The Scrivener: A Chap Needs A Chair
…I found a flat to rent. It was unfurnished, of course, but it did have built-in wardrobes. And my good Christian employers did provide me with a substitute for a chair — a well-worn brown leather front seat from an old motor-car, with no legs. I kid you not…
A blissfully relaxed Brian Barratt recalls chairs that have brought comfort to his life.
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Some chairs linger in the memory. In the 1940s, my father had his special chair at our house in Balderton (a village attached to Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire). It was a cumbersome sort of affair with a stout wooden frame and metal fittings. The removable and time-flattened upholstery was not the last word in luxury. The back could be tilted at various angles. When needed, the whole thing could be folded out and used as a bed.
At the age of 17, not many months after I arrived in Zimbabwe (then known as Southern Rhodesia), I was obliged to leave home and move into digs. My small dark room, in the house of a grim landlady who hated Africans, had a bed and a wardrobe but no chair. I bought one, a plain but well-made upright wooden chair, from an African carpenter who sold his wares from door to door. Back doors, because in those days most white people wouldn't allow an African to approach the front door.
My next chair was bought a couple of years later when I lived with a very hospitable family in Harare (then called Salisbury). My room was large, bright and nicely furnished but I had a yen for my own personal armchair. Off to the auction mart I went, and purchased a large, somewhat tatty, suspiciously smelly, very comfortable high-backed armchair. Oh, what luxury I felt as I settled into that old chair each evening when I came home from work!
In 1961, I moved up to Kitwe on the Copperbelt of Zambia (then called Northern Rhodesia). At the age of 25 I had been appointed manager of USCL Kitwe Bookshop which was owned by the United Society for Christian Literature. My terms of employment included furnished accommodation. When I arrived, there was no furniture and, you guessed, no accommodation. I found a flat to rent. It was unfurnished, of course, but it did have built-in wardrobes. And my good Christian employers did provide me with a substitute for a chair — a well-worn brown leather front seat from an old motor-car, with no legs. I kid you not.
I quickly hied me to the local auction mart and purchased a bed, a bookshelf, a sideboard and a very wobbly pre-loved dining suite. Until I could afford a cheap lounge suite of settee and easy chairs, I needed some kind of armchair. And so I acquired a metal framed chair with plastic thong seating, a sort of outdoor chair, but it wasn't second-hand, it didn't cost very much, and it had arms.
Some chairs linger in the memory. The best of all was my Grannie's old sofa. It was a place in which a small boy could get lost. And if you dug round the edges and probed between the cushions you might find a liquorice allsort (with added fluff), or an envelope with a stamp for your collection, or a penny, or even a sixpence. Now that, my friends, was a chair to remember.
© Copyright Brian Barratt 2011
