Romance of Elsewhere by Lynn Freed

Author:Lynn Freed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Inheriting the Past

For decades after leaving South Africa, home was in two places: America, where I lived, and South Africa, to which I went home. Home there, as arranged by my parents before I was born, seemed gloriously fixed with its serious furniture, serious paintings, silver, crystal, the tea tray clinking down the passage and the E-flat of the dinner gong. There was something abiding in it that gave a sort of pick-up-and-go lightness to the series of accommodations I’d lived in on both coasts of the U.S., landing up in a charming Victorian bungalow in California, looking out over acres of vineyards.

And then my father died and the equation failed. The old house was broken up, many of its contents shipped to me in America by my oldest sister, who had serious arrangements of her own. I had chosen them days before leaving South Africa, and in a miasma of disbelief. Even as I listed couch and chairs, two suites of crystal, tea sets, a tea service, it seemed impossible that I could claim them at all, that they could sail across to my other life and fit in there. And yet, if I didn’t claim them, my oldest sister assured me, they would be auctioned off to strangers, and, in any case, there would still be nothing left to come home to.

For the next nine months, while the things were packed into crates and then a container, shipped across the Atlantic, unloaded in Baltimore and then trucked across the country, I worried obsessively about how I would deploy them when they arrived, where they would fit. I had taken photographs and measurements of the furniture before I left, but now, back in my own house, I was beset by doubts about how they would translate—that world with its spacious rooms, high ceilings, deep verandahs, into this.

My living and dining rooms were already a bazaar of overstuffed furniture, Oriental rugs, Oriental pillows, old photographs and antique maps on the walls, bookshelves everywhere, and a looming grand piano in the bay window.

I’ve never been much good at imagining the way things will look before actually seeing them in place. And so, over the years, I’ve become an old hand at furniture moving. But then, with only measurements and photographs in hand, I could imagine nothing. I had to take it on faith that the Georgian grandfather clock would enhance any room it inhabited, that my parents’ large deco couch and chairs—formal, well designed, solidly made—would improve on my own overstuffed set in a William Morris fabric.

The real problem, I thought, would lie with the massive old Zanzibar chest. It was meant for large spaces, much larger than anything I could provide. And yet it was that chest I most desperately wanted to find a place for. I loved it; I had always loved it standing there in the huge hall at home, with its enormous brasses, its giant key, and, on top, the miniature galleon, brass bowls, claw-footed boxes, and mortar and pestle.

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