A SLIGHTLY amended version of this essay – with more pictures! – was featured at Quillette on July 2, 2022 with the title The Opposite of Junk. LONDON, ONTARIO – Though I didn’t plan it this way, I have long enjoyed a rather handy numerical symmetry in my life. Whenever a birthday comes along which is distinguished by a zero or a five for its second digit – as will happen later this month when I achieve the full Biblical allotment of seventy – then I know that come November and December, I will also be marking significant anniversaries for occupancy in this home (our fortieth) and marriage to my favourite human being (our forty-fifth). Two of our three babies were born in this house, and all of them were raised to an approximation of adulthood here and shared precious space with a succession of four superb dogs and one so-so cat. (Not Una’s fault. She couldn’t help it if her species is dull.) Inevitably, such long-term residency in the same cottage-sized house, has left us with an awful lot of stuff that we don’t exactly use every day but cannot quite bring ourselves to unload. Some people we know performed household purges the moment their kids moved out and then, to make sure they couldn’t backslide, downsized their abode. But we are, most decidedly, not constituted this way. We’ve never felt drawn to a Spartan existence and regard Marie Kondo as a fascist. Early on Kirtley and I would occasionally try to assert that the other one had the real hoarding problem, but the ever-encroaching evidence all around us made this pretense unsustainable. In our heart of hearts we know that both of us are out-of-control packrats; though we prefer the term, ‘archivists’. At least we knew this about each other before we wed. All the warning signs were there and still we said, “I do”. I knew she had more footwear than Imelda Marcos but hers were such lovely feet that I couldn’t begrudge them an array of apparel to suit every terrain and climate and mood. And she’d already shown me the most bizarre of her collections; an immense assortment of fetchingly printed tissue-paper fruit-wrappers from all around the world. And amongst the oddments crammed into the U-Haul that I brought into the marriage was every vinyl LP ever released by the dozen or so bands that made up the first couple waves of the British Invasion; all of their covers besmirched with the clunkily grandiose signature of ‘Herm’ that I developed as a twelve year-old and couldn’t retire as early as I should have because it had become my trademark. And more disconcertingly, I retain nearly all of those albums to this day even though I repurchased most of those records in CD format and haven’t had a functioning turntable for twenty years. And let’s not even talk about books; like, for instance, my eighty-nine different titles by G.K. Chesterton alone. I did pare back my almost-as-extensive collection of J.B. Priestley titles about thirty years ago and, almost instantly regretting it, have surreptitiously built it back up to fifty-nine titles. (But when or where will I ever again find copies of Albert Goes Through, Trumpets Over the Sea or The Carfitt Crisis?) Luckily my wife’s bibliophilic appetite gradually came to rival my own, though, of course, she disputes this. So now whenever she launches into one of her “We’ve got to clear some of these out of here” campaigns, I get to say, “Sure thing, babe; you first.” Sometimes a purportedly well-meaning visitor to our home will gently suggest that our children might not thank us if all this stuff is still here for them to sort out once we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. It’s a troubling thought, all right, but only for a few minutes until – each of us taking hold of our proper minds and one of our guest’s upper arms – we haul said guest outside and set them down on the curb where, it soon becomes apparent, that their own commitment to clutter management is so half-hearted that they can’t even remain in place until the garbage truck comes by to scoop them up. Fine ones to talk, they are. Also, in the more-than-likely event that our modest little shack won’t still be valued at three quarters of a million dollars by the time we join the celestial choir (I mean, aren’t we all expecting that preposterously swollen balloon to go ‘bang’ any day now?) it might be worth our grief-stricken kids’ time to look into the liquidation potential of some of the stuff that’s inside the house as well. A good number of those Chestertons are first editions and one of them has his signature. And one of the Priestleys too. And a Walter de la Mare; not to mention dozens of other tomes whose authors were born in the twentieth century. When it comes to stuff so loaded with personal and associative significance, the simplest way to ensure trauma-free divestiture is to just keep passing such treasures along until they fall into the hands of some ignorant, thankless and ill-bred savage who can let it all go without a pang. Our minds have been much preoccupied these past few months with this teeter-totter question of: ‘Is it detritus or an heirloom?’ And it’s a question that has come to us in a rather beautifully haunting form; all tangled up in grandmothers. It all started on Ash Wednesday when Kirtley settled into her Lenten project for the year; resuscitating my paternal grandmother's crocheted bedspread. It was a gorgeous white bedspread comprised of elaborately crocheted four by four inch squares that were stitched together and surrounded by fringe. My parents never used it, partly because it was white and a challenge to keep clean (unlike some more colorful throws and rugs that she’d also made for us) but also because the craftsmanship of this thing was just as stunning as in her exquisite needlepoint pictures of flowers and a gypsy caravan which my parents had framed and put up on the walls. Mom and Dad were reluctant to employ – and ipso facto distress and possibly destroy – so beautiful a bedspread. But my fifteen year-old self wasn’t encumbered with such scruples. I pulled it out of the cedar chest where it had been carefully sequestered away when, desiring a little more privacy in which to become a moody adolescent, I moved into the basement of our Wortley Road home. I was half expecting a parent to say, "Oh no you don't, Sunny Jim," but neither one of them did. Perhaps they were distracted that week and by the time they noticed, figured, 'Well, it's too late now.' I employed it down there in my psychedelic dungeon for about six years and then through most of my residency in my East London bachelor pad until Kirtley moved in and we graduated to a double bed that needed a wider spread. That thing weighed at least five pounds. There are claims that a slightly pressing weight in your bedding encourages a deeper sleep. I certainly slept like a rock back then but that probably had more to do with my age. No waking up once or twice through the night to whiz; just one four-minute blast of well-cooked, varnish-coloured pee in the morning . . . or whatever time in the afternoon it was that I finally rolled out from under the narcotizing heft of that stupendous artifact. Small surprise then that Gran’s bedspread endured a fair bit of abuse . . . coffee and wine spills and splattered candle wax . . . but the real destructor was my very first mongrel, Myrtle, who used one edge of it as a chew toy when she was teething. (Bad dog!) Most of Kirtley’s reparative attentions went to that most damaged edge where she removed two complete rows and used some of the more intact squares to replace other disfigured sections in the interior. And now, after another forty-some years of guilty consignment to the bottom of another cedar chest, it rises anew like an only slightly shrunken phoenix; brightened and restored and ready to lend some graceful warmth to another single sleeper. At our big Easter dinner a few weeks ago, we showed off the refurbished spread and my brother Bob who is our most reliable curator of family lore, told some stories about its creator, Edith Maude (nee Morgan) Goodden. And these were stories I’d never really taken in or adequately appreciated before. Truth be told, she wasn’t the cuddliest of grans, Edith Maude. She often lived in Ottawa with my Dad’s sister’s family and in those years when she was London-based, I mostly knew her as a regular Sunday dinner guest who was tuned in far more to our parents than my older brothers and me (she always contributed a box of McCormick’s Peanut Brittle to our repast) and as an occasional and rather stern babysitter. The story of Bob’s that affected me most regarded Gran and our only sister who none of the four Goodden boys ever got to meet. Our parents’ first child, Barbara Jane, was born in 1944 with Spina Bifida and died six months later without ever leaving St. Joseph’s Hospital. How different would we brothers’ lives have been if she’d survived and flourished? I had a couple friends with older sisters who had really interesting record collections and one of them handed over an entire crate of them to her brother when she got married and moved out. And on a considerably more cosmic level than that, might the presence of a sister have helped us pick up a couple of clues about how not to drive women so crazy with our obtuse and unmitigated maleness? After nine months of eager expectation, our parents were shattered by Barbara Jane’s grim prognosis. Mother in particular went into a real tailspin of grief that was shot through with feelings of inadequacy and shame. Many days she couldn’t get out of bed, let alone make her way to the hospital to confront everything that had gone wrong and wasn’t about to get any better. Such inaction surprises me from the woman I knew who would brave anything to keep me comforted and safe. It is so unlike her, I must admit, it even disturbs me a little. No, scratch that. It disturbs me a lot. Because it shows me that there was no bottom to her misery that year. But by God, I cannot judge her for collapsing as she did. And this is where that grandmother I always found a little standoffish, stepped up to face what must be faced; rushing in where lionhearted mothers could not go and offering up whatever love and consolation she could upon this most pitiless of altars. Every day of Barbara Jane’s short life, Edith Maude was at her side, sitting sentry with her granddaughter in an antiseptic ward that was the only world that poor kid would ever know . . . and, I can’t help thinking, probably taking up her needles and crochet hooks from time to time, so as to wrest a little beauty and mercy where she could. A COUPLE WEEKS after Easter, Kirtley turned a sceptical eye on the twelve volumes of diaries that were written by her maternal grandmother, Margaret Davison Scott Bentley (nee Hudspeth) Cranch (1887–1971). These came into our possession when Kirtley’s mom went into care at the Dearness Home where she died three years ago this spring. Kirtley had only checked out these volumes cursorily; flipping from page to page and noting that her Gran always seemed to be writing about the weather. And the weather could be interesting enough in the Scottish village of Gartocharn where systems got churned up as they moved between the frequently snow-capped Duncryne Hill and the open water of Loch Lomond. But did we really need to preserve 4,380 pages worth of meteorological variations from 1958 to 1970? Coveting the space which these not very scintillating books were taking up, Kirtley’s plan was to take a picture of the whole stack, digitally scan a few representative pages and then . . . you know . . . get rid of them in some heartless way that clutter counsellors everywhere would applaud. But before taking any step so final as that, she knew she’d have to dig into these volumes a little more closely and just make sure there was nothing much going on there. Well, we’ve been passing them back and forth with each other for more than a week now, pointing out entries of particular interest and reading out favourite bits. We’re mesmerized by these glimpses of mid-twentieth century life (which often feel like they could be drawn from the century before) in an out of the way village where Margaret and her sister, Mary (Mamie) Kirtley Hudspeth – a retired matron from the Henry Brock Memorial Hospital in Glasgow who never married – lived out the majority of their final two decades together. Sure enough, the very first paragraph on every single page faithfully records that day’s weather; sometimes quite evocatively and gratefully and other times through gritted teeth. The weather was important to Margaret Cranch because it really did influence – and at times would utterly determine – what she was able to accomplish on any given day. Mamie, younger by five years (and who survived her sister by exactly five years) is the sturdier of the pair; less inclined to suffer banger-clanger headaches and more able to stick to a schedule. A blizzard has to be pretty apocalyptic to keep Mamie from making it out to early service at the church, though when she does get back, in all likelihood Margaret will have made their breakfast. It’s not uncommon for Margaret to go to bed as early as 6:30 and to wake up in the wee hours of the morning when she writes her diary entries and a formidable number of letters to her scattered family. There’s one little quirk of Margaret’s that I do find a little trying. If she’s watched a television show or a movie, she’ll almost always give the title and sometimes a brief description. But this never happens with books. Even though she’s always got one on the go and expresses her pleasure that a pile of books has materialized over Christmas and at birthdays, I have yet to come across a single titular or authorial citation. We also have a few of Mamie’s less voluminous journals which are mostly filled with notes relating to her hospital work, some really fine sketches in pencil and pen, and lots of quotes, often of a religious nature, from great poets and writers who are always identified. So-called world events rarely intrude in Margaret's pages. The assassination of JFK really shocked her, coming just a couple months after her half year visit to Canada in 1963 which gave her a vivid appreciation for how life was lived in the New World. And the funeral of Winston Churchill (1965) evokes a lot of reflection on the two World Wars; the first one in which her husband almost died and sustained the injuries from gassing that would carry him off by 1934; and the second one in which Kirtley’s mom, Sheila, serving as a nurse in India, met the Canadian serviceman she would marry five weeks later and go to live with on the other side of the globe. But none of these world-shaking events take up more diary space than is devoted most years to the week-long campaigns of spring cleaning in which, room by room, she and Mamie turn out, wash and reassemble the entire cottage. We also follow, installment by installment, the sisters’ progress in knitting sweaters and stockings and shawls for all the loved ones in their lives. The dimensions of these sometimes very elaborate creations had to be updated each year as Margaret’s grandchildren grew and then, hoping they’d got everything just right, all that knitwear would be packed into the enormous Christmas parcels – along with sweets and calendars and more unidentified books – that were sent out to different chapters of their family. Part of Kirtley’s fascination with these diaries are the many qualities and attributes that were passed on from her Gran to her Mom. And in certain photographs their physical resemblance can also be uncanny. In one entry, just before turning in way too early after a particularly trying day, Margaret describes herself as “utterly utterly” which set Kirtley off in laughing remembrance of her Mom’s very words. Recovering from a cold, both ladies would pronounce themselves as “bettering”. And if you’ve just set out some flowers or smoothed out the curtains, you were “garnishing” the room. In 1970 when Kirtley, her Mom and sister all stayed in Gartocharn for a month, there are entries in the final days when Margaret is bracing herself to get through the sadness of their imminent parting. She has extended herself so unstintingly in hosting them that she actually faints from over exertion a couple days after they’ve left. And a few days after that, she spends an entire afternoon sitting outside and recharging her batteries by, “watching the clouds & the shaking of the trees – very soothing and peaceful.” This reminded me so much of a day at Port Bruce when Kirtley and I left Sheila sitting in a lawn chair just out of the sun to head down to the pier and returned a couple hours later to see her in exactly the same posture in that chair; apparently still breathing we were relieved to see. That 1970 volume is my favourite of the diaries as Kirtley’s gran provides so many vivid sightings of the girl I would meet for the very first time only one month later in film class. “Kirtley is a darling,” Margaret writes, “tall and very slim,” “with masses of long hair,” and “sitting with her sister on the lawn,” both of them “wearing the beautiful dresses they had bought” at Laura Ashley’s first shop in South Kensington. That is some first class reporting there, Margaret Davison Scott Bentley (nee Hudspeth) Cranch. All of your very limited edition books are safe with us. We’re hanging onto them for dear life.
4 Comments
Susan Cassan
19/8/2022 08:18:02 pm
Oh good luck with anything to do with getting rid of books! Even those diaries which seemed so unpromising have such treasures. What a rare experience to glimpse Kirtley through another's eyes so many decades ago. Good decision. Hang onto those books!
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Vincent Cherniak
19/8/2022 08:19:29 pm
Nice piece.
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Bill Craven
19/8/2022 08:22:53 pm
Your article on family junk struck a strong chord. We have similar problems. I went to move an antique crib to check a light plug the other day and found it was wedged by a toy cradle. We have photos of most of our grandparents' grandparents. Elizabeth's mother died just a month short of her 104th birthday, so there goes the family archives!
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Max Lucchesi
19/8/2022 08:27:08 pm
A really sweet and sensitive piece, Herman; the side of you as with Dot L Sayers you like to keep hidden, lost in your American spelt (spelled) fulminations. A shame, because it's your most attractive side. Many happy returns on your forthcoming three score and ten years. With all that's happening across the border, I'm sure the fulminations won't be too long in coming. Am looking forward to ducking.
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