71. The Archaeology of a Box: Introduction

Writing about the blue monkeys of Akrotiri (blog 70) reminded me again how fraught it is to interpret the past through the ideas of the present and the surviving artefacts of another age, time and place.

As I have moved during the course of my life from place to place, country to country, relationship to relationship, I have accumulated many mementoes of happy times. When I moved to live on my own in Milford in 2000 I packed all these mementoes away in a heavy-duty carton that I had kept for many years. It once contained Royal Doulton china and was stamped with that company’s trade marks and the Royal Appointment logo 1978.

One day, in a nostalgic frame of mind, I lifted the box down from the top shelf of the study cupboard where it was stored. It was heavier than I remembered - and I was older and feebler. I had to rest it on my shoulder, then carry it across the room to sit on the stool beside my desk.

I will delve down into the archaeology of this box in a number of future blogs and show you some of my treasure trove of mementos. When I opened it in Milford all those ten or so years ago I started to pile everything onto my desk. At the top were cards, drawings, tapes, photographs (some chucked in higgledy piggledy upside down still in their display frames) - a cornucopia of bits and pieces.

Below this layer were letters collected in bundles and stuffed into large brown envelopes addressed to me in Hawaii and London. Unfortunately these fat packages, which I hastily pulled out but didn’t open, slid from the top of the pile of memorabilia mounting up on my desktop and pushed a vase, top heavy with pens and pencils and letter openers, onto the steel base of the stool. The vase smashed. I looked at the pieces lying on the floor and berated myself for my aging clumsiness. It was a souvenir bought in Hollywood.

I stooped down, gathered up the fragments and pieced together the inscription. It was a Snoopy vase made in Japan*, decorated with Peanuts characters blowing kisses to each other in the shape of red hearts and a message, also in red, “Love is what it’s all about!” I put the pieces in a plastic bag and back into the box in the meantime, but I knew I would never bother to repair it. When I’m dead one of the children going through my things can discover the china shards, play at archaeologist and wonder what story they might tell.

 *Japan not China; that tells you something of its age.