Monday 24 November 2014

Moving on

My big brother Peter had ginger hair, just like me.  He had a drum kit.  He played in a jazz band and he went to art school.  He gave me a straw hat for my fourth birthday.  This is the family photo taken on that occasion.

Peter was the oldest and I was the youngest.  He carried me home from the nursing home where I was born.  Dad was working so Peter went to collect Mum and we came home together in a taxi. Mum always talked about the journey home - it was a picture she kept in her mind's eye until the end.  Peter remembered it too and so from their shared memory I imagined it and from this a special bond grew.

I felt connected by this imagined memory to the art student brother who moved out into a new and unknown world.  He left our mundane life behind. That is what happens when birds fly from the nest.  This is the order of things. The door was open for me to follow but I did not accept the place at art school that was offered. I chose my own path but in the end it led to the same place.

Peter became a performer, a designer, a teacher, a wanderer and a man of many homes.  I was a stage manager, an organiser, a teacher, I am a perpetual traveller with my heart in many homes. Like my big brother I don't know where I want to be.  But I am still in this world and once more he has moved on.

 

 

Penny Magazine 1832

Antony Oliver, Conservator from Sheffield Archives has fixed our Family Heirloom.  To be precise he has performed an extraordinarily delicate 21 stage repair procedure to replace the spine, repair the first eight pages with a fine Japanese tissue and replace a piece of black linen that had been used to repair a torn page with filmoplast tissue.  He has also made it a bespoke box with very smart label which read: Penny Magazine, 1832.

It is not Penny's Magazine.  It is, or was, my great, great Grandfather's book.   The inscription inside the front cover reads
"This book is the property of George William Rea, left to him by his Grandfather Thomas George, son of Squire Henery  (sic) George of Blaenavon, April 5th 1937.  Signed M. T. Rea, mother of G.W. Rea."