Brush

Painting isn't something I like doing but in an ageing home it's a necessity. The usual emergence of spring, warm breezes and bright Antipodean light nurtures the nesting instinct and even in my menopausal years, I feel the urge .  .  . the urge to spruce up the old humpy and apply a coat of paint.

So it's off to Bunnings, the hardware store from hell where you can buy anything from a gas heater to a crockery set, a sprocket case to a chainsaw, two-stroke and a tin whistle (well I  might be fibbing about the tin whistle)  but I'm buying paint, an assortment of rollers, a drip tray and drop cloths and one of those nifty spongey things that you use to make nice straight lines and corners around architraves. Of course there's masking tape to protect the woodwork and copious amounts of turpentine used mainly for removing the splodges that sneak onto the carpet and leave my face and forearms looking like I've been spattered with the blood of an alien, pale yellow  instead of red.

Hours of preparation, which is actually the bit I do like, masking corners, laying dropsheets, emptying and moving cupboards and discovering those little things about which  you'd forgotten. 

The tiny fruit knives a legacy from ancient aunts, a pair of opera glasses, two fine  crystal decanters that someone thought I'd use and proffered as a wedding gift. Home  made curiosities that children's hands had  moulded, Kitane Crane Wedgwood pieces bought for my 21st, the Shelley Tea set and a motley array of mismatched glasses and the books . . the books that my Auntie Daphne so carefully covered in brown paper and whose pages  have barely been turned.

Volumes and volumes of beautiful books  about Hollywood  stars, biographies, filmography, with almost Sepia photographs. The Picture Show Annuals, all 20of them from 1929 to 1949, each inscribed "Daphne M  Dunn, 18 Alexandria Road, Moss Side, Manchester 16".

Not a salubrious address for a 20 year old girl but better than it is now, virtually a ghetto of council houses, rap music and the pungent aromas of the West Indies and Pakistan. This is where my Aunt escaped the world. This is where she ran from the war ravaged devastation of Manchester and sank deep and hard into the romance of Hollywood in it's Halcyon days.

Books full of dreamy Ginger Rogers and sultry Basil Rathbone on coarse post war paper and stitched through the centre with white cotton. I had no idea that she even owned these treasures and at times, when money's been tight, I've been tempted to sell them because I'm sure they're valuable but with every opening of their lovingly covered pages, I remember my frosty spinster aunt and the fact that once, she was beautiful, young, vivacious and had dreams beyond the blitzed shell of a city where she grew up.

She never married which was very sad. She became bitter and jealous, masculine and foreboding so to discover such a treasure, so beautifully preserved hints at the feminine, the softness I never knew  but always thought was there.

Ah the painting can wait, I have 20 Picture Show Annuals  to browse.

Posted for Theme Thursday . . go see what they're splodging around with their brushes.