Teddy bear eyes
All things bright and beautiful. What's in the Wendy's World jar?
“Please empty that jar and let us know what you found and kept in memory of your mother.” So asked Abigail Thomas, after I commented on her witty and touching newsletter about Falling in love with inanimate objects.
Abigail had been tempted to bid online for a one-eyed teddy bear. I said that I might have its missing eye, courtesy of my late mother, Betty, who was given a selection of teddy bear eyes by a lady on a bus. No idea how that conversation went, but my mum would talk to anyone. “I met a very interesting lady/man on the bus/train,” were her first words whenever she visited me.
My mum kept everything, believing it would come in useful one day. She was a hoarder, though she never used that word about herself.
On her memorial stone we chose the epitaph “All things bright and beautiful”, because she really did love All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.
The image for my newsletter, Wendy’s World, is a jar of odds and ends that I found when clearing my parents’ house – my childhood home – after they died in 2021.
I saw the pink plastic girl, hands on hips, gazing out at me defiantly, surrounded by random tat and thought: This is me, right now, doing the task I’ve dreaded my whole life. This is me.
My brother, sister and I had steeled ourselves for one final three-day house-clearance blitz, assisted by a chap called Duncan, who had no fear of dragging old furniture down a precarious loft ladder. He advised us to “wear our Brutal Badges”. Don’t overthink it.
Every nook and cranny contained surprises. Often hairy. Stuffed under the kitchen sink were carrier bags full of the furry combings of mum’s Maltese terrier, Pip, who had died several years previously. She had thoughts of spinning his fur into wool for a cosy jumper.
In the bathroom cabinet, in rows, carefully wrapped in tissue, were locks of mum’s hair, ranging from chestnut brown, to grey, to white as my mother aged. (She stopped visiting hairdressers some time in the 1970s.)
In a wardrobe in her bedroom (which had been too full of junk to use as a bedroom for decades), my sister and I found in an old sweet tin our pony tails from when our long hair was cut; hers blonde, mine brown.
A terrifying broken doll1 leered out from a long-unopened drawer (I’ll spare you the image). And what looked like a box of chocolates turned out to be my late grandmother’s quinine contraceptive pessaries, individually wrapped in foil. (My mum had cleared her mother’s house and brought everything home.) They were euphemistically called “Wife’s Friend”. Did they work, I wonder?
On the back of the pantry door were mum’s “hedgehog notes” from when she was the local hedgehog rescue lady in the 1990s, saying things like: “Oscar. All paws present, seems fine, offered electrolyte in water.”
I thought about sorting through the jar of oddments at the time we cleared the house, but it was such a perfect microcosm of the place that I brought it with me as it was and put it on my dressing table, where the girl continued to peer out at me.
So what IS in the jar. Let’s lift the lid…
The Beatles cake toppers
I can’t remember whose birthday cake these went on. Who painted Paul’s (is that Paul?) smudgy eye?
One of my earliest memories is of hearing Love Me Do, The Beatles first single, played on the radio while I was waking from a nap on the settee in the kitchen. It was released in October 1962, so I would have been turning two years old. My dad moaned to my mum about the lyrics. “‘Love, love me do, You know I love you,’ What kind of song is that?!”
I thought it a very cheerful song. I was too young to argue with my dad, but that was the moment I became a Beatles fan.
Easter chick
The deal at Easter when I was a child was:
1/ Obligatory attendance at church in freshly whitened best shoes. Take an Easter chick from the basket on our way out.
2/ Once home, to balance sweet with savoury, eat at least two Jacob’s Cream Crackers with butter, before being allowed to crack open our Easter eggs, which my mum arranged prettily on the hastily-cleared table. The most extravagant eggs I remember were one in the shape of a Montgolfier balloon, and another in a basket shaped like a swan.
3/ Gorge on chocolate. The most chocolate I usually got was a fifth of a Mars bar as a treat after dinner, or maybe a Club biscuit, so Easter really was a feast.
4/ Cry from the post-sugar comedown.
Little Riddle Book
I was fascinated by this. How could a book be so very very teeny and yet legible?
Example riddle: “Two bodies have I, though both joined in one. The stiller I stand, the quicker I run.” (Answer at the foot of the page.2)
As for the rest:
Buttons, washers, the end fixings off a pair of braces, gummed up toy car wheels… Bits of broken beads. A pebble.
Is that white pointy thing a stopper off my dad’s catheter bag tube that he had to wear after he had bladder cancer in his early seventies? Maybe.
Like the rest of the house, the jar contained a few gems and a lot of tat. Tat that my mum thought would come in handy for something, one day.
And now it’s got me writing about it. So I guess it has come in handy.
Thanks, mum.
And thank you
for the prompt.Once again, I’ve found reading others’ newsletters on Substack an inspiration. As well as Abigail’s, I was inspired by this newsletter by
, where she writes about finding a baby mouse in her car, naming it Wesley and trying to save it. It reminded me so much of my mum, what with her rescue hedgehogs and the time she superglued a vole to her hand while trying to repair its damaged skin.As for physical books this past week, I gulped down Abigail Thomas’s 2000 memoir, Safekeeping, in one sitting, laughing and crying as I read. I had no idea when I first found Abigail here, courtesy of a tip-off from Oldster’s
, that Stephen King has described her as “The Emily Dickinson of memoir”. But I understand why. She is a gem.I also enjoyed
’s 2023 novel, Preloved, which fits in with this week’s theme, being about working in a charity shop (my mum loved rummaging in charity shops) and the story behind some of the items donated and bought. Really funny and well-observed. The description of Saturday afternoons being the “soporific drone of the football scores” took me right back. “Even during the most fun-packed Saturdays of her adult life, she’d swear she could still hear it, on some distant plane, the heart beneath the floorboards. Peterborough United, one. Accrington Stanley, nil.”Please do like, share, comment if you are minded. It’s lovely to know people are reading this.
Till next time.
© Wendy Varley 2024
Since publishing this I have had a request for the spooky broken doll. Here she is
An hourglass.
Loved this, and loved the spread of what was in that jar. So interesting, what was saved. The only thing I wanted was a photo of the scary broken doll. Dolls are sort of scary from the git-go.
I bet this was as mu h fun to write as it is to read.
This reminds me of clearing my mum’s house, minus the dog hair. To be fair, I found all my old school exercise books that I had made Mum keep, then promptly threw away when faced with the prospect of taking them to my own home.