Small gifts from abroad
23rd August 2008


Across the table lies a sculpted face, about the size of an oven mitt, carved or moulded from a tufa-like substance, the weight and texture of sandstone. It is the face of a man, creased in a grin so broad it has forced the eyes closed and wrinkled the bridge of the nose. The grin is beatific or idiotic, I’m unsure which.

It lies cheerily upon the layers of tissue paper from which it emerged, alive with fragments of story that tumble from it like the air miles it has travelled. Where does it come from? Who crafted its features? What cultural narrative styled those pointed cheeks, that upturned smile?

I know the story of this carving. I guessed what he was as soon as Sylvia unpacked him from between layers of clothing in her suitcase. I knew it from the weight of the object in my hands and the contours beneath the layers of tissue paper. The grin was the only surprise.

He comes from Exeter in south-west England. Sylvia will have bought him from one of half a dozen small souvenir shops in a restored warehouse on a stone wharf of the old waterfront, where the river Exe tumbles over a weir and coastal trading ships berthed 150 years ago. He is carved in the style of the gargoyles that decorate Exeter cathedral: the peculiar, often grotesque, figures that are flumes or pipes directing rainwater off the roof away from the walls.

This small figure is woven into our story. We once spent a year living and working near Exeter and explored the cathedral, the Roman ruins and the old waterfront, where we bought two or three miniature gargoyles and carvings. They have joined the accumulation of artefacts that decorate our lives, clattering and braying like the pots and pans of a tinker’s caravan. Little smiley man is a worthy addition.

Small gifts from abroad often possess value beyond price or provenance. I discovered this as a child, on those rare occasions when a parcel arrived in our household from Holland, wrapped in string and brown paper, criss-crossed with the purple tattoos of foreign postal services. It would lie in state on the dining table until dad got home from work and then be unwrapped with such care you’d have thought it held all the treasures of Samarkand.

The objects from these parcels flowed into our young lives like beacons. We pored over them for clues, for the stories our parents never told us, or we never listened to, about Holland, their early lives and the people who wrote those spidery letters on thin blue aerogramme paper. We marvelled at the bars of pale Dutch chocolate, the tablets of salty liquorice that I never developed a taste for, the cigars – Schimmelpenninck or Jacob van Hartog – and smooth linen tablecloths. We puzzled over decorative teaspoons, their handles with tiny enamelled coats of arms and names of towns whose vowels we could not master.

Years later there were other parcels, these from Sylvia’s mother Lyla, in England. Lyla pushed the limits of plausibility. She wrapped gifts in off-cuts of wallpaper, plastic shopping bags, recycled newsprint, and bound them with skeins of wool and pieces of string tied in knots that would have defied even Alexander the Great. She posted her final package to us a few days before she died aged 80, in November 1993.

A couple of months later, on a hot January day, we were moving house. Sylvia had hurt her back, the kids were fractious. There was a knock at the door and a postman with Lyla’s parcel. It had failed spectacularly, string and paper giving up, the contents spilling out. A diligent postal worker had gathered up the pieces, sealed them in a large plastic bag and sent them on their way. We unwrapped comics and sweets for the girls, a cushion for Sylvia and a prayer for our good health.

In the years since my childhood the world has shrunk to the size of a walnut, broadband and internet laying bare all its mysteries. With a few taps on a keyboard I can conjure products from anywhere on the globe. The system is efficient but the mystique has vanished. The small gifts I continue to treasure are those that arrive wrapped not in courier bags, but in stories.