Drawing Pin Cassandra

I spend much of my life wandering in and out of junk shops, charity shops and antique fairs. I am not much of a fan of straight shopping, where everything is the same no matter where you go, but I love the thrill of the chase in a junk shop. The weirder and more cluttered the better as far as I’m concerned. My heart sinks when I go into one of my favourite haunts only to find that someone has been tidying up. Tidiness is death to the committed treasure seeker.

The great thing about shops like these is that even if I don’t find anything I want, I will usually find something I like even if I can’t afford it or don’t have room for it. On the days when nothing speaks to my soul, there’s always the thrill of finding the most terrible thing in the shop and wondering about the life of the person who bought it brand new and was terribly pleased with themselves. There is a back story waiting to be discovered behind every random item, and I love it.

Last week, when I was back in Leicester I wandered into a local charity shop and found this box of vintage drawing pins. I whipped out my phone and took this photo, because this back story belongs to me and I’m about to share it with you.

When I was very small, we lived around the corner from my aunty Carol. Aunty Carol was one of those aunties who isn’t really your aunty, but who your family spends so much time with, they get enmeshed in your life until they become family. There was a lot of that going on in the Seventies. Carol had a daughter a year older than me and a daughter a year younger than my brother. I’m not sure how much we all liked each other, but that, much like in real families, didn’t matter. We still spent a lot of time together regardless.

On this particular day, it was the oldest girl’s birthday and we set off on a blazing, summer afternoon to attend her party. We moved from that house when I was four, so I must have been somewhere between three and four years old when this happened, which made Claire, the birthday girl, five.

All the kids were sent outside to play in the garden, where someone must have been organising games, because prizes were being doled out. All the mums were inside in the kitchen. All the dads were nowhere to be seen, because the Seventies.

I am terrible at anything competitive. It doesn’t matter what it is, I suck at it. Pass the parcel, an egg and spoon race, the pentathlon - all pointless. I don’t have a competitive bone in my body and I hate the pressure of being forced to try and win something and enjoy it. I consider party games to be much like the exams of the birthday world. There is too much stress involved and as my mum said about twenty times a day while I was growing up: ‘It will end in tears.’ It always did. Mine. Unfortunately I also like gifts, very much. So I would play the party games because I wanted to win the prize and would inevitably end up howling when I never won. I was a difficult child.

This party played out like every other party I had been to and would go to for the next decade of my life. I watched as child after child won prizes and I got nothing for my pains. I was particularly upset about this because these prizes looked excellent. Everyone who won got the same thing and soon, every child except me was running about the garden, playing with their prizes and having a high old time. I promptly burst into tears and went roaring into the kitchen to find my mum. Amidst the shuddering sobs I explained that I was being left out of the game because everyone had won a prize except me and it wasn’t fair. Under normal circumstances I would have been roundly told off for being a baby and sent back outside to deal with it, but something I said must have sparked my mum’s interest, so she came outside to look at what everyone was doing.

What everyone was doing was playing a game that involved sticking shiny, golden drawing pins into each other’s bare flesh and shrieking like banshees. It transpired that Aunty Carol hadn’t remembered to buy party gifts until the last minute. The nearest available shop was the post office and the most abundant and inexpensive thing in there were packets of drawing pins, whereupon she bought a job lot and considered it a job well done. As did every five year old child who had won said drawing pins, until I came along and spoiled everything. My mum moved amongst the screaming children like the wrath of God, plucking drawing pins out of arms and legs and confiscating every box.

To stop everyone mutinying, the grown up announced it was time for tea and we all trouped off to the dining room, where another disaster awaited us. Every time I had failed at a game and been sent off to sulk on the sidelines I had sidled over to look in at the delicious party food that was the sole consolation for attending a party. I had noticed a small boy, who didn’t seem to care about being disqualified from musical bumps as much as me because it gave him the opportunity when he was not being supervised, to sneak into the dining room and make hay.

The birthday cake was a large affair covered in white chocolate mice which he had made a beeline for and had been steadily picking off and eating until there were no mice left. Before I had dissolved into floods of tears at not being allowed to jab drawing pins into the eyes of my fellow small children, I had gone into the kitchen and told the mothers that a boy was eating all the mice off the birthday cake, whereupon I was told to stop telling tales and go away. Which I did.

When we staggered, bleeding from the trenches into the dining room to find the bald birthday cake there was more screaming than when everyone had been stabbing each other. I wondered to myself why I was doomed never to be believed. The Cassandra of the Seventies birthday party, if you will. At this point, I didn’t actually care. I hated white chocolate mice and while everyone was wailing about the cake, I sat quietly stuffing cheese and pineapple on sticks from the ubiquitous hedgehog into my face and gloating.

p.s. if you’re not familiar with the cheese and pineapple hedgehog, here’s one I made for one of my kids at one of their, drawing pin-less parties. It was a very Seventies thing and no child of mine ever loved them, but they are very much the Proustian Madeleine for me, terrifying though they undoubtedly are. Now I come to think of it, they could be improved with the addition of a few drawing pins here and there.