Almost everything we touched was as familiar to us as
our own bodies, but up in the loft we found the few items which Gran had
laughingly referred to as the family silver: some old-fashioned tableware
that had belonged to our father¹s family, and the box. It was about
the size of a large bread bin and fairly heavy but clearly not filled to
the brim as things shifted inside it as it was moved around. When it was
wiped clean of its felting of dust, we could
see it was made of dark wood with swirly markings walnut, Eleanor
thought. It had brass fittings and, set into lid in front of the handle
was a mother-of-pearl and marquetry oval depicting an exotic bird surrounded
by flowers. The edges of the lid were rounded with age, and chipped in
places though even these blemishes had a smoothness which told of much
handling and polishing over the years. What we couldn't find was a key.
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Bundles of letters still in their envelopes: addressed to my mother in my father¹s distinctive hand. The postmarks and stamps indicated that they were all written during his time in the Medical Corps when he was serving overseas, before Eleanor was born. Five notebooks, filled with my father’s writing, journals from the same period. Wrapped in a silk scarf, a pretty bracelet made from three bands of silver. I guessed it was a present from my father to my mother. Near the bottom, a big manila envelope, one word written in tall pencilled capitals, the strokes of the letters repeated over and over to make them large and black: Henry. A lump of rock wrapped in an old cloth. And a large and clumsy-seeming camera. Henry was Gran’s uncle on her
father’s side. Born of a French mother on the day of Queen Victoria's Silver
Jubilee, accounts of his adventures as all-round athlete, French legionnaire,
newspaper correspondent, and breaker of hearts - enlivened our childhoods.
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I untucked the flap of the envelope and pulled out a thin bundle of foolscap paper covered in angular, sloping writing in brownish ink applied with a broad-nibbed pen. The top few sheets were obviously written in extreme haste with many impenetrable abbreviations and notes in the margins, and were in French. The first was headed ‘Paris, 20 June 1909’. From a perfunctory scan, it would seem that Henry had
been interviewing someone.
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