I've written the opening for a new story, I've got plenty of details to fill it out with but I don't know where it's going, not yet. No plot, you see! Ideas sometimes stall completely, I hope this isn't one of those.
Berlin Bear (working title)
He had always been her favourite thing. He was black, neatly carved and had little white eyes and straight white teeth inside his open mouth. He walked along in a stately manner and was about as tall as Lydia’s mum’s blue tea caddy, and as long as her brother’s orange book with a penguin on it. He seemed quite small, for a bear.
Lydia was four, she wasn’t allowed to touch the bear, it had been her grandpa’s, he’d brought it back from Germany after the war. The bear lived on the shelf over the coal fire in their sitting room. When Lydia asked what his name was, her dad put his head on one side and said he wasn’t sure. Her mum came with a mug of tea for Dad and milk for Lydia, so she asked Mum.
‘Sit down and don’t spill your milk,’ Mum said. Lydia sat on the little green stool that Dad sometimes put his feet up on, and she sipped her milk.
‘But what’s his name?’ She asked again.
Mum smiled. ‘Grandpa brought it back from Berlin,’ she said. ‘So I suppose that’s its name. Berlin.’
Much later, by the time Berlin Bear took in pride of place on Lydia’s retro modular shelving unit in her Fulham flat, she had learned that he wasn’t from Berlin, or even from Germany. He was carved in Brienz, the small Swiss village that had become famous for its wood carving. Berlin was a black forest carved bear, although he wasn’t from the Black Forest either, that was 270 kilometres to the north of Brienz.
It had started with the wooden bear, her collection of wooden animals, then stone animals, then things to display her animals on, hence her modular shelving. It was the first non-new item she’d bought for her flat. It wasn’t antique, although she had found it in an antiques centre and mid-century modern hadn’t yet become expensive on the vintage market.
She’d originally started furnishing her flat with five-hundred pounds, buying new things. By the time she’d got the essentials, a fridge, a bed, duvet, curtains and a cooker, there wasn’t much of her five-hundred pounds left. Forty-seven pounds and fifty-four pence to be precise. New furniture was out of the question. A junk shop on the corner opposite had sold her a red Formica topped table and two matching plastic seated chairs for twenty quid and a colleague at work gave her two sheepskin rugs which she claimed had made her children sneeze, and an old, not very clean couch, which Lydia had scrubbed with carpet shampoo, but still smelt vaguely of children and dogs.
Her collection had stayed in boxes for years, until one Friday she saw, in the window of the Charlton antiques centre, another Black Forest bear. She went back the next day and bought it, never mind that it was seventy quid. The modular shelving unit it was sitting on was half the price, but she’d have to pay for delivery.
Jamie, the guy who’d delivered it, plus a green leather couch she’d seen later and added to her shopping list, was very happy to assemble the shelving for her. He told her the shelving was called Ladderax, from the sixties, very soon it would be considered retro, she was ahead of the trend. He said he’d only let her buy it because he needed the floorspace for a Regency bookcase which was worth thousands rather than hundreds.
Jamie also said her flat looked a bit bare, he suggested she could buy more from the Charlton Antiques Centre. She put her new bear on the shelving and told him she had more, she pulled out the boxes containing her collection. He was keen to see what she had and she became excited too, finding things she’d forgotten about. He helped her to unpack and arrange her animals. He was enthusiastic when she unwrapped from its newspaper nest a stone animal she had regretted buying when she was sixteen, because it was so heavy and she’d had to carry it home on the bus.
‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked her.
‘I think it’s a whale. I found it in a junk shop ten years ago,’ she said.
‘It is nice.’ He turned the piece around in his hands, examining it from all angles. ‘You’ve got a good eye. Not a whale though, it’s an Inuit carved walrus. See, the tusks?’ He pointed to parallel carved grooves down the chest of the beast and she could see it, of course it was a walrus, she just hadn’t looked hard enough.
