Picking My Precious..

Well it's definitely a blogging Sunday. Catching up on my view(s) for January to kick start the LuckySnapping challenge and now joining in with Sian's Story Telling Sunday here! It's a great idea and this year we are finding our most precious keepsakes and story telling around them.

So I set off for my special places.. a few drawers and little boxes in our chest of drawers. I pondered a few items and finally I knew which was my most cherished item.  There are lots of things I would be sad to lose, but this is the one I would be bereft if I lost...My Mum's engagement ring complete with a little brocade box in a heart shape which she always kept it in.

We were talking this morning about the tradition that you should spend three months salary on an engagement ring... yeah right! Somehow I think that should be filed away with the same box of things like not living together or having children before you are married..it just seems outdated for the 21st Century.

But way back in the 1940's it must have been such a big deal to get engaged and then plan the wedding and live together for the first time.

For Mum it meant leaving her Mum and her brother and sister (both older), leaving her Mum who had been suddenly widowed nine years earlier and moving down to the cove to live with dad .. and his Dad.. mmm, from what I hear maybe not the most special aspect of the deal!  (My Grandad was a bit of a miserable old thing, didn't take very kindly to my Mum doing his washing and generally making life a bit more homely and comfortable, you know sometimes you just can't help some people!)

Mum & Dad married in 1946 and her wedding ring was 22carat but only had '22CT' stamped inside it twice, no Hallmark, apparently that was the way just after the war (?)

She believed you should never take it off and in 1955 she had to have it taken off to have an operation and the first thing she asked for when she came round was her ring (now thy tape them over I think..)

Once married the engagement ring was a special occasion item and Mum only wore it when she was going out.. in fact as a child I remember coming home and asking her where she had been as she was wearing her ring.   After 23 years of marriage dad died and I think Mum wore her ring more, less working on the land and risk of losing it I suppose.  

Then in 1973 when she remarried she gave me both the rings. I have worn the wedding ring ever since, so it has been on her or my finger every day since December 1946 and you know, it is still a perfect circle, never dented or bent even with the lives we have led.  The engagement ring had become very thin on the underside so I only wore it on special occasions myself, usually to bring me luck in exams and I guess it did!  It's kind of cute too because it is very very simple and really a reflection of the life and times of the post war years..

.. so there we are, my most precious and not much of a story but a nice memory.. I wonder where they will go next..!

(and you know, that Jewellers, EJ Hutchens in Penzance is still there in Causewayhead, our cousin Penny used to work there in 1970's and now it is called Spiegelhalters, but I reckon lots of it is just the same.)