The Hazel Riley Project

OBJECTS Ⓒ

Dressing Table 
If I could go through that looking glass how many wonders would I find?  What was the first face it captured? Where did its existence begin?
 
It was in my room in my grandparents’ house.  The room which had been my mother’s.  Many of her things were still in it.  Jewellery she’d left behind when she married, a dressing table set, with pink Bakerlite hairbrush, comb and mirror… a few tiny keys… a silver paper leaf from a birthday cake.   I’d no doubt that all these discarded things had become mine. 
 
I filled the void that my mother left, when she married.  I stayed with my grandparents often. My brother never.   My grandmother was always kind.   I was allowed to have my hair loose. I brushed her hair, she brushed mine.  I didn’t know her fierce side.  Once moved into her new council home, she refused to move again, even to own a property.  There was one my grandfather wanted, right next to the park.  (My mother kept track of its escalating value.) She refused to have another child.  She came from a large family with eleven brothers and sisters.  Perhaps she was determined not to be like her mother.  My parents bought a flat as soon as they married.  There’s a pattern here. 
 
My grandparents were given one of the very first council houses.  They had to pass an interview, prove that they’d be reliable, respectable tenants.  It had an indoor bathroom…. a truly wonderful and rare thing in the 1920’s.  In later life my mother was shocked to learn how many of her friends hadn’t had shoes… had been hungry all the time.
 
The dressing table was a dark wood. It looks older than the 1920’s. Did they buy it, inherit it…  was it a gift?   The first time I stayed there I was 2 ½. My brother was being born.  Did someone hold me up before that mirror?  Did I sleep in that single bed, or was there a cot?  I know that mirror would be a more trustworthy witness than all the snaps in the family albums.
 
I’ve written about that house, that garden, trying to fix it in my soul for eternity.  I can still go down the steps by the rockery, past king cups and marguerites, knock on the front door. 
 
When my grandmother died I was in Paris. I came home to find black lined cards on the sideboard.  It was a seismic shock, even though I knew she was ill.  She was in hospital, in a horrible ward that had been an army barracks.  She’d lived with us briefly.  She was delirious, seeing a woman hang up her washing in the living room.  I half believed her. 
 
I’ve little memory of her house being cleared, other than that some of the portrait photographs of her sisters had disappeared.  Some of the china had vanished too.  My mother suspected she’d been swindled by some dealer who’d knocked on the door.  I mourned the house and the beautiful garden.  I kept the dressing table. 
 
We parents were now in their third and final home.  My kidney shaped dressing table, with curtain, was discarded.  I always loved old things.  My mother, who was close to a hoarder, longed for bright modern things. Over the years the unfashionable dark, sturdy furniture was replaced by paler, less substantial stuff. 
 
In my absence, I became the daughter they’d always wanted. My dad repapered my bedroom, replacing the dark blue and white walls with pink flowered paper.  I came home on a visit to find the dressing table was a near fluorescent pink.  Gloss paint. Sugar and spice….  all things nice…  I was furious.   I hated going home.  
 
Over the decades I always thought the dressing table would be the thing I kept. But when my mother died, aged 92, I knew there was no way I could get it to London, and no way I’d be able to clean off the thick gloss paint, or afford to get it restored.  By then it was the sole survivor from my grandparents’ house.  Some of the things were still in the tiny drawer by the mirror… the little keys, the silver leaf, a broken hair slide. There were things I’d left behind too. Matchboxes from Spain. A blue marble egg.  Hairpins. 
 
For the women of my family a dressing table was an essential thing.  It was where you sat to compose yourself each morning, checking your perm, applying the Max Factor pan stick and lipstick.   I thought I was different, with my brown eye shadow and pencil drawn lashes.  I was going to get away.   I was and I did. I don’t have a dressing table now. Don’t even have many mirrors.  But death changes everything.  I know I’m one of a long line of determined, fierce women.  I find  more and more ways in which I’m like my mother. 
 
If I could unlock the images in that mirror my heart might break.  As my mother’s health failed, I kept it very clean.  A duster and dish cloth lived under the shelf.  The paint had discoloured. The glass had smears that no spray could shift.  It was as if I’d moved back in.  The dressing table was my space. I had clean underwear and a change of clothes in the drawer.  It had my favourite face cream, a perfume spray, some shells and a two china horses, all carefully placed.  Past and present had achieved some minor harmony.   
 

Hornsea Pottery
At the end of June my ninety two year old mother had a severe stroke and had to go into residential care, something she always dreaded.  I’m amazed at how entangled I’ve become in the family home and all its objects. I find myself going through every postcard, putting them in piles… one for the charity shop, another with a few to keep.  I’m always drawn to ephemera, and some of this is very potent. There’s sheets of vintage wrapping paper that seem too precious for the recycling bin.  At the back of a drawer I find a paper bag with our baby shoes. There are notebooks with accounts, meticulously kept, immaculately hand written, that seem to blow open the doors to the past.  I teeter on the edge of time. I become more and more entangled in these invisible strings that tug at my heartstrings and my conscience.   How did I become the guardian of the house and everything in it?  I moved from Gateshead to London in 1976 and never felt the pull of my roots until this tragedy struck.
 
I started to photograph and write about these objects as a way of disentangling myself from all these objects, but they’ve proved a potent key to the not so distant past.
 
I’m surprised how easily the Hornsea Pottery pieces fit into my London flat. The ‘fawn tree vase’ seems to date from 1960-62, and I expect the standing fawn is much the same period.  They evoke a side of Northern, working class life that has never featured in soap operas, sitcoms or misery memoirs.  Parents were optimistic that their children would never face the severe poverty of their own childhoods, or go through the horrors of another world war.