Collections and Collectors

Tiptoeing into the secret places of my own house in Bristol, peering into the undusted corners and examining the forgotten shelves I realise there are collections everywhere. Some are deliberately crafted and involved, at some previous time, a decision that I would search and keep a certain type of object. On a beach in West Wales when my children were very small we discovered that on wet days at high tide you could find little shards of china and pottery buried in the sand, like tiny treasures. Some pieces were more valuable to us than others and there was a certain amount of grading involved as to their relative merits but we all agreed that the best pieces were white with blue patterns on them or occasionally, (and if we were very lucky), fragments of writing, usually of the religious kind. That beach has been panned for porcelaine many times and we have piles of the little tesserae stored in temporary boxes and tins lying all around the house. Another deliberate collection was of glass animals which my father bought for me when I was a small child in the sixties, on days out together in London. My original collection has since been divided between my three children as an occasional lucky dip and is now spread between their three bedrooms, each piece hoarded and beloved, some even named and every one of them extremely dusty. My favourite was the octopus called Errol.

Other collections have been accidental; where a hoard has grown by virtue of one item being left somewhere and another similar one placed next to it and, as if magnetised, soon there are five, ten, twenty similar objects crammed into the same spot. Plastic animal masks, buttons, teacups, board games. All of them have achieved the status of a collection by default and occupy a space which, although originally just a dumping area, now frames them. If I were ever to venture into the shed in the garden or indeed any of the darker shelves of the understairs cupboards, I already know what I would find. Like a miser I can count them in my head and remember where each piece comes from, who owned it before me, how it came to my personal little museum. Old cameras, empty perfume bottles, tin candle holders, leather bound books with a particular type of tooled embossing on the cover, stove tiles, fragments of bright coloured paper for collaging, musical instruments in dusty cases piled behind the sofa. I can measure the phases of my various obsessions through these little collections.

Some collections have broken free of their allocated areas and spread like a tidal wave across several rooms. Sheet music, although clearly meant to be on the music shelf and easily identified by its paper covers and its particular size and weight, appears to accumulate like snowdrifts on chairs and in bags and across the floor by the piano. Every so often, like a weary curator I make an attempt to collect it all up, to mend with sellotape the battered covers and to reunite the solo parts with their accompaniments. Sometimes I even try to categorise it all on shelves by instrument or by composer or in alphabetical order. It is not really possible to maintain any order to it however and in the end I don’t mind. It is a living collection, added to on an almost weekly basis as the children bring home more and more sheet music from their various choirs and bands. I like that though. I like that we are still collecting and that the mounds of paper and manuscript have a living energy to them which will for the time being remain in a state of growth.

Some elderly friends of ours recently downsized their collection of jazz on vinyl because they felt it had outgrown the size of their house. These records were part of an act of collection which Dave had been engaged in since he was sixteen years old. He is now eighty-one. They asked us choose which albums we would like to have before he sold them on and eventually, when we could not choose one over another, they timidly asked if we would like to take the whole collection on. When we agreed Dave told us how relieved he was to think that his collection, a life’s work really, would remain intact and be listened to and loved in the same spirit of discovery with which he had assembled it.