I love Regency
mirrors: I like the way they can lighten a room and make it seem larger. I also
admire their elegance.
My first mirror used
to be above the fireplace in the drawing room in my childhood home – a formal
room to which the ladies withdrew after a dinner party, leaving the gentlemen
to their port and salacious stories. I was rarely allowed into the drawing-room,
so the mirror always held a special glamour for me. I particularly liked the cupid
on the top.
This mirror is
rather the worse for wear, alas. When it became mine, it had to undergo a two
hundred mile journey from my mother’s house in Yorkshire down to London, which didn’t help. When a friend helped
me to put it up in my bedroom, bits of moulding kept falling off and had to be
stuck back. I’m terrified to dust the cupid because I can see that the plaster
is cracked in places. I blow it gently and hope for the best.
My second
mirror was in my childhood bedroom, once I’d graduated from the night nursery
where I slept with my brothers and had my own room, known as the blue room,
when I was about ten. I always admired the Greek key pattern, the black
contrasting so nicely with the gold. It is now in my study.
The bottom
mirror belonged to an aunt who lived in London throughout the Blitz. She found it in a
skip outside a bombed-out house and rescued it. The moulding is slightly
battered at the top – you can see the once hidden wires which held the leaves
in place - and it has long lost its original gilding. My aunt painted it with
gold paint and replaced the broken mirror. It was obviously made for a tall
room so it now sits on the mantelpiece in my sitting room which has the highest
ceiling.
None of them is
particularly valuable; time, and the Luftwaffe, have taken their toll. But I
still love them.
Elizabeth
Hawksley
