THOUGHTS FROM A RECLAMATION YARD

Elder Daughter phones to have a grumble. Turns out that hubby has dropped a ceramic soap dispenser, leaving a large circular and leaky crack in the bathroom basin. “Come over at the weekend,” she commands, “we’ll buy a new one from the reclamation yard. You can help me choose.”

So that is how I came to be somewhere next to Frome railway station staring at a row of red telephone boxes, none of which stood properly upright. The sign says Frome Reclamation, though its colloquial title - Frome Wreck - sounds better and is more descriptive. Below hangs a notice: ‘Children risk being impounded or recycled.’

“Adults too,” I thought. For this is a collectors’ paradise, full of architectural gems torn from stately homes and humble cottages or, in the case of the telephone boxes, village high streets too. Fanlights, beams, studded doors, great gates of wrought iron, stone slates, fireplaces, domesticity from long ago thrown together here, hugger-mugger.

You could tell the stuff belonged to another age just from its size. In one bay lay several giant baths of cast iron enamel - the sort of bath in which you can imagine Winston Churchill reposing. You could tell they were old because they didn’t have overflows but instead those clever lighthouse thingies in place of bath plugs. If the water level rises above a certain point then it pours into the top of the lighthouse and so down the plug hole. What is more, by lifting the lighthouse top, your maid or manservant could empty your bath without wetting their sleeves. All very Gosford Park.

Next to the baths sat an array of impressively floral lavatory pans, some looking for all the world like pieces of blue Delft and big enough to take a small elephant. Rest your posterior on one of these and you really could believe you were sitting on a throne. How sadly unenterprising we are these days with our rationed portions of earthenware in pastel tints.

These put me in mind of the great double commode in Kew Palace on which Mr and Mrs King, aka George III and Queen Charlotte, would sit side by side of a morning chatting away merrily over their morning eliminations and watched over, no doubt, by the ladies and gentlemen of the bedchamber. This, I think, would be much better way to test the provenance of a putative princess than putting a pea under the mattress. If you could manage to remain dignified in such circumstances then you really must have blood of the deepest blue.

Anyway, these lavatorial ruminations were cut short by Elder Daughter announcing that she had found what she was looking for - a bathroom basin circa 1930 to match the rest of her between-the-wars house - and would I please help her shift it.

Our way led past a fetching cast-iron fireback, dated 1659, propped up against a pillar box. It exhibited a heraldic device, full of fleurs de lys, and thus looked as if it had just been torn from the bowels of Chateau Loufoque. That would fit nicely in my fireplace, I thought.

Idly, I asked the price, trying not to appear too interested. “£225 plus Vat,” came the reply. Suddenly I developed a close interest in the ground between my shoes. Even if I had a spare £225 (plus Vat) how can one ever be sure that a fireback is genuine? I mean they turn these things out ten dozen at a time in the back alleys of Shanghai, don’t they? Short of some species of forensic analysis of Home Office complexity, how do you know that today’s nicely distressed seventeenth century fireback wasn’t three months ago a manhole cover belonging to Network Rail?

And yet, does it matter? What difference does it make, beyond simple antique snobbery, if the fireback has come from Chateau Shanghai rather than the Frome equivalent of Blandings Castle? After all, a lump of iron is a lump or iron. Nevertheless, £225 plus VAT seems a lot to pay for a manhole cover, though thinking about it that is probably what Network Rail pay for theirs.

When I got home I wondered just what the salvage men would rescue from my home in the unlikely event of it being pulled down to make way for a new Tesco’s. Precious little, I concluded sadly, at least precious little modern stuff. The furniture, pictures, books that have lasted a century or more already all look as though they could take another hundred years in their stride. But I have grave doubts about anything made in my lifetime. Except maybe the ceramics. Will our modern fittings, the bathrooms, the staircase, the kitchen last? I doubt it. Or if they do last I can’t imagine anyone thinking they would be worth salvaging.