A Collector’s Item: In Memory of my Dad

There’s a well known saying that ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

For me that saying has certainly taken on much greater significance in recent months as I have contemplated what to do with a bequest of Pewter left to me, in his Will, by my late dad. 

Dad, known as Ted to his family and friends, died on 1 September 2019 on the day before I returned to school at the start of the autumn term. I miss him.

Dad loved his pewter. Me?

Mmmmmm……. not quite as much!

Yes my dad really, really did love his collection. He had built it up over 60 years and it had a significant aesthetic value to him even though its monetary value throughout that time, was probably very low. 

Apparently I had made a comment back in the late 1980’s about how much I loved his collection of pewter. Whilst I still have no memory of that claim, clearly dad got the bequest idea somewhere and so when his estate was settled it was me (and not my brother or sisters) who was nominated as the ‘lucky’ winner.

Emotional attachments can generate all sorts of responses. For me, this box of a little known metal alloy, has proved to be quite an emotional test, because despite not really liking it, it had a very obvious and tangible link to my dad.

‘To keep or not to keep? That was the question!’

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Preparing for an imminent house move in late 20200 has now forced us to focus our minds and make a decision about a few of our possessions. With the sale of our house agreed but with nowhere to move onto yet, our need for rented accommodation is becoming more and more inevitable and so thinning down these possessions has become much more of a priority.

Suddenly ‘stuff’ (and let’s face it we all have far too much of it) really does matter in our house. 

Shifting ‘stuff’ when it has an emotional attachment is really quite hard.

Dad’s Pewter collection was never really to our taste, but it carried an emotional attachment to him that made any initial thought of selling it seem like betrayal to his memory. I guilt tripped for months, with the result that the Pewter stayed boxed, forlorn, dusty and unloved in a lonely corner of the garage.

Thankfully, when we extended our loft in 2011 it meant we no longer had the space to store the ‘rainy day’ items that previously had cluttered up our attic: that most frequently used of storage areas for the unwanted, untouched and unloved in our lives. Our garage could easily become a tailor made substitute of course.

Despite that enforced clear out 9 years ago and since then, our relatively low level of hoarded items, it became clear that this 60 piece pewter collection couldn’t stay, boxed and unseen forever. It needed new homes where it could be displayed, celebrated and cherished.

So as the pending house move exercised my mind more and more, some of my dad’s own pragmatism eventually won the day! (I just hope now that dad would have approved of my decision making.)

Over the last month dad’s impressive collection of pewter has now dwindled, despite the operational restrictions we have all faced in Lockdown 2.

Approaches through Facebook Marketplace and Ebay from a diverse group of buyers in Keighley, Wakefield, Sunderland, Scotland and Hereford has seen his collection dwindle and now only a dozen or so items are left in that forlorn box in the garage corner. I’m glad to say that my dad’s collection has now spawned the creation of 5 or 6 new collections and that in all those households his pewter will be back on proud display. Where a story about a particular piece in the collection could be remembered, it was shared.

Thankfully my dad was a supreme pragmatist for all of his 91 years so I hope that ultimately he would have approved of this reluctant action. Besides, his collection was always intended for display and celebration and my allowing it to gather dust in the garage was not honouring of this concept or his decision to leave it to me in the first place. That’s my sorry justification for waving it farewell at least!

As I pondered the postal dispatch of the spirit measures photographed below I remembered once again (with the now familiar nostalgia that my recent reconnect with this forgotten collection and his absence engenders), receiving the worst rollicking of my life from my dad.

I wasn’t young, I must have been around 26 at the time and I was guilty of something terrible; I threw out the old toaster resident in the kitchen of his holiday home in Wales.

It wasn’t even a good toaster: it burnt on one side and didn’t toast on the other, but it worked and that was good enough for my dad.

Dad was livid with me: not because I had broken his toaster, but because I had then thrown it away. Apparently he could have recycled the element inside it! 

My dad was probably like yours: he was old school.

Having survived the war years of 1939-45 he would rarely throw anything away. ‘Reduce, reuse and recycle’ could have been a personal motto of my dad, way before it was more frequently adopted in the ‘noughties’ by the Greens.

So my decision to bid farewell to his Pewter collection whilst an initial cause for my own self guilt has been softened somewhat by the knowledge that my pragmatic dad would probably have fully supported this decision anyway. I was ‘recycling’ his collection within the homes of people who would now truly appreciate it.

And so dad’s pewter helped me focus once again on the true importance of the people most central in our lives. It reminded me that our loved ones should count way above the things we possess and most especially within the weird Covid-led times that we live within as we end 2020.

Whilst I miss my dad badly and would give anything for him to still be with us, I also remain so grateful that he didn’t have to suffer a ‘pewter-like’ existence in these harder times

If he was alive today dad’s reality would have meant him (despite the best efforts of his carers) being marooned in a care home for months on end and unable to see, meet, talk or hug the people in his family that really mattered to him. It is likely that he would have been increasingly isolated and alone especially as dementia took more of a toll on him in his final months, I think that a ‘Covid Lockdown’ would have been a truly terrible experience for him and dad would have hated it. 

So I proudly display his photograph in this blog; (in my view one of my best ever portraits, taken in the summer of 2018, with just seconds to spare as he wasn’t too tolerant of me wanting to ‘shoot’ him). Dad was a hugely practical and I’m not so sure that he ever fully appreciated that a ‘picture can paint a thousand words.’ His portrait reminds me that whilst the possessions will change and the collections of our lives will come and go, the person who matters will always remain and that their memory lives on.

My memory of taking that photo remains crystal clear and this is one possession of my dad’s that I will never give up and that I will always be proud to display.

Thanks for the read.

Martin