The Writing Box

I’ve owned it for less than a day, but I have known it for most of my life. The newly-smooth lid that I lift so carefully now to admire the leather and the embossing inside, I used to crash down as a child, loving to hear the delicate lock catch. You can still see, faintly, the scratches we made around the depression for the ink pot, and the pen container.

Where is my mother going to keep her jewellery now? I ask. 

On the elongated days of our childhood, my sisters and I would search through the box, lifting up chains, fastening brooches. I wondered why my mother kept the macaroni necklace that my cousin made for her at school, but which she never wore.

The box came from my grandmother’s house. The one in Ashfield, not the corner shop in Summer Hill. I looked up that up on the Internet a few weeks ago. It is newly restored as a residence now, and sold for millions, but the staircase is the same. And the shopfront windows, which I looked at and thought ‘they should be mine.’ My older sister remembers our grandfather behind the counter, cutting deli meats for her to try, but I remember only the stairs. I guess my memories prevail. 

My grandmother inherited the house in Victoria Street, like a miracle, like something in a story, from a friend who she would visit, and who had no family. Or perhaps no family to which she wanted to leave the house, I wonder now.

It was a lovely house. Victorian, like the box. Or maybe Edwardian. It’s gone now, too.

I know the gift of the box is some sort of reference to my writing. Writing which I, cowardly and cruelly, refuse to show them. Which I fear will hurt them.

And because I always live my life second-hand, as well as first, I think of Jane Austen’s panic at the thought of losing her writing box, and Anne Brontë’s bad children, who would destroy a woman’s most private place.

They wanted to bring it to me, on the last day before our movements were, officially, restricted again. I did not want them to leave their house, which they have very seldom left since this thing began. I have only seen them in person, once, since before my mother’s birthday. That day the sun was shining and we sat outside in their garden and two kookaburras flew in, perched nearby, and watched us in our strange new ways.

My mother put the parcel outside our house, and they phoned from the car.

My daughter and I went out, picked it up, and waved from the footpath.