[edit] Uncle Safroni

Uncle Safroni lived in South London in an old house with a veranda. He was in his early seventies when he developed a remarkable passion for collecting second-hand oddments. Perhaps it served as a kind of sublimation for an otherwise restricted suburban life after years spent in the South Sea Islands. Certainly his choice of bargains tended towards the massive and the eccentric. Their bulk and weight loomed through the house and, in time, seemed to take possession of it. The most striking items in his collection following on the grand-piano and mahogany side-board period were the harp without strings and the stone statues from the Crystal Palace fire.

    Uncle Safroni never purchased his pieces singly. No sooner had one mahogany sideboard settled in the high, shadowy drawing room but it was swiftly followed by a second and yet a third. Ranged along the walls, commanding the rest of the furniture, they took on a stiff, patriarchal dignity which gave the impression of their being rooted to the floorboards, never to move again. Sometimes Uncle Safroni's wife or dark-eyed daughters would airily pass a duster over the bulstrated shelves. They had long moved beyond the point of suprise or despair.

Michael Middleton and Hermes

The difficulty of getting the sideboards up the front steps into the hall were largely overcome by solicitous courtesy on the part of their purchaser. Keeping slightly to one side of the furniture men, wearing a frayed dressing gown over his trousers, he ushered them across the threshold with vague butterfly movements of his hands beckoning, halting, advising gently at sharp corners or acting as a breakwater, with arms spreadeagled, against a possible collision with the hatstand. The furniture men. caught by his charm, followed his fingers with mellow obedience.

    A month or so later came the two grand pianos. Like legendary creatures from an early world their dark shapes moved heavily in the drawing room. The pianos proved a constant delight to Uncle Safroni. Shuffling in his carpet slippers he would strike out a series of fortuitous chords on notes left long untuned. Or, peering short-sightedly over the piano-top through broken spectacles, looped behind one ear with a piece of string - he would meander through a composition of his own, perhaps a military march or a little song evocative of Samoa. And in the quiet of the room, shaded by the varandah, the worn-out pianos seemed to draw gently to the composer.

    When the Crystal Palace fire occurred he lost no time in buying up a number of singed, stone statues. They arrived in a van on a wet, summer afternoon. Uncle Safroni stood under a dripping umbrella to welcome them. The Goddesses - some with chipped draperies and charred limbs, and all of them looking cold and damp - were carried into the hall and propped temporarily, against the bannisters. They were given a good rub down with a dry toweI. Hermes, unscathed by the fire, was put in a favoured position at the bottom of the stairs. (It was on the bowed head of Hermes that, later, Uncle Safroni hung his panama hat.) The gracious host, he hovered over their welfare, with no less charm and concern than if he had been greeting lady friends at afternoon tea.

    Then the rain stopped the Goddesses - with the exception of Hermes were removed outside where their host dotted them about the shrubbery and in the long grass. Aphrodite, badly scorched by the fire, was given a place under the magnolia tree near the greenhouse. In the sunlight the Goddesses brought a classical distinction to the wild grass. But at dusk, standing immobile and dark in their separate corners, they become slightly menacing, as if waiting for a moment to advance in a body on the silent house.

    Then came the harps. Because of their broken strings Uncle Safroni secured them as bargains in various parts of South London. On their arrival - in more or less discreet conveyances they stood idly about the sitting room, like a group of forlorn sea-horses. But the last harp in the collection created an impression long to be remembered. Not, indeed, in any superior value over the other harps on the contrary, it was completely without string but for the reason of the unusual manner in which it came into the house.

    One Autumn morning Uncle Safroni had seen the harp advertised in a local newspaper. Wearing his black velvet jacket and bow tie he had hurried off to inspect it. He bought it and then hailed a solitary taxi in a by-road. For inexplicit reasons the driver had refused to be encumbered with the harp, murmuring something about it not fitting in. Uncle Safroni, not to be baulked-and with the same tenacity of purpose which, in his youth, had prompted him to sail before the mast to Australia then walked into the undertaker's yard adjoining the public house. Tempting remuneration and persuasive charm had done the rest. In a few moments the harp was hoisted into the back of the hearse and was gliding swiftly down the hill from Crystal Palace with its new owner chatting artlessly to the driver.

    It was something of a tribute to their perspicuity that his family, looking out through the drawing-room window, showed only mild suprise when the hearse drew sharply up on the gravel under the chestnut tree. The head of the family then proceeded to slide the harp from its resting place and drag it triumphantly into the hall. The harp remained, always, his most treasured bargain.

    It was a year later when Uncle Safroni started on his collection of old houses. He bought five or six at a low price, filled them with tenants and sent one or two sideboards and a grand piano to help furnish the empty rooms. But Hermes remained at the foot of the dark stairs. At Christmas time, dusty in the drawing room, the harps wore garlands of holly and mistletoe. And on summer evenings, Uncle Safroni, wrapped in an old dressing gown,would stare dreamily out to the stone Goddesses rising from the dusk as he sat in his room under the lea of the largest mahogany sideboard. And only Uncle Safroni knew that, behind its mildewed mirror, a fast growing collection of banknotes were safely stowed away.