For The Love Of Nana And Her Love Of Broken Knickknacks

You know it’s going to be you and me who’ll have to shift this crap when she’s gone, don’t you?”

These were the words, muttered to me under her breath by my nana’s youngest daughter as Nana proudly showed us her newest acquisition.

The object in question could be anything, but almost always fulfilled four criteria:

• It was small because her house was.

• It cost under £1.00.

• It was an ornament of some kind.

• It was probably chipped, faded or in some other way damaged.

The fifth and most important thing, was that it gave her a degree of pleasure far beyond its value to any other living person. And that, right there, was why we played along as she beamed at us with the words:

“Isn’t it lovely? And it was only 50 pence!”

We would both take it as she handed it over, examine it with a smile that was linked to the fifth criterion and not the first four, and hand it back with remarks such as:

“What a bargain!”

“Where are you going to place it?”

“What a lovely colour!”

My aunt and I had always been close, closer in some ways than I was with my mother. She was my confidante in my younger years and the only one who loved Nana as much as I did.

When there was a problem or something Nana needed, it was the two of us who discussed it and dealt with it. Between us we kept Nana’s life as stress free as we possibly could, dealing with her pension, her paperwork, taking her shopping and anything else she might need. Her cooking and cleaning she still did herself, and with vigour and pride.

So yes, there were other members of this family, but it would undoubtedly fall to the two of us to decide what to do with this collection once Nana was no longer with us.

And back then, as my aunt mouthed those words to me each week, neither of us could have guessed that by the time Nana died at the age of 94, she would be dead at 60 from a heart attack and I would be living in Austria.

On the day I sat in Nana’s living room with my heart in my throat as I prepared myself to tell her I was leaving the country, I looked around at all these strange and mismatched objects that she had acquired, bought or rescued – call it what you will – and their familiarity almost broke me.

I always wondered what it was that pulled her to that row of charity shops every Friday morning in search of something new, but it was inevitable that she left with something that had escaped her attention in previous visits or had been brought in that week.

Nana never had much money and as one of eleven children in a small Austrian town in the 1920s and 30s, she would have had almost nothing to call her own. Was that why these little things meant so much? Maybe, or perhaps it was also the fact that most of the objects had been brought in by relatives of those who had recently passed away and Nana didn’t want their things to end up tossed in the bin.

She was never a great thinker and had I asked her the question, I’m sure she would have shrugged, smiled and said it was just because she liked it. And that’s good enough.

When I last saw her, shortly before she died, there were new objects standing around, fighting for space in her cabinets, on her shelves, her windowsill and her mantlepiece. She showed me each one and I responded exactly the same way I had a decade earlier. My aunt, by this time, was long gone.

Nana’s death took me by surprise and I wasn’t there when some other family members cleared out her home. For that I was grateful, for I am sure that had I been present, I would have found disposing of these old friends of Nana’s, an almost impossible task.

I don’t know what became of them, but I hope they were taken to a charity shop for some other nana to discover and to love.

There are so many objects out there, objects still here when the people who loved them are not. How many hands had these old broken knickknacks passed through before Nana’s and where are they now?