I was 19 when my paternal grandmother died. It was my first experience of bereavement, and I felt that life could not be imagined without our zany, wacky Granny, a born entertainer and a rock-like tower of strength. I railed inwardly against this injustice, and wanted everything she had left behind to disappear in some sort of spontaneous combustion.
Everything was a painful reminder: the Bible, the hymn book, the crystal vases and bowls she had saved for her six granddaughters, the pieces of crochet that were her great interest, the box of photographs from the family past.
Of course time did its usual work, and that particular feeling dissipated, especially when I learned that the Victorians, with their habits of braiding lengths of hair into brooches and preserving pictures in lockets, were great believers in mementoes.
Eventually I read Annie's Box, written by Randal Keynes, direct descendant of Charles Darwin. Charles and Emma Darwin were unusual and exemplary parents, Darwin confessing to being fascinated by his children, in a period when parental fascination was rare. When Annie, their first daughter and apparently a most winning child, died at the age of ten, both parents were emotionally shattered. Decades later, Keynes discovered a box in which Emma had deposited a few keepsakes and items that had belonged to Annie.
When my mother was a young woman, her brother, a pilot on active service in New Guinea, made her a present of a locally made and carved camphor wood box. I don't suppose people use the label glory box now, but that is what we always called it. In it Mum kept the things she accumulated for her trousseau, another outdated term: her linen and lingerie, and the shoeboxes containing wartime correspondence between her and Dad.
One day those boxes disappeared. 'We took the letters out, we read them to ourselves and to each other, we laughed and cried, and at the end of the day we burned the lot.' So Mum told me. But there were various cherished items left, such as the satin-covered horse-shoe shape she carried on her wedding day: it is now here in my Greek house. She also kept her grandfather's hand-made christening bonnet and some of his old school exercise books.
My Greek mother-in-law also had a box, a trunk, really, a feature of most Greek households at a time when migration was often part of an uncertain life. In it,