do with past notebooks? Then there are books that meant something at particular points in our lives.
We’re partly spurred on by wanting a tidier house, and partly by the experience of sorting out my parents’ belongings.
And that’s led to conversations about what you keep, what you pass on, what means something to you, and what will mean something to the people you leave behind.
I’ve held on to some things which will be meaningless to my children when they find them after my death. My mum’s sweatshirt from the choir she sang with for 40 years, which carries memories of childhood weekend afternoons sitting on pews in draughty churches listening to rehearsals and then performances. Her copies of John Rutter’s Carols for Choirs. I couldn’t bear to listen to Christmas music for the first year after she died – now I don’t want to give away the scores. I’ve kept my dad’s school reports, Cambridge Union debate cards, and the invitation to one of the Queen’s garden parties. I found references for my granddad for carpentry work from the 1930s.
All of these mean something to me. But a generation on, they will be meaningless. The memories can’t live on with the objects. And yet I have them tucked away. Kept for the sake of it.
Then there are the photographs. There are some absolute gems. I’ve never seen most of them, including photos of my christening. I’ve found them in shoe boxes tucked away under shelves, and in archive boxes in cupboards, some in a plastic bag.
I’ve looked at many photos in wonder and others in perplexity. Most are not labeled so unless you recall the event being photographed, you don’t know when, where, or in some cases, who you are looking at.
Tucked in the back of the folder containing one of my brothers’ official graduation photographs was this:
That’s me.
But why am I dressed like that?
Another box contained more photographs, and as I flicked through slightly too far away, slightly out of focus images, a dim memory resurfaced of a Victorian-themed primary school fete. They must have had a studio as one of the attractions.
Mystery solved.
But then there are the real Victorians. Ghostly photos of people who are presumably great-grandparents or possibly uncles or aunts. No names. No clues. And miscellaneous photos of babies, who could be our parents or grandparents, but we don’t know for sure.
I’ve kept them. It feels wrong to throw them away. But I also don’t know what to do with them.
There is one photo which is helpfully labelled: squirrel on wall, June 1982.
I recognised the location as the back of my grandparents’ house.
Yes, I’ve kept it.
Memory and nostalgia is a funny thing. I’m sentimental about old photographs too: I used to love sitting with my Grandma looking through a box of them and now that box is mine. I sorted through them but it was hard to throw anything other than bad or boring landscapes (quite a few!) or ones with people’s heads chopped off (more than you’d credit!) away.
Yes, the many, many photos of mountains taken across Europe have gone, as have photos of my parents’ friends. Yes, I know who some of them are, but those photos don’t really mean anything to me. I love that you have a box of photographs you used to sit and look at with your grandma, what a beautiful thing.
This one is a tough read for me Rachel, it’s the reality I choose to ignore on a daily basis! I do have people regularly try and present it to me, with questions like “who will inherit your collections?”. I never have a good answer because I’ve not really considered the meaning of everything I’ve kept, or go out of my way to add to, to someone else – it’s why I struggle to answer questions about the monetary value of my collections, that would imply selling it! I think keep all this as long as you can, every time I walk around a museum I’m glad that someone thought to hold onto such items, no matter how mundane they must have seemed at the time.
I am a huge fan of ephemera. I remember going to a museum in Aberystwyth as part of my history degree and being delighted that someone had kept bus tickets. These are all the everyday bits of life that get forgotten and discarded but they matter. I don’t think you need to know – let along justify – the legacy of your collections. They are meaningful to you and you take joy in them. That is enough.
That is a very lovely photo, Rachel. I have just binned 100s of photos because the world has gone entirely digital since I took arty photos of flowers and statues back in the 90s.
I’ve found & kept some pictures of relatives, and this time I spotted that my Grandmother was blind for years before she admitted to it. I’m not sure how we didn’t notice how poor her eyesight was, although, it was her own decision to make.
My surprise discovery was left over IVF meds and all the documents that went with it. The needle is at least a metre wide but I desperately wanted children, so this needle phobic went through with the treatment. The now 15 year old wasn’t terribly interested : it’s still his legacy.
I found the pics of a young me, difficult due to not looking anything like I thought. I’m one of those people that can’t find their edges, I struggle to locate where I am spatially and I imagine I’m really tall or really big. Nope, I’m hobbit sized till about my late 40s.
I’m not a collector apart from books which marks me out as ‘old & boring’ but I don’t care, I keep all the books I love.
Deciding what to bring with you is hard isn’t it and as you say, some things are part of other people’s legacy. I’m not sure I appreciated many things my parents went through until I was a lot older, and even then, I’ve found things and wished I could ask them about them. Collecting books does not make you old and boring! I’ve been collecting books for as long as I can remember! And no, I haven’t read them all.