[Jane Teresa Anderson]

I’ve just posted a new blog at JaneTeresa.com. You can read it here.

It begins:

I was admiring photos of broken pieces of antique pottery, hand blown glass, a clay pipe, and an inkwell, all mudlarking treasures foraged from English river mud by Carys, a friend on Instagram, and it took me back to childhood expeditions to the gardening allotments near my grandmother’s house in Portsmouth, England.

Portsmouth was heavily bombed during World War Two, with some 6,ooo houses destroyed and a greater number severely damaged. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents lived within the bombed areas, and my parents described emerging from the bomb shelters on many occasions to find nearby houses reduced to rubble. Over the next few years, prefab houses were built as temporary measures to house the homeless, and a huge council estate was built just outside Portsmouth to help accommodate the overflow. In the mid-1950s, when I was two years old, we moved to the council estate – one of Europe’s largest wholly social housing council estates – where we lived until I was nine. We rarely left the estate, as we didn’t have a car, but sometimes we would take the bus or train back into Portsmouth to visit our relatives.

I don’t really know the history of the garden allotments near my maternal grandmother’s house, but we believed they were situated on bombsites because it didn’t take much digging to find buried treasure of the kind Carys shared on Instagram.

We brought home so many bits and pieces, imagining what they had looked like whole, who had owned them, and what kinds of lives those people had lived. Today, …

 

(Keep reading at the blog, link at the top of this post.)

Do comment here in our private student community forum, or on the actual blog page.

Enjoy 🙂

 

• This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jane Teresa Anderson.

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