Back in the 80s, the Thatcher government was accused of “selling the family silver” in order to make the budget look good. What this entailed was the selling-off (privatisation) of some actual money-making public companies such as British gas and British Telecom. Whatever. The purpose of this post is not to revisit the machinations and figure-massages of the Thatcher government but rather to look at the phrase “selling the family silver”.
When my grandmother died I was offered a few bits of the family silver to remember her by. I ended up with a silver ladle, which is pleasingly large and almost useless for my purposes as I don’t have a tureen to go with it (a very long story – I should have had) and in any case, I rarely, if ever, make soup for about a dozen people. If you don’t have a massive amount of soup, it’s a pretty large ladle. I also got a pickle spoon, which is useful for fishing pickled onions out of very tall jars, i.e. almost never. The pickle spoon I actually wanted had a little lever-operated device that snapped the spoon over the onion. It wasn’t really any more useful, but the mechanism fascinated me when I was small. A cousin got that. I also got a silver teapot with matching sugar bowl (I don’t add sugar to my tea) and milk jug. I don’t remember my grandmother using any of this, if indeed she did. And I don’t have many bourgeois tea ceremony-like occasions where I’d be tempted to use it. The various items sit, as probably in many homes, behind the glass doors of a pine dresser (also a family “heirloom”), where they tarnish. Now and again, perhaps annually, they are cleaned and shined and put back.
Following the recent demise of my father, my mother tells me that I must choose some more pieces of family silver. I can’t say that I am in any hurry to do this, as the process will simply be duplicated. I will end up with more stuff that I won’t use and that I can’t put in the dishwasher if I did. I don’t associate my father with any bits of silver per se. I find it interesting that a family’s sense of itself is, or probably more likely was, bound up in a few metal objects that today must have almost no value at all, unless it is sentimental. People are increasingly less interested in stuff and more interested in experiences. The stuff they do buy (plenty of it) is used fleetingly and then chucked out or taken to the charity shop. People have less and less space to accumulate unnecessary stuff. I know how they feel. I have a house and I still don’t really have any room for superfluous pieces of silver.
That’s not to say that I don’t want any objects to remember my old man by. I’m quite keen on his war-time stapler which is surely of very limited use. And I associate him strongly with a very small chopping board that he used to trim stamps, or postmarks or for some arcane philatelic purpose. I can’t think I’d have any use for these either, but at least they won’t take up much room. But one day, I woke up knowing precisely what I wanted – his lawnmower. Or more precisely, one of his lawnmowers.
He appeared to have a few lawnmowers at any given time and as I seem to recall, they often didn’t work. There was the unpowered pull-along or push-along mower for the postage stamp of lawn that we had in the early 60s when we lived in Roehampton. It was sky blue with orange hubcaps and I think it’s still around. Hmmm. I could have a project for that. He had a Flymo at some stage for dealing with scrubby bits of grass in hard to get to places, and he ended up with a few other machines. But the one he used the most in the 70s was a large Atco with a cylinder blade of the sort that rolls the lawn flat and produces the classic stripes that any self-respecting lawn should boast. I think these have gone right out of fashion. Maybe lawns are going out of fashion; they have probably been paved over so that you can park three cars on where they used to be.
The Atco was one of those petrol mowers that was a bastard to start and then, when it was going, had a mind of its own, careering off at the slightest opportunity into the flowerbeds. You had to keep the thing on a tight rein, with much use of the clutch. But it did make a great job of the croquet lawn. My father had always wanted a croquet lawn, and after about half-a-dozen years of flattening a very undulating piece of ground, he finally had one. I thought that the Atco had a kickstart, but I’m probably wrong. But one day, it appeared that my father got bored of its unreliability or capriciousness and bought a Ransomes Marquis, which was a similar sort of affair. It is also a large, heavy, petrol-driven cylinder mower, but it was seemingly more docile, or reliable or more trustworthy. And of course, it was green, as all the best lawnmowers are.
I wasn’t around the house that much when my father was using it, as by the 80s (and he must have acquired it in the mid to late 70s), I’d pretty much left home. But I think that the cylinder lawnmower in some way encapsulates my father. He was a great gardener. I don’t know that I’d say a “keen gardener”, as the hackneyed phrase has it, because I’m not sure how much he really liked gardening. What he wanted was a garden, not to garden for its own sake. If you want a garden, you have to get into gardening, so he did. But he was probably happy enough doing it. And I doubt he liked cutting the grass, but he did a lot of it.
And now, there was the Ransomes, sitting rusting in the garage, unwanted and unloved. My father hadn’t used it for years. In his 90s, he wasn’t going to, but in truth, he’d sort of given up on it in his later years and was no longer really very interested in having a croquet lawn. Perhaps it was because with his kids having left home, there was no one to have a game of croquet with. So he used lighter lawnmowers that don’t roll anything flat and don’t produce stripes and he got a ride-on mower, a completely useless machine that constantly clogs up with cuttings.
Thus I woke up that day with the idea to resurrect the Ransomes. I would have it restored to its former shiny glory, have it shipped over to Switzerland where I would use it on my own lawns, or rather the patches of grass that might become lawns once they got the regular Ransomes’ stripy, rolling treatment. I consulted the internet and found The Old Lawnmower Company, a firm that was seemingly invented for people with wishes like mine. They specialise in resurrecting the classic lawnmowers of the 60s and 70s, and they’ll sell you one for a very reasonable price if you haven’t got your own rusting hulk in a garage or shed.
They operate out of premises hidden up a lane to a field behind a huge farm gate, somewhere near Aylesbury. Your satnav will come in very handy if you try to meet them. If you do, you will find John and his father Ivor to be charming people and passionate about lawnmowers. These are the skilled artisans of grass-cutting machinery who will make your mower rise Lazarus-like from the rusting flakes of its once vibrant green paint.
I have now delivered the Ransomes into their tender care and over the winter they are going to turn this potential scrapyard item into the envy of all my neighbours. The latter already harbour thoughts about me spending more time than is reasonable on my grass, but then “c’est un anglais, n’est-ce pas?”. But when the stripes appear, some time next spring, well, they’ll just have to bow to my superior English lawn knowhow and commitment. The Old Lawnmower company tells me that although the mower is about 40 years old, after their refurbishment of it, it will happily chug along for another 30 or more. I hate to say that this is because it was built to last by an English workshop, rather than being made of cheese in some factory in the muddy and smoky heart of China, but well… there’s got to be some element of truth in that. It was made in a period where people who bought lawnmowers were not “lawnmower consumers” but “lawnmower owners”.
I will doubtless take more pictures and add smug remarks to them when I finally get my hands on the Ransomes again, some time next year.