There followed some weeks of application of Savlon antiseptic and turning the ear studs night and morning, and a certain amount of inflammation and oozing. I wonder now if the anaerobic conditions created by the studs, rather than being more hygienic as was claimed, was more likely to provoke this than turning rings would have been. I still don’t know how people can bear piercings in more intimate, sensitive or moist areas. Sometime after Christmas though, when we could think ahead to being able to wear other earrings, we took a walk along Hemel Old High Street.
Hemel Hempstead is best known as a post-war new town. I don’t know what it’s like now, but in my childhood and early youth it was an array of fairly typical and generally unlovely 1950s and 1960s architecture. It had a somewhat unusual covered pedestrian bridge over the main road, resplendent in citrus yellow fibreglass panelling (on the outside!), which led from one upstairs shopping arcade to another on the other side. As I say, not really a place of beauty, though as youngsters we liked it. For the grand opening of the bridge, Batman and Robin came and drove down the high street in the Batmobile, we watched them from above, though I was rather too small to see properly.
But if the New Town represented modernity, with its yellow bridge leading to the Wimpy bar and giving a glimpse of superheroes, there was what seemed like a half-forgotten tranquil fragment of another age just a few hundred yards away in the Old High Street, which always seemed quiet, leafy, almost rural, I remember it as looking something like a set for a film adaptation of Middlemarch or similar. Unlike my older brothers and sisters I didn’t grow up in the town but a few miles away, and was barely aware of the existence of this quarter of it for a long time, even though one of its tall, white, foursquare and fine Georgian edifices was the House Where Dad Was Born. It was handsome by then, restored and well-kept, but in truth when my father had been growing up there, it was, I gather, a rather poorer place, crowded with his numerous siblings, sometimes cheerful but more often dogged by the uncertainties and insecurities of poverty and the fragile physical and mental health of his parents. Grandfather, it was said, was sometimes in trouble for watering the milk and putting sand in the sugar he sold, and he often kept a pig in the back yard, possibly against the by-laws. One of my father's most abidingly horrid recollections of early childhood was having to sit on the pig and hold it down while Grandfather castrated it (I sometimes think Dad had a touch of Jude the Obscure about him...). Grandmother struggled; she fed her large and hungry brood on brawn made from a sheep’s head, and her own fragile spirit with chapel religion. They both died, broken and insane, long before I was born.
Yet with all the nasty and brutish aspects of its history, there was, as I say, a sense of stepping back into a quaint and gracious pocket of past times, which was affirmed by the presence of the only shop I can remember there, the Basket Shop. This establishment sold nothing but items made from wicker, and straw and cane and rattan. It gave an impression of a world before plastics and machine tools, filled with light structures, fragrant and warm and sepia-toned. There was every kind of basket, of course, cat baskets and shopping baskets, picnic hampers and fishing baskets, but also some wicker furniture, stools and ottomans, peacock chairs and rockers, and those egg-shaped swinging seats that hang from the ceiling, and also trefoil-shaped long-handled carpet beaters, which I still have a fancy for as objects, even though I would probably never beat a carpet. And somewhere in a corner was a case of small, exquisite articles also made from straw like tiny corn dollies as jewellery, including ear-rings. They caught our eye; Az bought a pair for herself and a pair for me.
Ear-rings are funny things. You don’t always know which ones you’ll take to, which you’ll stay with, or which will stay with you. They can look beautiful in the shop, indeed be beautiful objects, but they’ll never sit right on you. They can be finely crafted and formed, but then have some snicky bit that will catch in your hair or scarf or coat collar, or else they have a fragility which causes them to break irreparably . I have had other pairs which I have loved to wear but they have left me, gone when I took off a jumper, or taken off when they started to chafe of an evening and were put to one side then lost, knocked on the floor or dropped down the sofa or gone with the vacuum cleaner. Sometimes one is left alone which languishes forever in a box or drawer, because I’ve felt a sense of guilt and responsibility towards it, having by my carelessness lost its partner so I don’t feel I can perform such an act of callous betrayal as throw the survivor away (for a time I thought I might have an extra asymmetrical hole made in one ear to give a home to these waifs and strays, but it didn’t happen...).
I’m more careful now, and I’ve a few pairs that have done well: a quirky little silver sun-in-splendour for the right ear, with a hey-diddle-diddle crescent moon with a profile smile for the left, that I bought from a roguish and very talented silversmith in a Somerset village twenty years ago; a pair of irridescent glass pebbles coloured like oil plumes with pewter rims which Tom gave me when we were first together; and the small amethyst teardrops she-who-calls-herself-Firebird sent me for my fortieth birthday, nearly nine years ago now. I love all of these and wear them frequently. But the tiny straw corn-dollies from the Basket Shop are the longest-lived of all, the very first ear-rings I owned after the studs. They are light as feathers, of course, and never drag on my ears. Being organic material, they have deepened agreeably in colour, and they go with any bead necklace or pendant - wood, ceramic, shell, glass,and with any clothing. I fell back on them so often, and really didn’t give them much thought, or where they came from.
Now though, I’m afraid to wear them.
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