My life, in 5 items or less

Jackie Cook

The sewing machine lives in a small alcove on the sun-porch, folded back into itself, as if it were a table, with an incomprehensibly sloped metal grid as its bottom shelf. 

From time to time my mother will wheel this table out into the room on its casters, and lift the top, dropping it into a hinged extension, pulling up the sewing machine which is nested into a case beneath the lid. 

Everything locks into place, and she slides open a series of small, silvery, metal hatches, to begin the complex process of threading the machine. 

My mother's sewing machine pre-dates bobbins. Its thread spools onto a narrow reel, which she slides into a sharp-ended tube as large as your thumb, and slots this back into the hatch beneath the needle, where it begins the magic of picking up its thread and looping it into near un-pickable stitches. 

This sewing machine is superior. It says so, on the sewing arm, in gilded, art-nouveau lettering. My mother tells us the machine belonged to Great-grandmother -  not our Great grand mother, Nanny Frank, but my mother’s, yet another generation back: Nanny Twist. 

With this Superior machine come countless smaller treasures, stowed away in the double bank of drawers on either side, drawers elegantly carved, with twisted bronze handles which small fingers love to pull. Inside there are tins of pearl buttons, and cards of lace. Sticks of French chalk. Lace-makers' tools. Tatting shuttles. Suede-covered ivory implements for buffing your fingernails. Embossed silver button-hooks, for doing up your boots. Curious reverse scissors, which close outwards instead of inwards, and have no sharp edges. They're for stretching the fingers of gloves. 

Life must indeed have been superior in Nanny Twist's day. It required all these elegant implements to keep things going. 

All we seem to contribute to these treasure troves is mess and clutter. Shells we've picked up, and can't quite part with yet. Broken hairpins, which for some reason are called 'Bambis.' Perhaps in the mists of our own earliest days one of these little plastic and wire contraptions did have a baby faun, a Bambi, on it. The idea behind the name is lost to us now, somewhere in that time before language knew what it was doing. But there is also a central treasure: one that counts, and it’s only in there because it's too big, too long, to fit into my mother's morocco jewelry box, or the Florentine crystal bowl on 'the duchess,' where she keeps her earrings. 

It's a piece of pounamu - which we call 'greenstone,' since no-one has told us any better. Those who are said to have found it, somewhere on the West Coast during the gold rush days, and who probably did know the right name, are no longer here to tell us. 

It's a beautiful piece, much, much bigger than any we've seen used for jewelry. It is water worked, flat and smooth, and entirely pure green, the colour of the Aorere river in mid summer. 

As all jade is said to be, it is always cooler than the air around it, inviting you to touch it, to feel your way imaginatively into its cool depths. 

It knocks around in the sewing machine drawer for twenty, fifty, a hundred-and-some years, while we wonder vaguely, from time to time, what will become of it.

The sewing machine meanwhile roars along, never seeming to need a service, for all it has run for fifty of its own one hundred-plus years, at a pace it had never been designed for. My mother had polio as a child, and couldn't work the treadle, so my father had cut into the case that held the machine and installed a small electric motor. A slight pressure on the treadle plate, and away it zoomed. 

You could smell the metal, as it friction-heated the lint left by the racketing thread and the endless swathes of fabric, my mother consciously slowing down for doubled seams or bulky joins, and sometimes doing them manually with the adjustment wheel on the side, one needle-loop at a time. It's the 1950s, after all, and trims are all the go: floral braids, pre-strung beading, contrast piping, and that zig-zag patterned ribbon called 'rick-rack.' 

Most of all, though, it's bobble-fringing and pom-poms. 

You'd be amazed at what could be done with bobbles. We spend months in about Standard Two, making bobble-edged dish-cloths and pot-holders. 

The premium bobbles of my life, however - the ones that pursue me about for what feel like decades, are white plush, about the size of golf-balls, suspended from a satin bow, and with a brooch attachment at the top, so they can be used interchangeably on whatever my mother thinks of next. 

I swear she'd have had them on my school uniform if she were able to. She certainly puts Sister Mary Saint Whoever, in charge of our uniforms, through a sort of ethical hell, in having to decide if the real mother-of-pearl buckle my mother has recycled from the sewing machine drawer for my school pinafore belt, amounts to 'jewelry.'  

Is this the sin of vanity, or the virtue of thrift? 

It's the finest of moral lines - as I suspect my mother well knows.

Meanwhile, the white pom-poms march on. And on. And on. 

 They fasten onto hats, and handbags. They close the top of cardigans, and otherwise unfastened boleros. They're pinned to waistlines, and collars, and pockets, and for some reason I could never quite fathom, they seemed always to be teamed up with another 50s ikon: the poodle brooch. 

Above all else, and unlike almost everything else - they never fall off and get lost. No matter how much I hope they will.

I'm just not a pom-pom sort of girl - although they do manage to make it to University with me, when I leave home for Christchurch, and so a new world of duffle-coats, and black stockings, and plain woolen skirts. The pom-poms live in yet another drawer, along with a carefully-wound and equally carefully ignored white velvet sash, and a collar of pearls which I also never wear - although a friend does borrow it to sew to the neckline of a ball-gown, to wear to the graduation dance. 

He is, of course, told to leave.

Meanwhile, different forms of elegant living are evolving. For me, these are signaled in the wildly daring acquisition of my very first pepper grinder.

We know it is time to splash out, even if we have very little money. We live an entire winter on a box of pumpkins someone's father has harvested and delivered in a farm trailer, and we re-use tea leaves, and ferret about desperately for that extra shilling for the gas metre whenever we need to do the washing. Around us, though, everything is changing, gearing up. Straining towards those little dashes of flair and dare we say it: elegance, that once lived in the sewing machine drawer. 

Steak houses arrive in the city, and we watch nervously as potatoes baked in their jackets are served with sour cream, and a waiter hovers over the table with an ostentatiously large wooden implement. 'Pepper madam?' he murmurs, and twists ridiculous amounts of it onto our steaks or grilled fish. 

It is, we are instantly aware, the very smell of sophistication. 

That week I am searching out a source of gherkins, aiming at a potato salad to accompany a new recipe by Graham Kerr - pronounced 'Care.'  I’m collecting ingredients to make steak with peaches, seriously ooh la la, when I come across a small, brown-paneled coffee place. Perhaps it is in Regent Street, but who can remember? It has booths, and quiet conversation, and any number of mysterious aromas wafting about. 

Sophistication has any number of levels. I am already well beyond smoked oysters on cracker biscuits - even beyond the plan to make potato salad - when I spot an entry portal to that magical next level. 

It's a pepper grinder - and not just any pepper grinder. It is red-mahogany coloured, tapered, and already filled with aromatic black peppercorns - themselves a level-one sophisticate’s item and so very hard to find. There's said to be this shop, in Fendalton, but curiously the bus doesn't seem to go there.

I abandon the gherkins, and buy the pepper grinder. 

It follows me around the world. Black pepper, at least, never seems to go out of fashion, even if it doesn't quite signal what it did back then. Some people say they have worked out where I live - which flat is mine; which back-street sub-compartmentalised house I am living in - when they spot the pepper grinder on the kitchen window ledge.  I still have it - even though its grinding mechanism gave up the ghost decades ago. 

Some things, I guess, are just sort of - symbolic.  Maybe someone, some day, will be able to fix it - and so I never get around to throwing it away. 

So it is that I find myself launched on filling up my own sorts of sewing-machine drawers. 

At some point in my life I buy a modern version of a Korean tea-gallery chest: 24 little drawers with pull-out knobs, each much the size and shape of my mother's sewing machine drawers. I pack in the pom-poms, and the poodle brooches, the still-neatly-wound white velvet sash, and the pearl collar that had just that one outing.  Not the pepper grinder. That still lives in the spice drawer, with all the sachets and jars and little silk bags of spices which succeeded it. 

In there too, I discovered recently, are my opera glasses, bought in St Petersburg when it was still called Leningrad. They recently had a trip to the Russian ballet, passed around the group of old school friends who had arranged the outing, over to Blenheim's Art Centre, to see Swan Lake. I hope the opera glasses reminisced a little - maybe heard their own language spoken, or recognised the music. Mostly, they nestle in their oddly utilitarian, Soviet-era, black leather case, in a drawer full of silk scarves - which I'm wearing more and more as I grow older. 

The great Aunts who gave them to me would chuckle if they knew. 'Tie one to your handbag, dear. It does so add that little je ne sais quoi...'

I very rarely carry a handbag, these days.  Who does?

One thing, though, seems to have found its place in the world - and that's the piece of greenstone. Jade. Pounamu. It has found its name again, alongside its status restored. 

Not wanting to have it drilled or worked in any way, I took it to a silversmith, who crafted it a casing, attached to a chain. So now, at last, it can be worn - and then passed down the line, a piece of family treasure. 

It's a powerful piece. Not for everyday. 

Mostly, it lives in one of the drawers of that Korean tea-chest. These drawers are almost exactly the same size as the ones from my mother's sewing machine - as I discovered only recently, when I took one of those original old drawers that I use for storing packets of plant seeds, and tried slotting it in to the chest. 

It’s a perfect match. 

Maybe there's some cabinet-maker's rule about these things.

Or maybe it's just that, in the disregarded world of the physical items that circulate through our lives, we're attracted, all unconsciously, to whatever is most familiar.