Stardust Memories

The remains of the last known stuffed dodo had been kept in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum but in the mid-18th century, the specimen – save the pieces remaining now – had entirely decayed and was ordered to be discarded by the museum’s curator or director in or around 1755

Asked to show the remains of the dodo to some high ranking Japanese business men who had recently made a huge contribution to the Ashmolean, using the appropriate gloves Richard placed the remains in glass vitrines on acid-free conservation paper. He had been advised under no circumstances should he let the businessmen touch the artefacts and to ensure this rule was upheld whilst demonstrating the greatest diplomacy.

Tense, Richard went to the loo and took his gloves off and on and off again. Welcoming the businessmen in he shook their hands with the gloves off, remembering to put them back on again when it was time for the inspection.

The businessmen were very charming, spoke perfect English and respectfully held their hands clasped behind their Saville Row suits.

After they left he put the dodo’s remains away. He sat down at his leather embedded desk and felt both tired and relieved.

He saw in the light from the large wobbly-glassed window that there was a small whisp of fluff on his desk and he was glad that it had taken this moment to make it’s debut and remaining hidden on the windowsill while the businessmen had been present.

Looking closely he realised it was a dodo underfeather-the rarest of all. The thought of putting his gloves back on and opening the safe door and getting the clearance to do so was too much, so he put it in the part of his wallet reserved for stamps.

Several years later he moved to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire where he opened a strange sort of antique shop specialising in relics. He kept the dodo feather weighed down by a milk-glass marble on a Spode dish on his garter-blue bookcase. He liked to tell the story and although he was shy it meant that there was always something he could entertain guests with.

One time he was showing his friend Dan the feather and realised it wasn’t there.

He doesn’t know where it is. He thinks maybe

1. Henry the hoover

2. His daughter licked it as it was close to when it had snowed and he had shown her snowflakes on the tongue;from then on she had tried other things on her tongue too, a scientific justification for a return to infancy.

3. The cat?

4. Maybe it’s still in the house.

He has sold the house. The new owners now about the dodo feather and spend a lot of time examining their dust.

Cunard’s Queen Mary was built and fitted with an Art Deco style that was part country house post foxhunt, part nightclub pre-drinks. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique’s Normandie was an opulent, glittering hareem.

War broke out as the Queen Mary was carrying Bob Hope to New York. After that the Queen Mary became The Grey Ghost, stripped of interior and painted battleship drab.

The Queen Mary lives in California now where it is, again, part museum part hotel.

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Coming out of the loo in the Rose & Crown on Lower Slone Street I felt a tug and thought I must have hair caught on a chair. I turned round and saw a Chelsea pensioner holding my hair in his hand.

He recited a poem about his Danish daughter, Amelia, her aquatic life in the womb. Here eyes he described as Whitby jet.

He hated the X Factor but most of all Carol Thatcher.

He loathed vulgarity. Respected Rodin’s The Kiss. This he thought was something beautiful-love not lust. I don’t know how he would have felt about Auguste Rodin the man…or even the sculpture of Balzac.

He described a look he had seen a man give to a woman at the bar and he said this was the only thing that made him feel OK when he went back to the hospital.

He thought of his Danish wife and daughters and felt they had washed away on an iceflow in the night.

Queen’s coat bought in jumble sale for £10A woman, Gaynor Andrews, has discovered her favourite second-hand coat, bought for £10 from a jumble sale nearly fifty years ago, was previously worn by The Queen.

Gaynor Andrews with her mother Margaret and the special coat. The Queen wearing what is believed to be the coat bought by Margaret Andrews Photo: SWNS

The 57-year-old, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, was surprised when she saw the distinctive silk jacket, inherited from her 82-year-old mother Margaret, in a photograph of the monarch dating from 1953.

She said the family had always known the coat belonged to someone important but had no idea it had been worn by a young Queen Elizabeth II shortly before she set off on her tour of the Commonwealth.

the coat from a gentleman who was arranging a jumble sale for the Sea Cadets in Epsom, Surrey.

“He told her it had come from ‘a high-up place’ but wouldn’t say any more. Mum paid between £5 and £10 for it in 1961 – which was quite a lot in those days – and thought nothing more of it.

“It was only when I was looking at the television guide a few weeks ago when I saw an old picture of the Queen. I thought ‘that coat looks familiar’ and when I looked closer I realised it was the exact same item.”

She added: “The photo was of her during her 1953 tour around Britain. It’s a very distinctive coat so I was shocked to see it on her.

“I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else.”

A spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace would not comment on the coat but confirmed some of the Queen’s old clothes end up in public hands after being sold on.

As the neighbour of Dennis Severs for 20 years, I had the unique experience of the “collection of atmospheres” which he created in his Spitalfields house. We bought our 1724 houses, both derelict, in the same year, yet where the restoration which I attempted took well over a decade, he had his atmospheres up and running for visitors within months.

He could have been an inspired theatre-designer, for improvisation was his watchword. Things were rarely what they seemed: velvet was generally Dralon, not sewn together in swags round the four-poster bed, but stapled, the pillars were taken from nearby fruit-market pallets; the walnuts hung on the chimney-piece were real walnuts, simulating what Grinling Gibbons might have carved. In the candlelight the magical look was what mattered, and his dictatorial commentaries added to the magnetism, even if they encouraged the summary ejection of unsympathetic visitors.

With each room devoted to a different period, while taped sounds of the Jervis family were heard off-stage, he constantly developed his tours for visitors. I would get a ring on my frontdoor-bell, with the frantic message from Dennis over the Entryphone: “Can you put your kitchen light out: it’s the Jack the Ripper episode”.

I never did get to go on one of his tours, though I went round the house on many occasions, and I regularly heard through the wall the sound of the Boer war train leaving Waterloo.

I was glad that he quickly gave up his names for the rooms on the top floor – Scrooge’s room with a high clerk’s desk, and Little Nell’s room with its truckle bed. Much happier was his re-creation of an illustration from Beatrix Potter in his cellar-kitchen.

The Jervis family of Huguenot immigrants, his own invention, were what mattered, and knowing that my house had once been inhabited by James Stilwell, (master silk-weaver reputed to have woven the cloth of gold for Queen Victoria’s coronation gown), Dennis invented a half-true character in Blanche Stilwell, sworn enemy of Mrs Jervis. I marvelled at the ingenuity with which he simulated carriages and carts clip-clopping up and down Folgate Street outside.

He was a great neighbour, and I am glad that the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust plans to continue his work, with the tapes of Dennis a ghostly presence alongside the Jervises.