Our reporter waxes lyrical on collecting in England
I’m a collector. Not an Antiques Roadshow-style collector (though I do hope I will one day find an elusive majolica-ware item in a junk shop); rather, I am a collector who likes to collect oddments from my own history.
I had three motives for planning my recent holiday to England. It was time for my partner Aden to meet my family (I have him locked into a committed relationship raising our four cats together), visit delightful op shops in small seaside towns and see my Granddad Ken.
As I was planning the holiday I kept experiencing what I could best describe as a sense of loss before I had actually ‘lost’ anything at all. I became aware this might be the last trip home where I could see and be with Grandad. I planned to relish every moment I was with him.
The first items I collected as a child in England were small pieces of blue and white china in a section of the garden that had previously been used as a rubbish tip for the 18th century house we lived in. I felt an impossible need to document my finds and preserve them in glass jars with brown paper labels that described the ‘dig’ date, location and imaginary owner.
I think my granddad is a collector too. He has a thousand war stories that can be rendered relevant to any conversation, tales of the railway from the 1940s to the late-1980s and a collection of tattoos embedded into his skin in various countries around the world.
When I was young I remember sometimes catching a glimpse of a faded blue-grey portrait on his forearm just visible beneath the check pattern of his rolled up shirtsleeve. These glimpses were so mysterious. Who was this man? Where had he been? Who was the woman in the portrait? She was, it turns out, my Gran Lavina..
The portrait of gran on his sleeve made me think that maybe he too was trying to document his history. So on this trip to England I would collect images of him. I would document him and his home and archive my findings. These would be my holiday snaps.
I think my gran’s side of the story would be a little different to my romanticised version of grandad’s tattoo-collecting process. She was devastated when he returned home from the war. He left their house with clean skin and returned decorated with exotic animals and indecipherable foreign lettering.
My collection process would aim to be as objective as possible. My grandad and I would be like strangers on an archaeological dig. I would ‘dig’ to discover the fragments of his tattoos. I had expected he would be reluctant to show me his tattoos in full, having previously told me many times to not get a tattoo as they were “not for ladies”, but I was wrong – he was actually keen to let me photograph his tattoos.
(I still won’t get a tattoo though.)
I started to take photographs of the images on his arms, the elephant under a palm tree, the sword with the snake wrapped around it and the portrait of gran. As I asked him to change his pose he began to reveal the countries where he began his collection, the first one acquired when he was posted to Kuala Lumpur in World War II.
The last image I wanted to collect was of a dragon clutching a snake on his chest. Initially he felt uncomfortable revealing it, the most impressive of his many designs. It was always hidden under his shirt.
Opportunity knocks
Key items I needed to buy in op shops included buttons (preferably with a little bit of shirt left stitched on the back), small ceramic horses and old fur brooches from the 50s.
"The op shop windows sparkled like museum collections. The window displays in England are works of modern art. Elements of popular culture through the decades are combined in installations that recreate high tea in the 1950s while gathering the detritus of the region from the Victorian period to yesterday."
I spent my childhood years in England’s West Country so I felt confident I would be able to navigate my way through the winding country lanes, which only appear wide enough for hatchbacks. Fingers crossed we wouldn’t meet a tractor!
In fact I was a star performer when it came to navigating county towns and lone villages. It was like I was a homing pigeon, sensing op shops at every turn. The op shop windows sparkled like museum collections. The window displays in England are works of modern art. Elements of popular culture through the decades are combined in installations that recreate high tea in the 1950s while gathering the detritus of the region from the Victorian period to yesterday.
The winning towns for good op shops include Exmouth, a delightful seaside town (reportedly the first seaside town in England), Crediton, the town that was built for retirees, and the stunning Cullompton, where you are likely to get entangled in the leashes of the many small dogs accompanying their retired companions.
I found my ceramic horse in Exmouth. He is lovely; small, glossy and white like an English winter. He has a friend, also from Exmouth, a turquoise horse, petite and glamorous. They both survived the trip home wrapped in stockings and nestled against a kilo of buttons, belt buckles and clip on ear rings. This small muster of two has now been added to my collection.
The family
I was so excited as we drove towards Devon. Aden was finally going to meet my older sister; I could finally prove I was the normal one in the family. Six foot nine in the old language, the laughter echoed through the village as Aden entered my sister’s house. Aden simply could not stand up straight in houses built in 14th and 17th century England.
He soon adapted. As he entered a room he would head straight for the nearest chair to sit down, the quicker the better to avoid the hysterical laughter from my nine-year-old nephew.
I think Aden took meeting my family well. He survived the taunts from my nephews about his inability to complete a Rubic cube, understood you can’t play basketball aggressively with a niece who is five foot three and discovered an overweight family cat can catch a rabbit even if he has no teeth and can’t jog.
The time we spent with my family was brilliant: outings to the pub, shopping for school shoes and bonding while watching repeats of English TV on Sundays. What more could I have wanted from our first family meeting together?
Home
The arrival home in Perth was bittersweet. I instantly missed my sister and it hurt to be in a different country. I missed the excitement of finding new shops and the chance to add exotic items to my collection. And I wanted to see the glimpse of a grey tattoo in the flesh. We unpacked the tiny white horse. This is our holiday, small and compact, a memento of our first trip to England together as a family. Now we are busy planning a trip to Sydney to visit Aden’s sister and launch my next attack on undiscovered op shops. The collection grows.
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