The bobbet tin…

Screws, nuts and bolts, nails, hooks and eyes, tacks, panel pins, washers, the odd rivet or two – who of us doesn’t have an old biscuit tin somewhere, almost too heavy to lift, and choc full of odd bits and pieces collected over the years?

We’re magpies us men, or at least I am. I simply can’t bear to throw away that ‘one too many’ screws supplied with the flat pack chest of drawers or all those bits you don’t really need when you put together the kitchen units. You start with an old tobacco tin, but soon progress and before you know it you have a two-litre plastic ice-cream tub full of red rusty and whitely calcifying metal. Whenever I need something to fix another something I usually end up looking in the same place eventually; “I’ll look in the bobbet tin,” I say.

Yes, I call them bobbet tins. I don’t know why, but that’s what I call them.

My dad buried one in a field once; not a plastic ice-cream tub, there weren’t any back then, but a round floral biscuit bobbet tin, Huntley and Palmer’s probably. Bits and pieces he’d ‘borrowed’ from the Morris’ works at Cowley where he worked building the Morris Minor. The factory police were calling around, searching houses for nicked components. Apparently pilfering was rife and engines were ‘brought out’ to order. One chap, Tinker I think his name was, was rumoured to have brought out a complete Minor, piece by piece, under his overcoat. I don’t think they’d have worried too much about my dad’s tin of springs and nuts and bolts, but it was probably better “safe than sorry” he said.

My granddad, a blacksmith, had all kinds of metal paraphernalia in tins and boxes all around the forge, covered in oil and black with soot. What a treasure house for an eight year old boy, a surprise under every workbench, a miracle on each shelf. After an hour or so of exploration and meddling, I’d re-emerge into the light up to my elbows in grease and muck to be sent off to the washhouse to clean up with my granddad’s big tin of strong smelling Swarfega. Now then, was it orange or was it green, or as my granddad would have said “Naw than, werrit orange or werrit green?” Either way, it did the trick. I felt the proper little workman as I smeared my hands and arms with the strongly smelling stuff. I can smell it now even if I don’t know what it smelled of… and it was green, definitely green.

Whenever I open my own tin of bobbets in the cellar, turning over the metal things and getting my fingers darkly stained with reddened rust, trying to avoid the sharp points of the nails and screws, looking for that washer that never seems to be quite the right size, I remember that foggy morning my dad and I buried his guilty tin in a farmer’s field, still smell the hard metal of my granddad’s forge and the Swarfega in the wooden washhouse.

I hardly ever find what I’m looking for, and if I do it’s always at the bottom of the bobbet tin with all the dust and debris. I lift my fingers to my nose and breathe in the smell of old metal and old past and stand remembering… and it always seems to take me ages to try to find what I am looking for.

I wonder why?