Heirlooms

 I was recently invited to an awards evening that was a "black tie" event, which posed something of a challenge to me as a person used to wearing almost exclusively jeans and "work" attire. I went through a brief phase in my mid 20s of buying evening-wear, partly because I was expected to attend functions as a young professional in a company dominated by colleagues who had a very refined dress sense, right down to matching grey shoes to the exact same shade evening suit! Fortunately, I have held on to clothes I bought many years ago, but what came through for me was a dress that my mother-in-law had worn to my own wedding in 1986! Fortunately her style and dress size match my present situation exactly, so no adaptation needed to this beautifully hand-tailored garment. I wonder how many people at the event realised they were looking at something that was the height of elegance 40 years ago.

A 40 year old dress in a timeless design

This led me to thinking about those things that we treasure and pass on from generation to generation: the ones that most often spring to mind are jewellery, antique furniture or valuable artworks. But they can be far more modest, and enduring if there is a family story attached to them that is carried on from generation to generation. Often it is the object itself that becomes the vehicle for this oral tradition, a memento of a person and what was especially important to them.

One of these in my family is a cast-iron mincer, that had been in my paternal grandmother's family for generations. I now have it, and still use it occasionally, although the rest of my family think I am crazy to mince my own lamb! I can so vividly remember my grandmother, in my uncle's huge farmhouse kitchen, attaching the mincer to a countertop and with her extraordinary upper-body strength, getting stuck in to a pile of cubed beef. This is a beautiful example of the best kind of traditional industrial design - perfectly reflecting the qualities of its materials and extremely well crafted. 

A Husqvarna cast-iron mincer

Far less glamorous, yet of greater value to me is my maternal grandfather's collection of "Everyman" books that he collected mostly during World War II. These are printed on very low-grade paper and the print has faded in places over the years, the binding of the more frequently read is now starting to look very worn, but they hold profound memories for me. When I was a young teenager, I remember spending many hours reading everything from Cicero to Dostoevsky (fortunately all in translation), filling up my repertoire of classics as a way of surviving endlessly dreary family holidays. I have kept the entire collection, and resisted re-binding them, even though they look quite shabby, to preserve their authenticity and the memories attached to them. I can still imagine my grandfather as a young man in the desert in North Africa, losing himself in stories based in Mexico or Scotland to escape from the horrors of war.

A small section of my grandfather's collection of "classics"

Equally functional, and in varied condition, are the two wooden sewing boxes that were passed down to me by my mother and mother-in-law. These are identical, so no doubt they were a "must have" in the 1950s, probably sold at one of the big stores "in town" such as Stuttafords or John Orr. One of them is in mint condition while the other has seen considerable wear-and-tear, testament to very different histories. Both of them have been pressed into use, one for my extensive collection of threads that have been collected over the years, and the other for all those essential items that one invariably needs on a Sunday afternoon to finish a garment before the end of the weekend.

One of the wooden sewing boxes from the 1950s

The tradition of keeping beautifully crafted clothes and linen seems to have gone out of fashion sometime in the 20th century, although I am sure this has been retained in some cultures and by some families in the English-speaking world. It will be interesting to see whether this tradition is revitalised, with the revival of an interest in hand-crafts. My personal favourite garment is a jersey that my mother made for me when I was in my early teens, which I still wear to this day: the complete opposite of "fast fashion".

The jersey my mother made for me when I was 14 years old

In essence, anything can become an heirloom, providing it is well designed, of good quality and authentic, but the most important attribute is the history and memories that it preserves, even when fashions and lifestyles change.