{"id":17983,"date":"2022-03-30T22:04:24","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T02:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/?p=17983"},"modified":"2024-08-29T13:59:11","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T17:59:11","slug":"the-silver-teapot-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/2022\/the-silver-teapot-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silver Teapot (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n The Silver Teapot (Part 2)\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

Gradually the teapot emerged from the tarnish \u2013 I must have worked on that teapot for a whole week. It was hard work and the prospect of cleaning the other pieces, all in the same condition, didn\u2019t appeal. But once it was clean, I noticed that it wasn\u2019t ugly at all, but rather, in its own way, quite elegant. It was sleek and simple, and it had an almost modern look, smooth and uncluttered and without any of the fussy details that you often find on old silver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it was old, at least 40 years old, and probably more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I found the silver mark stamped on its bottom. It read \u201cmade in England\u201d. Here was another puzzle: my parents had lived in Canada since 1947, when as newlyweds they had arrived in Halifax. Buying English-made silver when you live in Canada wasn\u2019t likely and I knew my mother\u2019s silver had all been purchased at Birks (I have some of her pieces and they all bear the \u201cBirks\u201d stamp). So, the teapot couldn\u2019t have been Mum\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My parents immigrated to Canada from Britain. When my father\u2019s mother died in 1953, he went back for the funeral. It was the only time either of my parents ever went back to Britain. Could this be his family silver? I was pretty sure it wasn\u2019t from my mother\u2019s family \u2013 I knew only too well how little they had had, as she had told us often enough how poor her family had been (her method of ensuring that we appreciated what we had). And my mother\u2019s family had all been dead and gone for years before she married my father. She had had no home in Britain since 1943, when she had joined the British Army and been stationed for the next few years in the Middle East. There, she met and married my father. So, it had to have been from my dad\u2019s family. And that was, I believed, the answer to this riddle, the reason why the teapot would have remained, unloved and undiscovered, wrapped in newspaper and hidden in an unremarkable cardboard box: my mother had disliked my dad\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if what she told us was true, but according to my mother, my father\u2019s mother had not considered her \u201cgood enough\u201d for my father. I do know that that\u2019s what my mother believed, and that she had resented it bitterly. Understandable, if what she believed was true. She never said very much about my paternal grandmother, but I knew from what little she did say, and the tone of her voice, that she hadn\u2019t liked her. If the teapot had been part of my dad\u2019s family silver, then that would explain its relegation to the tatty cardboard box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My parents were both born in Scotland, in the Lowlands, and as children, we were told often, principally by my mother, that the Scots are notorious grudge holders. My Mum could hold a grudge like nobody else I\u2019ve ever known. I would bet that she had let that silver teapot sit in a cupboard, in its cardboard box, out of sight and out of mind, since 1953.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gradually the teapot emerged from the tarnish \u2013 I must have worked on that teapot for a whole week. It was hard work and the prospect of cleaning the other pieces, all in the same condition, didn\u2019t appeal. But once it was clean, I noticed that it wasn\u2019t ugly at all, but rather, in its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17983"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24532,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17983\/revisions\/24532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}