Travelling Victorian Pennies

Old Queen Victoria rests well in the palm of a hand. Her coppered head veiled, held by a diadem, raised, rubbed, her regal chins jiggling in pockets and stacked in purses. She lies layered amongst her heirs in till drawers and counting bags.  Cheek to cheek, cheek to jowl with her younger impressions. Staring ahead to avoid odious comparisons with her grandchildren. For a while the crossover currency from grandparents, parents to child. A time travelling disc, transferring, in low relief, the entity of Empire. 

I collect these pennies, keeping them for a while in a small jar with a black plastic lid decorated with a red and yellow Chinese dragon. Shopping is local and our small village Square has all the shops we need for basics. We have a Mace supermarket manned by women cashiers. They keep back the Victorian pennies for me, making sure I am given them in the change, matriarchal exchanges. 

In the Square the butcher is a man, the sweetshop owner is a woman, the post office owner is a woman, and the newsagent owner is a woman, the two pubs and hardware store are run by men and their wives, the bakery shop staff are women, the baker is a man. The vicar is a man. Those serving the public wear tabards, overalls, suits, aprons, collars, ties. All have a physical barrier, as a prop, waist line height. Counters, pulpits, bar tops, glass cabinets, displays. Chests, bosoms, elbows, fingers, palms, all in my eyeline. These people are strange and performative. I cannot imagine them in houses or passing them on the street. Some scare me with barks and growls or mysteriously sing when I enter the shop. They do not have a face value, I cannot read their profiles, their context or histories. I acquire my coins  mostly by luck, not often by patronage, kindness or in wonderment of a child Victorian coin collector. Size and maturity equates to worth. The average age of a coin collector is sixty years old and probably male. 

There is shop that sells a penny tray of sweets covered with a tea towel. Loose sherbet comes in paper twists. There is ham on the bone, tins and dairy food. A surfeit of  gingham strung on white plastic covered wire, hooked and drooped.  This shop won’t survive much longer, it exists due to tradition. The owner is a growler, being a mid-twentieth century child I owe her no loyalty and she does not proffer a single penny.

My grandmother has a Victorian silver florin, found in the grass at a cricket match. She married twice, the second husband waits until the first dies. Born in 1900, she grows up as an Edwardian and still likes to wear a collar and ribbon. Her father is a vicar, her brother serves in the tank regiment in the First World War, is mentioned in dispatches, receives a Military Cross and drowns himself in a water butt. Her sister has chestnut red hair and I am told it is a shame we do not inherit that gene. She gives me the florin which is put in the jar with the Chinese dragon decorated lid. Eventually I lose it, it was safer in the long grass, away from the mercurial hobbies of children. 

In those early days of commerce transferring to supermarkets, I shop with my mother and observe the choreography of give and take, the etiquette of what is served and what is self-service from shelves, value and theft being balanced. Some goods are delivered. This is reserved for milk, bread, fish, meat and a large grocery delivery that is ordered weekly by telephone. Bills are accrued and payment promised. The balance and change carried up and down the road from my house. Travelling pennies, Victoria’s profile stamped impassive and imperious of the rurality of her destination. We eat fresh food, some  from  the produce and fish markets in the town. Certain foods need the status of big displays and a hereditary lineage of serfs, peasants, fish hawkers and cabin boys. It is women who shop with baskets and purses. Men keep shrapnel in their pockets and carry the quarry in an armpit.

To enter a shop alone as a mid-twentieth century child is as complex as a peace treaty. They are not friendly spaces. They have codes as mysterious as going unarmed into the lair of a wild animal,  challenged to fight in a duel, ordered to dance a minuet, negotiate a house sale, perform a ritual of gift exchanges in a foreign land and language, show deference and anticipate nervously a change in the rules of queuing, dependent on who is serving you today, who is behind you, who your parents are, the size of your house, your friendships, your religion, which pub your parents frequents or do they frequent pubs, what you are wearing, how your hair is cut. The shopkeeper may as well point a gun, demand I do not pass the threshold and shoot me dead. 

We either walk or I am driven to the shops. I cannot remember ever being on a bus with a parent. Which is unfortunate as by far the most dangerous local adult money handler is the transient male single deck bus driver. Boundary beater, orbiter, sedentary badged and uniformed comrade with garrulous arms, circling prey hunter, random accelerator, brake and door operative, pale ale and Golden Virginia musk, incandescent at the bearer of notes or passes, any currency, regardless of royal jowls, held in small hands. Hater of school uniforms that include a Panama hat but shifts at the sight of white socks, bidding, biding, passive stalker, no eye contact, eyeline fixed on torsos, hips, puberty. Trickster, herder, bully, bus

station Inspector and Commandant. I hate them. They plague my life until I learn to drive. They would barter my virginity for a Victorian penny.

Once past the check point there is the gauntlet of abusive and racist old women who sit together behind me and glare at the top of my head. They are probably the same age as one of my  coins, with the same  rubbed out profile and indistinguishable features, freshly minted in 1880s, children in the last cholera outbreak of 1892. Irritated by prolapses, facial hair, bad digestion caused by weakened immune systems in childhood they talk about television shows, The Black and White Minstrels and Hughie Green, mock anyone without a local dialect unless it is Received Pronunciation. They praise the colloquial, mundane and conformist. They have travelled in circles on this bus route as the vanguard, snipers shooting Murray Mints and Parma Violets, their purses are stuffed with small change, cat fur, budgie seed, pan and brush dust. 

I take two buses to school. One journey is with a bus pass that every driver disputes. The longer journey each way is one penny and a sixpence. A travelling Queen Victoria occasionally mixes herself into the change, accompanying with me until she is confined to the jar. I snare and jail the currency of the patriarchal Empirical code of conduct, curtailing her tour of the Shires. 

Who handles these pennies before me, born nearly sixty years after Victoria died? How far have the pennies travelled, beyond and  around the bigger town a mile from my house, up the road to  the village Square, into tills, pockets, purses, jars? Is the journey from The Royal Mint the longest they have ever travelled? The most rubbed coin with a barely defined date of 1885 is in circulation before the last local cholera outbreak in 1892 when less lives are lost than in the three outbreaks of 1833, 1849 and 1866. The men from London descend on the town and village after the 1849 epidemic, describe the filth, slums and poverty for the 1854 Sanitation Report. By 1892 patience is lost and the urban and rural district council are ordered to stop using, and allowing the residents to use, the natural springs as sewers or dumping sewage in pot holes euphemistically described as cess pits. My home town is literally a shit hole and the residents disenfranchised shit stirrers.

That poverty still hangs in the miasma of the Square, Fat Annie who lives in a house without indoor sanitation. The tin bath still left hanging by the outside toilet in the back yard of the house my grandmother moves into in the early 1960s, requiring a grant to put in an inside bathroom. I am accosted by a tiny old woman by the church entrance  of the Norman church, who tells me she plays the mandolin at night and had lived all her life with her father until his death. It is early evening and she is a spectre from a different world. When I remember her she is wearing a bonnet but it is only the gravestones throwing their shade and the strangeness of the graveyard at dusk, the family plots of infant mortality, puerperal infection, diseases of poverty, ignorance and neglect, shrouded that evening in the garments of MR James, Dickens, Alan Garner and Leon Garfield. The jangle of silver pennies stamped with  fleury kings. There is a pinched lane at the bottom of the park that overlooks the graveyard, at one end the vicarage and at the opposite end the workhouse. Both functions lost to the community and the buildings converted for different uses, no longer a village dependent on offertory and charity when one Victorian penny bought a loaf of bread or a quart of beer and a pauper’s grave left no memorial. 

I scour the pavements for lost change to buy Toffets. The Adventures of Robin Hood  begins so I leave the ancient yew lined path and walk up the hill past the houses with their medieval foundations and nylon net curtains. The monochrome lights from televisions wink and tremble. 

My parents collect antiques to mix up with their mid-twentieth century art and furniture, tasteful and eclectic. The sitting room at home changes regularly  like a theatre set. My mildly eccentric collection is tolerated. I am given special coin display books to keep them safe and give them status. There is a subliminal pressure to complete the collection. Special books means I am not a random individual coin collector and I merge into a community with a name – numismatists.  I can be queried about pennies, asked to show the books, quizzed about gaps and values. I need to acquire knowledge I don’t care about.  I am a child. It is the images of Victoria I love, the ribbons in her hair on the earlier coins, the way they fly and the little laurel leaves in her hair. On later coins, her veiled head like a churchyard memorial, drop earrings and a jewelled bosom, adornments signifying grief and intransigence, her face blank. Over time the blank gets blanker, the past smeared and receding, her punched face disappearing under the pressure of swapping. Swapped eventually to the power of ten. 

In our Edwardian house my husband and I reduce the diversity of possessions we have accumulated over many years. Out goes brown furniture, other collections I brought from childhood including Victorian glass perfume bottles. I keep my favourite children’s books, every poem I wrote from approximately age nine, letters from dead relatives or lost friends that permeate with nostalgia, any containing accusations, false truths, absolute lies or incidents not worth the re-reading  are thrown out. The one remaining Victorian penny display book is emptied of the few remaining coins. I put them in the last piece of brown furniture, a glass fronted cabinet loved by travelling collectors.  I now shop anonymously in supermarkets in other towns. I drive and do not have to catch a bus. My transactions are contactless. Once coins have been conjured up as the bearer of Covid, as miasma was once thought to carry cholera, it is easy to lose all contact. 

In the town, in other collections, there are Roman coins, offertories in a Neolithic cave. Julius Caesars’ coins are minted with a laurel crown as are King George Third coins lost on the cliffs of Napoleonic forts.  I excavate  my mother’s purse, lying in the dust of forty years. Inside is a 1971 new two penny piece and a bent 1976 new halfpenny. Queen Elizabeth Second wears her great grandmother’s  diadem. She has a look of the hairdressers about her, set and netted. I have an accompanying note book, a housewife’s Rosetta stone, full of shopping lists that seem to have been written in random years, not chronologically and not always in her handwriting. Someone else scribes, someone else shops and my mother dies. 

I am not collecting coins. I am collecting faces and portraits. Adornments and flora. Blanks, punches, dies, profiles. People memorialised. The patina of the past pressed into palms. I cannot remember the face of the sweet old lady in the graveyard. I know she held my gaze, her want of recognition at the edge of the deep well of nemeses. She may have endured a childhood with contrary coachmen. I had left her for a quest for Toffets and the film star looks of Richard Greene. The one living person who could have willingly filled in the blanks. 

Art is not always about pretty things.

It’s about who we are, what happened to us, and

how our lives are affected.

– Elizabeth Brown