Polish

I have always marveled at how a little attention to detail can bring a tired, shabby object back to life. I like nothing more than restoring the shine to a piece that has taken on the patina of age and become dull and tarnished. I feel a thrill of accomplishment when I return the freshly polished gleam to a piece of chrome or brassware, particularly if it has been long neglected, and lately I have been kept particularly busy doing just that.

By Dave Charles

Our son, Dan, moved into a lovely old apartment in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town, last year, and I had great fun stripping and polishing the original brass fittings on the doors and windows to bring them back to life. Some were covered in decades of old paint, while others were almost black with tarnish. It took many hours of labour with a Dremel and a host of accessories to strip the fittings down to the base metal and then polish them to a high-gloss finish. When the job was done, those brass fittings would have passed muster with the Royal Horse Guards, and I felt a real sense of satisfaction knowing that they were once again as beautiful as they had been when first installed more than eighty years ago.

Of late, my beloved Sue has been going through our collective inherited family keepsakes, looking for things that Dan might appreciate in his new home, and she has come up trumps with some interesting pieces. Some of these might best be described as trench art, made from brass cartridge cases and recycled metal by her late grandfather when he served with the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War. These took ages to buff and polish, but eventually the gleaming brass began to appear, and I could almost feel Great-Grandfather Harold’s presence as we worked together to bring them back to life.

This odd assortment of knick-knacks was duly parcelled up, along with a few more substantial pieces, and couriered off to Cape Town, where they took pride of place in Dan’s apartment.

Harold would be pleased, I think. My polishing spree has also rekindled personal memories that had long been lost in the mists of time but have now returned, fragmented and filtered and, if the truth be told, a little sinister.

I had long forgotten the mystery of the fireplace in my first home in Benoni. As a small boy, I loved the crackle and roar of the coal fire that kept our little house warm on those bitter Highveld winter nights that froze the taps and transformed our garden into a ghostly wonderland. The frosted grass crunched underfoot, and the birdbath was always a solid block of ice in those bleak midwinters, long ago.

Inside the house, it was always warm and cosy when the fire was burning, and because we had regular coal deliveries, this was generally the case. But there was something terrifying about the coal. It arrived in sacks carried to the coal bunker by wild-looking men covered in coal dust, which seemed to accentuate the whites of their eyes and teeth. They draped the sacks over their heads and shoulders, making them look like apparitions from the underworld in my childish imagination, and I generally hid when I heard them coming.

But even when they had gone, there was still a sinister presence at the fireplace that I found unsettling. It was an old brass plate on a stand next to the fire. But this was no ordinary ornament.

It was magical.

The plate was engraved with the image of an owl with enormous eyes beneath a sickle moon. It was really rather frightening. In my childish imagination, it merged with the dark nursery rhymes and fairy tales of my youth to conjure up images of cackling witches, giants and demonic children running through the town, upstairs and downstairs in their nightgowns, rapping at the windows and crying at the locks...

No doubt Freud would have had a field day with me. And now, here I was, many towns and a lifetime later, polishing away the tarnish until the owl and the moon emerged from the shadows once again. And with them came long-forgotten memories of my childhood.

For a moment, I was back at the fireplace, and they were all there with me — my dad and my mom, my sisters and our little dog, Cindy.

And we were all safe.

And happy.