posted by Lily on books, chatter

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It’s a funny thing … my contact with my father’s side of the family has been limited, especially since the death of my lovely Nanny Dougall in 1981.  Instead, we have always spent oodles of time with my mum’s family and know them all inside and out.  And yet, under mum’s house, the boxes and drawer are filled with this lady’s treasures …

Family meant everything to my Nanny – Clara Alicia Bacon – and she saved EVERYTHING.  Books, clothes, linen, embroidery supplies, china, letters, furniture … and anything that her siblings no longer wanted (Great Uncles Frank and Ernest, and Great Auntie Jean), well she saved that too.  I have Uncle Frank’s china, a beautiful leather suitcase that belonged to Uncle Ern, countless books that once graced Auntie Jean’s shelves, and my Great Grandmother Nell’s piano music and stool.

Today, we tackled the Bacon books.  Oh my.  There were so many boxes and drawers full.  Sadly, many of them were beyond repair.  Decades of sitting in bookcases, facing the sun by the sea had left them frail.  And years of storage under mum’s house had left them at the mercy of cockroaches and silver fish who clearly had a taste for the glues and papers of the past. Such a shame, especially as it is so evident, from the hundreds of inscriptions we read today, that this was a family who loved books, were widely read and regularly gave books to those they loved.

Ah such is life.  Not everything can last forever.  And there are many lovely books that we managed to salvage.  Such as a small series of Books for Bairns that first belonged to Grandmother Nell and then to Clara …

Books with beautifully rich covers …

And a selection of Clara’s and Jean’s nursing books …

They were both nurses – Clara was also a midwife – and together, for several years, they ran a small private hospital in Taree.  This wee collection of silverware – a teapot, coffepot, sugar bowl, creamer, tea strainer and napkin ring …

… is one of the sets the hospital had for each patient.  Can you imagine this hospital!  A little bush hospital, on the New South Wales coast, run by two sisters where patients’ refreshments were served with modest, serviceable silverware.  There were many more relics from the hospital in Nanny’s home – I remember thick, stiff white cotton sheets and amazing glass and metal syringes that were sterilised and re-used.  Such a world away from the hospitals we are accustomed to today.

Maintaining cheerful and close relationships was often difficult for Nanny especially after her mum, whom she both admired and adored, died just a few short months after my father’s birth.  As I open boxes and pull out decades of memories and mementos, I wonder whether this is where her careful hoarding comes from.  She couldn’t always hold the people she loved close to her, but she could care for their belongings.

Now I have a small selection carefully boxed up to take home to Melbourne with me.  Whilst I didn’t get to spend much time with these people, if at all, I will take these small tokens from their lives and add them to ours, reminding us, when we use them or read them, of those that came before and the love they had for each other.