My Life in One Hundred Objects: 1–5
By: Lachlan Robertson
Tags: Prose, Photography, Museums, Life Lessons, Biography

© LR Objects through Glass

“You only truly possess that which you cannot lose in a shipwreck.” Abu Hamid al-Ghazali

If you live and prosper long enough, you will have a house-full of stuff which you will then spend the remainder of your life trying to get rid off. In the end, you will end up in the ground in a suit, or cremated and then your gold teeth handed to your relatives.

I will never be able to afford a super-yacht so it is a waste of time yearning for the ownership of such an object. On the other hand, I have owned many, many things which stick in the mind as key moments in my life. A sort of cabinet of curiosities of life’s experiences.

So, here am I, defined by the not-so-significant number of 100. This article describes the first five of these objects: only another 20 articles to go!

OBJECT 1 — THE GERMAN KNIGHT

In my grandmother’s house, when I was about six, I came across a German Knight. Nobody seemed to mind that I played with it as if it was a toy, but it was clearly not made for that purpose. The Knight stood about six inches high and the metal was dense, heavy and shone dull grey like pewter. He stood on a Bakelite base within which was concealed a musical box. When lifted, it played a Teutonic tune reminiscent of the music I had heard in old black and white war films shown on television.

But it had a functional use. By pressing a stud in the front of the visor, the helmet flipped up with finger crushing speed to reveal the fact it was a cigarette lighter. The strong spring made it hard for a small boy to push it back in place. That function was to be avoided if the small boy didn’t want to bruise his fingers again. It was therefore in look and function, a terrifying object from which sweet music could emerge.

It was an odd object to find in a household where no-one smoked and when I asked where it came from, I was told it had been a present from an uncle to his mother, my grandmother.

It was only years later, as an adult and when I was given the “toy” as one of the memories of a much loved grandmother did I look at the object more closely.

The Knight carries a shield and on it is a map. In tiny writing and engraved with hand coloured dots, the map shows a Germany split into the respective British, American and Soviet zones. The music, “Schau mich bitte nicht so an” would only have been written a few years before it was made, a contemporary song of the time, later to be made famous as “La Vie En Rose” by Edith Piaf.

From questioning of various members of the remaining family, its story emerged.

My Uncle on my mothers side had joined the Royal Air Force as a clerk in the late 1940’s, after the war, and was sent to Germany as one of the occupying forces in the British Zone. He was in a position to barter goods in a Germany where a decimated Country which knew hunger and destitution tried to re-invent itself once more. He would buy coffee and other goods in the UK to take back with him to his posting and he would return with presents, including my German Knight. I don’t know what else was bartered and I suspect that, like others, as a British serviceman he was in a good position to bargain with local people for a wide variety of goods such as they could scrounge and produce.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

One day my Uncle returned with a mysterious German wife who appeared to have no past, no papers, and no indication of her real age or provenance. To want to be a German wife in a post-war Britain must give some indication as to what life was like in Germany at that time.

All we knew was that she had had a child she left behind and and later in life, would occasionally travel back to see him.

I don’t think it’s outside the realms of possibility that the metal in my Knight came from melted down armament, moulded using reconfigured wartime tools and produced by re-skilled people who only a few years before, were making weapons. To add insult to injury, they would engrave a tiny map to show how their Country had been carved up between the winning powers.

When I was that boy playing with my Knight, I would place him central in the field of battle where my small Airfix plastic soldiers coloured to represent the British, German, American, Russian and Japanese Armies fought him as a giant metal Godzilla, laying waste all before him.

I had no idea of the tragedies that my Knight represented, the political earthquake that had formed my Country and reformed its erstwhile enemy, the meaning of the Iron Curtain and the true impact of those coloured dots dividing a nation. He may be of a time showing a history long gone, but my metal Knight is built to last for generations and he will stand witness to that war and it’s aftermath, every day nonetheless.