‘My vintage memory’ is a regular series here at Bess Georgette and I’d love to share yours. Email me your vintage memory (attach photos if you have them) to info@bessgeorgette.com and I’ll share it here. This week’s vintage memory is by Clare Murphy.

When I try to remember the first thing I ever bought that was vintage, my mind fills and clutters with images, shelf upon shelf, hanger upon hanger of the many treasured things I have somehow inherited (from friends as well as family) and never paid a pretty penny for.

So many of these things — some pointedly op, some sleek-angled and shining, quaint and neat, or garish and mushroom-clad — come tethered by a white-stringed tag of emotion. When I turn over the tag on each, I know that it will say something like: “burgeoning friendship”, “sheer covetousness” or “giddy excitement”. This is because before I or anyone knew that the things we had long known and come to inherit would become “vintage”, they would simply be “hand-me-downs”, as connected to our memories and emotions as any single or repeated event in our lives.

My mother, on migration from the small village of Taddington in England’s north to the Antipodes, had inherited what remained of her mother’s best tea set. As a child, each momentous time that set was brought out, I would whisper a spell to keep its dainty encirclement of ivy leaves safe, until that glorious (and yet tragically sad) moment when the sound of each cup clinking as it kissed its pretty saucer would become mine.

While my mother lives on, that Colclough pattern tea set is long since gone, the fragments of it scattered, like my family, across continents.

When I was not eyeing off her good china, you might have found me lying upon my mother’s quilted bedspread examining her silver charm bracelet — replete with moving parts: a cat that foraged up and down through a garbage can; a sewing machine with a spinning wheel; a pair of snipping scissors; trumpeting elephant; opening book …

Space on the thing was at a premium and most of its residents, which were crafted at a time when big loved to be beautiful, jostled each other for space as a new one arrived each birthday or Christmas. A charm could be bought easily as a present with a child’s pocket money in the 1980s, but as production and taste by then had reduced the charm to the suggestion of form rather than a detailed reproduction of it, I was never sure if the charms I bought her really held any charm at all.

At eight, Santa Claus brought me my own charm bracelet. It was the perfect cure for covetousness. By 14, I knew myself to be no jangling gypsy. The search for a self-constructed self had begun.

This search for self curiously coincided with the realisation that I should also stop asking questions that started with the cruelly sentimental, “When you die, can I have … ?”

So, I was not particularly enamoured with the brass bird brooch my Aunt Dorothy spontaneously gave me around this time while cleaning out her jewelry box. It had been my Yorkshire grandmother’s. The pin and its tail were slightly bent and with its painted jewel-less spots it looked more like a child’s curiosity than a serious adornment.

That brooch would move house with me no less than 34 times before I began to see its red beady-eyed merit as something more than the relic of a grandmother I had never known (who it seemed had polished other people’s treasures for a living, but didn’t spend up big on her own).

The red-eyed swallow survived another two decades of being occasionally worn like a copper wallflower against a 60s palette: acknowledged but never completely enjoyed.

Until, that is, motherhood itself changed the brooch’s significance for me. This was no startling moment where Sometimes when we touch started to play from behind some invisible curtain that once pulled back revealed the spirit of maternal evangelism that, unknown to me, had been forever burning within.

No. I started wearing the brooch because, with motherhood came exhaustion, frugality, and a lack of spare time. With motherhood came the all-black or grey wardrobe and its drab demands for splashes of glimmering optimism in the form of a necklace, scarf or … brooch!

I have three daughters now, and I wonder at what age exactly I should begin to watch them for signs that what I give them won’t be appreciated until they can truly make it their own. And I wonder if they will think the same thing when the time comes to hand down that lovely wooden fox brooch they chose last year from the pop-up shop at the handmade markets.

And … how I would love to know how that will be worn by my great-great granddaughter in a future as unknown as a distant land.

Clare is an editor with an interest in all good friends to words (and, as Teresa knows, she loves to swan around in pretty things, admiring pretty things, wondering wistfully at their history). Clare keeps notes on the art of editing on her blog The Invisible Mend.