A Collector is Born

Extracted from: Bits of String Too Short to Use by Jennifer Beck, Mary Egan Publishing, RRP $40.00

Many years ago, I was talking with a friend who was dealing with her late mother’s estate. This involved trying to clear out her house.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

She sighed, and held up an Agee jar crammed full of miscellaneous bits of string.

When I looked at the label which had been carefully printed and pasted on that jar, we both laughed. Why keep stuff like that? But the words stuck in my mind, and have become the title of this book. Unfortunately I’ve lost contact with that friend, but would like to say, “Thank you for the inspiration”.

I used to be a collector. Not anymore. Time has caught up with me. Now I’m well past retirement age, and faced with a future of unknowns I’m feeling weighed down by possessions. I actually don’t like to think of mine as ‘stuff’, or ‘clutter’, though sometimes I do. When I watch TV programmes on what is now called The Hoarding Syndrome, (among the many other ‘syndromes’ which have recently been discovered, affecting a supposedly large percentage of the population – how do they get those figures?) I feel uneasy. Yes, I find it hard to make decisions to get rid of things. Nostalgia is hard to ignore. But once, each find was a treasure, and I have derived great pleasure from discovering items and making them part of our home and family life.

Now I get pleasure from looking back on that life, and seeing connections and a relevance that I was not aware of at the time. As a writer, recalling the experiences that led to the stories, and as an older person avoiding thoughts of life-changing falls, loss of driving licence, power of attorney and which retirement village might best suit our needs…

I also now see life as a collection, a series of stages, events, impressions, decisions and relationships, some retained and others lost on the way. Just as short bits of string can be joined together to form a chain, so too can a collection of linked memories tell the story of a lifetime.

How did I become a collector?

I used to think it began with my trip to the UK and Europe as a twenty-one-year-old in the 1960s. That was my Overseas Experience, or OE. For the first time I felt brass door handles worn smooth by human touch, crossed stone steps worn down by millions of feet and entered magnificent buildings built many centuries earlier. With a Youth Hostel pass and a backpack, a friend and I hitchhiked round England and Europe. Somewhere on the cobbled streets between Bath and the Bosphorus via Venice and Vienna, I became Sold on Old.

On returning home to New Zealand overland on an old and unreliable London bus, and fascinated by the markets of the Middle East and Asia, I wrote an article about the overland route which was published in The New Zealand Herald. It was my first published writing. I was paid ten pounds for the article, and could not wait to spend the money.

I can still remember my first visit to an Auckland antique shop. It was in Parnell. I gazed up at the polished brass and copperware strung across the ceiling, admired old mahogany and hand-carved kauri furniture and sniffed in that smell of good quality furniture polish. I felt as if I were in a wonderful museum where all the exhibits were for sale.

I came away with a large copper kettle, which may have gone up in value but which I have never been tempted to sell. More significant to me is the fact that although we have moved house several times since then, that first purchase has always brightened our hearth.

However, while sorting through drawers recently I came upon a little red box, with a gold crown and Elizabeth printed on the lid. Inside was a faded note titled Presented by The New Zealand Herald, and the box contained a thin, worn coin – a sixpence from the reign of Elizabeth I, dated 1575. The note described the coin as ‘the most romantic coin of those days, for it was the custom among suitors to bend a sixpence and give it as a keepsake’ which led to the old nursery rhyme, “I found a crooked sixpence…”’

I remember the coin in the red box being presented to me as an unexpected school prize in 1953, during the year of the second Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and her first visit to New Zealand. I believe it was given to me at Waipu District High School for merit in English, and other students also received coins. I’ve since wondered, did those coins come from some private collection? How many other recipients still have them?

At the time I was awed, as I had never owned anything so old, so steeped in British history. It was the history of my forebears, as my father was born in England and my mother was of Scottish and Northern Irish descent. That coin was minted at the Tower of London many years before the Great Plague and the Fire of London.

It’s now nearly seventy years since I received the coin, and realise that it was the true beginning of my love of collecting. But although I’ve kept the crooked sixpence all this time, what am I going to do with it?

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