Vintage Voices: Entry - With @dreemsteem and @anutu

Good evening my lovelies!

This is my entry to @dreemsteem’s Vintage Voices competition as dreamed up by @anutu. The job is to take a picture of something antique, vintage or sentimental from your home and “tell a story from it’s perspective”. I hope you enjoy this.

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We’re not sure where our story starts, because our story starts with stories. So many stories. Some about love. Some about death. Some about dragons. Some about holy men. Some large, some small. Some epic, some forgotten. But we always came together to make stories.

But then the stories stopped and our little lead hearts were heavy. We found ourselves thrown in a box with just one page of old, yellowing stories lining it. Those stories weren’t happy stories.

Then, after many lives and stories had passed us by without us being allowed to tell them, we found ourselves in a high room, full of many men. Some had beards, some had waistcoats. There were women too… in tweed. They were all listening to a man. We didn’t like him. He talked too fast, spilling out words and numbers as if they were worthless, and then banging his hammer down when the numbers got high. We were held high over someone’s head, so were lots of other boxes of shiny things. Then the hammer banged and we were thrown to the ground in our box.

And then we were moving fast in another rattling metal box. We could hear a man called Tom telling stories. We wanted to record all his stories, but we were still stuck in our box.

The big rumbling metal box stopped in a street. Lots of the other things were taken out from around us, but we were left there, but at least the sun was shining. And then we heard a different voice. Tom started to tell the different voice a story and we recognised some of our words in it. Books. And type. And lead.

And then SCRAP.

We knew that word. Were our stories over and never to be told again? The other voice, the girl’s voice was asking about us. She reached in and held some of us. We liked her. She had stories in her soul.

And then we were in her arms, sailing through the sunny street to a new home. A home full of stories. The girl whispered that she would never, ever sell us for scrap. That she would help us tell our stories again. Even simple one-word stories. Like Love. And Laughter. Like Dreams.

We like our new house full of stories. And one by one, we get to stamp our letters again.

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Yep, you guessed it. I live in a town full of antique shops and dealers, and I'm friendly with several of them. One afternoon I was passing by Tom's and he had been to an auction. I asked about what this glittering mass was, and he told me it was old type- but it wasn't worth anything, so he was going to sell it for the minimal lead scrap value. I was upset by the idea of this and asked how much he wanted for it. He picked the box up, dumped it in my arms and said it was a present. I love my glorious family of type, don't you? Imagine all the stories it has created!

Hope you enjoyed this.
E x

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^{Sources: all photographs by yours truly}