Addendum: ‘Rosebud’

While digging in my basement recently*, excavating what had been forgotten and removing what should no longer be there, my ‘pit-helmet’s lamp’ alighted upon a small cardboard box on a far shelf. I’d been searching for its contents for nearly two decades. None of the items within have any significant monetary value. However, all are treasures to me. Many are my parents’ personal effects. Some belonged to my grandparents. And a few are mine. Most have followed me through life, since birth.

There are a pair of fluted, plaster pillars that once elevated one of the tiers comprising my parents’ wedding cake. They were married at Berea chapel, Blaina, Wales, in 1953. When a child, the idea that I could handle objects represented in a photograph taken years before I was born, astonished me. It still does. That, materially speaking, they’ve outlived those other two pillars of my life (my mother and father), astonishes me even more.

On my mother’s (Mam’s) dressing table sat a small wooden container in the shape of a chest of draws. When its lid was opened, it chimed Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March in C major (1842). The musical jewellery box was a wedding gift. She’d let me play with it when I visited her bedroom as a toddler. A box with music inside. Was there ever a more intriguing possibility for a child?

On small table by the window that looked out onto Roseheyworth Colliery in Bournville, near Blaina, Wales, sat another object containing a sound: my paternal grandparents’ (Nina and Grampa) brass bell. The original clapper had been replaced by a rather ungainly hexagonal metal nut. I was allowed to ring it only a few times when visiting. The bell was cast with the number ’12’ on its head. (Perhaps it had at least eleven siblings. Or, maybe, the number refers to its size.) No one told me either where the bell had come from or what purpose it served, previously and presently.

However, my cousin (who is the ‘historian’ of my father’s side of the family) suggests that it came from a shop owned by my paternal grandfather’s sister, Elsie. On listening to it again, the bell does sound like one of those that rung when a customer opened the door.

This is the gold watch that my mother wore during the period before I was born until my early teens. It’s the object that I associate with her most intimately. I’d look at the second-hand move round dial insert, and touch the smooth, tempered-glass face, as I lay with my head on her lap as a child. The hands still move, but can’t keep up with time. How strange that a ‘dead’ mechanical wristwatch can be ‘resurrected’ simply by turning the crown and winding the spring. Whereas its owner will require the power of God so to be. (See also: September 26, 2018, Diary: September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021).

In the musical box there are a number of my mother’s rings. Most are costume jewellery. Among the others are her engagement and wedding rings (shown below, along with Dad’s signet ring). When she died, the hospital gave them back to me in a plastic bag with a receipt. It was the first time that I’d ever seen and touched these rings in the absence of her hand.

^{*See: Summa: diary (October 25-31, 2025).}

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice