To some, it is a place of summer holidays, of sun and sea and clear blue air laced with the aroma of fish and chips. To others, it is somewhere to visit annually, immersing yourself, beer in hand, and swaggering your way through the honky-tonk throngs of bewigged and jump-suited disciples to the king of rock n’ roll during the yearly Elvis festival. To others still, it is a place of recreation, a destination for the daily surf, swim or fishing session to blast away the cobwebs of the working week and restore the soul.
I have known Porthcawl, on the south Wales coast, as all of these things over the years, but to me it is so much more. Most Saturdays, my wife Rachel and I head east to walk around its shorelines, streets and backwaters, chatting, putting the world to rights at the end of the working week and simply spending time together in a place that, for some indefinable reason, has become special to us. Through our quiet ramblings we have come to know its quiet corners and nooks well enough to notice when anything new or unexpected appears. And so it happened one morning that, on our usual strolling circuit, we suddenly stumbled across a new shop we had never noticed before. Attracted first by the unusual array of oddments festooning the pavement outside – old walking sticks, wicker baskets and even a rocking horse – we stopped for a moment to watch the comings and goings and to glance up at the sign: Kitty’s Imaginarium. Intrigued, we stepped in through the open door.
Once inside, our eyes quickly adjusted to the shadows and immediately began to flit around an array of fascinating objects that stood, hung, leaned, glistened and simply occupied every available corner of floor and wall space. Ah, a bric-a-brac shop, I thought. Fine; we’d have a look around before going to find a coffee somewhere. But why the fancy name: ‘Imaginarium’? Why not something more regular, like ‘emporium’ perhaps, or even a twee version of this word, something along the lines of ‘shoppe’, that might pluck at the sentimental heartstrings of tourist shoppers? I pondered this as I started to wander around.
Even as I began my browsing, the answer to my question became apparent. Shops, emporiums and bazaars all have one thing in common: they exist for the sole purpose of selling, that simple transaction of money for goods, but an imaginarium is a very different thing altogether, and so much more than a simple shop. An imaginarium, as the name suggests, is a place whose primary raison d’etre is to foster and cultivate the imagination; it is a place for daydreams and ditherings, for fantasies and flights of fancy. As much as they are a shopkeeper or a trader, the proprietor of any such establishment is also a curator, as thoughtful as any librarian or museum custodian. They are the stewards not just of objects, but of the past and the potential futures within them, along with the symbolism behind those objects, grouping them for best effect so that the stories and lives within find their way out.
With every new corner turned, Kitty’s careful tending of the narrative was clear and, as I browsed, I noted how the arrangement of the items on the shelves had the desired effect as my imagination took over and began to construct the narratives behind some of these pieces. There, a 1930s perfume bottle had me conjuring up a sleek, art deco dresser equipped with a large mirror, in front of which sat an elegant young woman. As she dabbed the stopper at her neck and admired again the sleek blue dress and oversized string of pearls draped around her pale, graceful neck, her excitement simmered away through a Saturday evening at the thought of a night of dancing to the effervescent beat of a jazz band in full blare.
There, a large family Bible summoned a long-ago winter’s Sunday afternoon, sleet spattering the window of a small cottage where a chapel-going family, fed and warmed after their weekly excursion to the morning service, sat in front of the fire while father pulled the Bible down from the timeworn, smoothed shelf of the family dresser, ready to read aloud a few verses before a string of hymns, sung with gusto, added cheer to a drab day.
I continued perusing, and still the stories tumbled in one after another, until the imaginarium swelled beyond the confines of this small shop and became a world in its own right, peopled with personalities of my own creation.
Even better, though, than the stories that these items fired within the imagination, were the personal memories they retrieved from some quiet corner of memory as so many curios tapped into dusty echoes of their counterparts on grandmothers’ shelves, grates and sideboards; Rachel and I couldn’t help turning to each other regularly and muttering “God, did your nan ever have…?” and “Remember these?! Everyone used to have one of these!” This, then, is the importance of such things, and of the places that contain them. They may seem trivial and frivolous, but they become metaphors for something far beyond their physical appearance and dimensions, so often serving as a link between past and present and, even in some cases, the future.
A few of those items started to take shape in our own rooms, mentally pictured with their new additions. We picked up the trinkets, felt their weight in our hands and considered where and how they would sit until, finally, we decided upon a couple of small things that would fit, and now they, along with a number purchased since, have slotted neatly into our home, into our lives, helping to tell the tales of our Saturday morning routines – a little wooden duck guarding the kitchen shelf, a cast iron octopus ready to hold onto jackets hung on the back of my study door; the list grows almost by the week thanks to our frequent visits since those first explorations.
Even now that these things are in our possession, it’s probably best not to think f ourselves as their owners, but as their current custodians, taking on the baton from Kitty, for who knows? Maybe in years to come, when our days are over, these things will drift free of our lives and back out into the great imaginarium of the world ready to begin chapters new, firing the thoughts and fancies of others yet to come, populating the stories of their lives one small corner at a time.
