Nan’s Breadboard

What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?

It’s normally a lighter colour than this but I have just washed it up.

Grandad was a carpenter – not an apprentice-trained one, I think. During the second war, too old to be conscripted, still carrying around a double hernia and a lot of shrapnel from the first war, he had a job in a local factory. I don’t know what the factory did before the war, but when he was there he was engaged in knocking up packing crates for parts of aeroplanes. So perhaps he was more of a joiner.

Actually I still have a stool he made for Mum. It’s a cheap and cheerful thing with a varnished chipboard top. I guess he used offcuts or scrap wood. Dad used to joke that every stool Grandad made had a slight wobble to it because he could never quite get the legs right. This one doesn’t wobble – and I doubt if Dad could have made a stool of any sort.

Ex used to smirk at Granddad’s carpentry too. He called my family “bodgers”. In a technical sense he was right – compared to him, everyone was a bodger at everything. Myself included, of course. What he lacked was the gentle and kindly art of not appearing to have noticed.

And, so the story goes, Grandad made the breadboard for Nan when they got married, which would have been somewhere around 1920. They married on Christmas Eve, against the wishes of, apparently, both sets of parents. They both came from enormous Victorian families living close together, and one of his brothers was married to one of her sisters.

The story is that they walked up Station Road together hand in hand that icy cold day, to the Church on the top road. No family member went with them. They found the necessary witnesses in the street, with the help of the Vicar. I always wondered whether it was snowing.

I am not sure how I ended up with the breadboard. Maybe Mum realised I liked it and gave it to me after Nan died. I use it every day for making sandwiches on, and on the rare occasions when I peel vegetables I use it to chop them on. Unlike Nan I am not much of a cook. Bodger, you see!

It always fascinated me how he managed to make it an octagon. He left school at twelve and I doubt if he got as far as geometry. I did get as far as geometry – in fact it was the only branch of mathematics that interested me – and I could still, I think, construct a hexagon with a pair of compasses (useful for patchwork) but I don’t know how to make an octagon.

And I like the pattern. The curved lines are like Nan used to edge her pastry with, and she would have used the edge of a spoon, or spoons of different sizes, to make those. Did she copy the pattern from him, or he from her? Or maybe they inadvertently solved two different problems in the same way.

Either way, approved of or not, bodgers or not, they were  married for a very, very long time, so they must have got something right.