Nostalgia

These days, shops more often close than open in Fishguard but one of the two charity shops in town has a new branch going by this name. (I always find it interesting that the British and American names for these fund-raising outlets emphasize quite different moral virtues.)

On the whole nostalgia is something I avoid but I went in today out of curiosity. There were the usual outdated dressing tables and hatstands but then, in the back room, I spotted this, an old cooking range. It wasn't for sale, it was the original, left in situ since it was last in use, decades ago, behind whatever shop this had once been. Seeing it shot me back to my early years, and a similar range in the cottage smallholding my parents had rented for five bob a week (that's 25p) when they escaped London at the beginning of WW2. My mother, a townee, had learnt to cook on it, balancing pans over the grate and taking her chances with the oven which could be regulated only by the strength of the flames and a series of small dampers but she swore the bread and cakes she baked in it surpassed all her later efforts. Cats crouched in the warmth beside the fire until they were put out at night to patrol the barn, laundry hung to air (and fall) from a string stretched above and I bawled my way through a weekly hairwash in a tin bath set on the hearthrug. Each morning the ashes would have to be raked out and the fire relit unless it was 'banked up' to remain smouldering through the coldest nights.

As I explained to someone who was refurbishing the shop, there would normally have been a mantelshelf above the range on which the 'best' china or ornaments would be kept out of the reach of small hands, and behind these items would be filed away important documents such as the rent book, school reports, outstanding bills and letters from loved ones. A rather superior example can be seen here.

Nostalgia! It had got me! It's no longer an official diagnosis but once it was treated as a serious complaint that could jeopardize the health of soldiers and sailors. The Swiss were especially susceptible. Removed from their mountain fastnesses they sometimes pined away to the point of death. In the 18th century, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swiss mercenaries were expressly forbidden to sing or listen to Kuhreihen, the melodies that the herdmen traditionally played as they accompanied their animals to and from their Alpine pastures. Hearing the tunes far from home could make the soldiers so nostalgic that they would desert.

Listen and perhaps you will see why.