TINS & KEELEY

Three good things. For Keeley, as a kid, tins made her think of tea and cake and old ladies. All old ladies kept tea in caddies like these and all old ladies made cake. The tins belonged to her Nanny Flo, Nanny Rose and Great Aunt Etty. The family had always lived east, Etty lived in Hoxton all her life. It took a bomb to force her sister Violet out, with the added indignity of being re-housed in Chiswick. The blue tin was Etty’s, the red one was her sister Flo’s. The three girls helped in their dad’s Bethnal Green shop, they french polished the cabinets that he made. On the other side of Keeley’s family, her dad’s mum Rose owned the rustiest of the three tins. Rose died young of TB. At 17, her husband Victor had joined the navy, he’d spent two years stationed in Shanghai. Keeley says it could be that Rose picked up the chinoiserie tin at Hoxton market but she’d like to think it was a present that Victor brought back from China.

25 Aug 2013