Anthony: Those two chairs Alison and I bought in Oxfordshire, maybe Gloucestershire around 1980 I can’t remember when. We were going on a trip visiting Fenella, and we went to Burford to go to the wood shop where we bought all those wooden animals and bricks and things, and wooden jigsaw puzzles, the ones that fitted in a frame and so forth – the wonderful toy shop that Fenella was so fond of. And we just happened to notice on the main road, Oxford to Gloucester I suppose, a craft centre, and we saw lots of things. I bought some bell pull knobs – not for bell pulls but for lights and for curtains, in lovely acorn shapes and they were so elegant and had a shaft for holding the cord – a real quality woodwork, whether they were made locally…. I’m pretty certain the one in the shower room is one.
And then I sat down in the chair – not particularly liking it, there’s nothing special about the chair, and it was so comfortable – I’ve seldom sat in a chair so comfortable – and so we started talking about it and mum sat in the chair and mum liked it. We talked to the proprietor, a Mr Woodward, I can’t remember the name of the shop. And we decided to order a pair. He said they were copies from an old famous Berlin library where this maker had seen them and decided to copy them. I said the one I sat in was a bit low, and he said they could make them any height, and so we’ve got a his n hers, identical apart from the length of the legs. So we have used them ever since at number 9 Royal Terrace and now and number 11 and we like them very well. They’re just very elegant old design, probably C18th or maybe C19th – the original ones – these are copies.
[Mil – I can’t remember them without cushions, but did you enjoy them without cushions?]
Yes – thoughrouly! And then mum’s felt period she bought the felt cushions. [mil – why do you like so much padding?] Mum has always had to cover everything! Everything we possess is covered! It is!
Talking of chairs, I bought these from an auction in Chester, particularly because they had loose seats. This was at a time when I was dreaming of getting back to my tapestry work and I thought they would suit the seats I had already made and I’d be encouraged to do another 3 to make a set of six but I’ve never resumed.
[Mil – I’m intrigued by the obsession of covering everything with something else… like the fact you have this off cut of kitchen linoleum from a very long time ago on top of this]
Alison – it’s to protect the wood you see.
Anthony – it is mum. I find it quite infuriating. In this house you can’t put anything down anywhere because every surface is already covered but it is part of mum, and if I free up space I would come back from work and find it had been covered with something else. It’s her nature. She’s got too many objects, but she wants to put them out and see them and love them and so on, but she doesn’t have this concept that a surface actually has a function as a surface. [Mil speaks about how the woodgrain itself has character. I think it’s the mosaic kind of thing – every surface has the potential to be embellished somehow] Alison says “I can’t explain it Mil. I cannot explain it.”
Antony – she’s always been like that. I don’t know whether it is just innate, there’s an empty space it must be filled, or whether she specifically likes the things like that.
[Mil says was this not one of the things that attracted you to mum – her creativity…. You must have been in her homes – the warning signs must have been there!]
Hardly – they were typical students, a bit scruffy. My bachelor flat up here had space for everything. It was smaller than what she lived in but there was much more space for things. My Persian rugs, I’ve always been a total sucker for Persian rugs, but I would never put a Persian rug on a table like mum would, as appears in so many Flemish paintings as a tablecloth.
Alison: I’m remembering something Mil, in my misty mind, about my grandmother’s house in Wales. In the hall there, there were three great round tables, absolutely covered with junk, with fascinating junk. But I don’t remember any of those tables being clear. It’s a lovely memory.
The Royal Collection 