My mother tended to keep messy drawers and cupboards in our family home. The dressing table drawers were chock a block with all sorts of things. The dining room sideboard drawers virtually bulged at the seams. The sideboard had three large drawers which contained a variety of tablecloths, lace doilies, small cases of spoons and forks and almost everything else under the sun! The sideboard cupboards held precious china. The crystal water set, the silver teapot and the tall silver vase graced the top of the sideboard.
I particularly loved “cleaning out all the cupboards” day. It was the sideboard I loved most. Out came old letters and receipts, photographs, cards, knitting needles, reels of cotton and boxes of birthday candles. I waited with bated breath as she withdrew each article. She reminisced a lot and she occasionally found a long-lost brooch. It took several hours for the clean-up but I remember loving every minute of it.
The sideboard cupboards were always a little tidier but often amongst the china were snippets of this or pieces of that. The big bowl with the royal blue rim and the pictures of camels, Arabs and palm trees always intrigued me but the one piece of china I loved the most was the coffee set. (It was one of Mum and Dad’s wedding presents) It was fine china, half pale pink, half deep pink.
Somehow it was a little like coconut ice or fairy floss. I was even imaginative enough to think the delicate little cups might be something the frothy pink Glinda. the good witch in “The Wizard of Oz, may have sipped her coffee from. The coffee set was almost fairy-like.
I liked to hold each piece ever so carefully. As there wasn’t a china cabinet, the coffee set had to live behind the wooded door. Sometimes I opened the cupboard just to lovingly look at it. Mum never used the coffee set. Perhaps she always thought that one day it would be there for her daughter.
Towards the end of the war years, when I was about fourteen, we learned we were going to have visitors one evening to share dinner. Mum was aglow with the news for one of the visitors was the husband of a Welsh cousin. Anyone who had anything to do with Wales was the ultimate with my mother. Her Welsh blood fired and her eyes sparkled with delight. It thrilled me too, for not only was I about to meet a Welsh relation, I was going to meet a couple of sailors as well! I thought sailors were the nicest kind of servicemen.
Times were not easy then, but my mother never refused anyone a meal. She managed to whip up something. As it so happened, there was not enough in the pantry for two extra guests for that particular night. Nor was there any spare housekeeping money to buy anything delectable.
We sat down to dinner that special evening, my mother served beautiful individual potato mince pies with vegetables and a sweet to follow. It was an ordinary sort of meal but the two naval men eagerly devoured and enjoyed their banquet. The conversation was brisk and happy. I had already fallen in love with the younger man! He was the most handsome fellow I had ever seen. As it was the only opportunity to meet our Welsh cousin and his friend, my love affair fell flat on its face the minute it had begun!
My father never questioned how Mum got the money to buy the food for the evening meal. It took him many months to discover what she had done. I found out much earlier, of course, and all my bubbles of fantasy were shattered into a thousand pieces. My mother had packed up the pink coffee set and sold it to feed her guests.
Even to this day, I feel a part of the magic of my childhood disappeared in a cloud of dust. I never knew my mother’s true feelings, but I guess, in using her precious coffee set to make one happy evening for overseas visitors, she had made one of her little supreme sacrifices.
My mother has long since gone to the Land of the Pink and White Clouds. Many of her simple treasures hold pride of place in my home. How I would have loved my children and grandchildren to see and touch that beautiful, delicate pink coffee set. How that exquisite piece of fairyland china would have excited them as much as it did me.
I wonder whose cupboard it sits in today, or has it been shattered and tossed away. Who knows, after sixty years of enchantment, the pink coffee set may have been more than a treasure of the childish heart, it may have been a valuable antique!
Nothing, however, will be able to shatter my loving memories as the pink coffee set floats in and out of my dreams.
Elizabeth Porter (nee Woods)
