Bric-a-Brac & Byegones
Most people like to rummage, hoping to find some treasure or trinket for next to nothing. Unfortunately, charity shops are no longer cheery grottos of disorder having morphed into overpriced boutiques. Woe to the down at heel dreamers, the stylish yet skint and those of slender means. Second hand on the high street has sadly become as regimented as any other outlet. Worse still is the scarcity of Bric-a-Brac shops, scrappy, overladen emporiums of everything people almost wanted and discarded keepsakes. Tinselled caves of melancholia stocked with the remnants and revenants of past lives, old photograph albums foxed with age, Victorian scrap books with pages missing, Rosaries and garish jewellery, costumes of the hapless, wedding rings from unfortunate unions and sheet music for songs no one listens to any more, abandoned toys from yesteryear and tattered lace recalling Miss Haversham. Ever since Dicken’s wrote ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ Bric-a-Brac flourished, but no more. In recent years they had become the orphans and strays of shopping streets and largely overlooked aside from the perennial magpies of which I count myself. These days, car boot sales suffice but they are often in hard to reach locations for those dependent on public transport and lack the charm and faded gentility of Bric-a-Brac emporiums, where one could strike up some kind of rapport with the owner by merit of irregular visits.
In the past year, the remaining two local Bric-a-Brac shops have shut down due to the deaths of the respective owners whose combined age must have been in the region of 170. How lucky we were to have had them! The first, was run by a charming Italian gentleman whose name I sadly don’t know. Whenever a customer entered the shop, he would hide an ashtray full to the brim below the counter. Now and again he really would have a genuine antique but he could also romanticise even the most humble bit of junk, with lyrical ease. So stricken was I to discover that he’d died during ‘lockdown’ that I even wrote a poem about it that I’ve just had the pleasure of recording. It was seeing the shop empty, all the ornate clutter swept away, along with his life. Within a month or two it had become a nail bar on a street that already had one. That shop had been the soul of the thoroughfare, something real and familiar and it had virtually vanished overnight. In walking distance was ‘Memories of Mortlake’ run by elegant Elka from Austria. I had been a regular for nearly 30 years. The front of the shop was bright baubles, old carvings, scrapbooks, embroideries, brooches, a dazzling array especially in Summer when the bright light would make prisms in the window. In Winter, Elka would place holy relics in the window, pushed up against Welsh Dolls and little figurines of Dutch boys & girls. As Elka aged, still with regal posture and Katherine Hepburn style, so the shop became more unruly and yet no less appealing. Unfortunately she became increasingly possessive of the items. One afternoon I picked something up and asked the price, she practically pulled the object from my hand, exclaiming ‘Oh isn’t it pretty! I’m not sure that I want to sell it.’ Elka lived above the shop that was her life. As I was to discover, she kept the best for herself but she was kind enough to let me see the upstairs of her domain which was the most glorious antiquarian mess that I’ve witnessed. Sat along the three flights of stairs were Victorian Dolls in different stages of dishevelment propped up on picture books of equal age. The walls were crazily paved with masonic certificates, Edwardian religious tracts and odd paintings, mainly dramatic biblical scenes. In the lounge, there was nothing but sculptures, all these stone heads staring into the cosy dusk of a room rarely used whilst the roof garden festooned with Ivy and other tangles of plants had become a graveyard of broken statues, still beautiful but past reclamation. The kitchen was overrun with vintage ceramics and yet more paintings and prints including one by Margaret Tarrant, an illustrator of whom I am particularly fond. The picture was of a little Pan playing his pipes for two enraptured children. I still have that picture on the wall by my desk.
Nina Antonia 