On Toby Jugs

It was, I suppose, sometime in the early Blair years: a strange and foolish time to buy a single Toby Jug, let alone two. This was the dawning of the age of blow up furniture and the triumph of the beige palate and there was to be no room for ornament or chintz. Yet it was then that I, against the express advice of my parents, used what pocket money I had and bought two Toby Jugs in an antique-come-junk shop in Rye. I knew, even at the time, that this was an act not in tune with the prevailing march of taste- they were ugly things, a Saracen and Pirate, but they had not been bought for their exterior beauty, rather as totems of early onset contrarianism.

At this point, the only person I had ever known to have Toby Jugs was Maud. My grandmother had, and continues to have, scant disregard for social norms and has a tendency to ‘collect’ people. Not in the manner of a Victorian big game hunter but rather like a planet, gliding serenely through the solar system taking objects into her orbit as a matter of course. Maud was one such person- she was very old when we met- and that was when I was very young. She could remember the First World War, and the Second and she had not married, nor had children. It was always suggested that she was part of that great swathe of collateral across Europe, denied the lives they might have had by bullets and speeches they never heard or saw.

We, her strangely adopted family, became her delight. She would slip us scratch cards and humbugs and partake of all those little acts of rebellion by which the elderly and the young conspire to enrage the middle aged. I was a recalcitrant child, not much taken with bedtimes and so had watched more comedy with an adult theme than was perhaps good for me and so it was that the word ‘prostitute’ entered my vocabulary (although, it must be said, without any concomitant idea of what it might mean). I remember once, as we sat in a garden, presumably my grandparents’, asking the assembled company- including our oddly embraced Toby Jug fan- what it was Maud ‘did’. On receiving no satisfactory answer I posited that she might be a member of the world’s oldest profession. Faces dropped, a chastisement found its way to my father’s lips until, a split second later, Maud herself erupted in convulsive laughter- delighted that someone might still think that possible.

Maud lived in a small bungalow at the bottom of the hill where my grandparents had their house, at least she did until she was too frail and my grandmother took her in. The bungalow was a far cry from the other houses I knew as a child- all frosted glass and textured walls and, of course, Toby Jugs. They sat, in her front room, these fat and ugly chunks of painted earthenware; St Paul tells us that the treasure of the glory of God might be found in earthen vessels, but all I remember seeing in Maud’s were dead spiders and dust. Yet still I found myself buying their smaller cousins in that Sussex side street. Marxism would, I am sure, suggest that my purchasing of them was as much a rebellion of class as of taste but, though we may not have grown out of delighting in pirates, we must surely have grown out of listening to Marx, and so such analysis might be quickly discounted.

No, the reason I suppose I bought them was as a strange act of- of what? Affection? No, I never was an affectionate child. Of solidarity? Of course not- there’s Marx’s bloody fingerprints again. Of appreciation? Perhaps. Of tribute- that’s it, vile Neo-Augustan that I am, I bought them as an act of tribute to Maud. The hint of exchange is not accidental- I suppose I felt I owed her something for the care and delight she showed, for her kindness, for her love, all of which were shown not for financial gain or because of family devotion, but because she really did love us. Strange, too strange, perhaps for a child to understand. And so I did the only thing I thought I could do; I bought Toby Jugs. To show Maud that she was not alone in her manifestly unpopular tastes, to show that I too delighted in her, to show, I suppose, love.

So it is that I think of ‘Toby Jug delight’- that unique joy sparked in the young by the old and vice versa. I remember it from my very earliest days of Church attendance, creeping up earlier than a teenager ought to on a Sunday morning, walking across the earthy fields and then to the back rows of pews. In front of me were sallied ranks of ladies of a certain age, who could shoot barbed poison at one another but, when the children and toddlers of more pious scions than mine would be trotted out with the fruit of their activities, would be filled with a joy which could not have been aught but genuine. I think too of a patient of my mother’s, Florrie- born the year Nightingale died and so named for her. She would come to visit and shower us in chocolate and colouring books and delight simply for being fragile vessels of new life. Such affection was, to us children, a mystery and one of my very greatest fears is that we might have seemed ungrateful as a consequence. How strange that one with a past such as mine should be so troubled by this, a possibly non-existent sin of omission. It was, I suppose, in all cases, a mystery to me that these people, who had seen so much in their lives, could take such delight, could see such glory in me, who had seen so little. Now, I realise, that was rather the point.

Each time I see a Toby Jug (a rarer and rarer occurrence as taste- or at least its impersonators- continues its relentless crushing of sentiment in the interiors of the nation, although I still have mine), I remember Paul’s gentle warning to us as we seek to run to fast or too far, to climb too quick or too high, that warning to us, to me: we have this treasure in Earthen vessels. I think too of Maud, of Florrie, of those beaming ladies in the front few rows- all vessels returned to frail, fragile earth now, of course, but not without showing- and sharing- that treasure they had deep within. My exterior is as earthen as any other- more so, I shouldn't imagine- and I fear that my features bear a closer resemblance to those clumpy earthen caricatures than I might like to admit, but if even Toby Jugs can bring joy, can conceal treasure, can speak of love, then I suppose there's no limit to what us living earthen vessels might do.