A priceless locket in an eBay haul

NOT being an eBay expert, I paid too much for a little bag of cast-off jewellery.

Nothing looked valuable in the pictures; you’d have to be a rather melancholy sentimentalist like me to have wanted the job lot, probably from a house-clearance.

There’s a large Victorian black ‘pietra dura’ (inlaid stone) cross set in silver, slightly damaged.

A pretty silver cross (which I shall wear) decorated with gold leaves. A blackened bracelet.

Then the two items that captured me. A double-sided oval glass locket, set in silver, shows on one side a portrait of a walrus-moustachioed man wearing a hat, and a woman (surely his wife) on the other. They look Edwardian. Then the same woman’s picture forms half of an engraved yellow metal locket next to a little girl.

Facing them are (I’m sure) the same pair about 25 years later, the woman now white-haired and the child grown up, smiling next to her. They have to be mother and daughter. I’d date the later picture to the Thirties.

Old photograph albums and portrait jewellery always make me wonder who owned them, what their lives were like — and at what stage the family lost interest in the relics of a past time. Or perhaps there was no family left, who knows?

Many people have no interest in old objects; others can value them too much, locking themselves into mournful memory.

But I love old postcards sending greetings from the seaside in faint, spidery writing; mourning jewellery containing the woven hair of the dead; battered albums of fuzzy blackand-white photographs stuck in with photo-corners — and lockets like these; trinkets that carried treasured pictures of anonymous people close to long-gone hearts.

Was walrus-moustache good to his wife? He looks a bit of a bruiser. But the mother and daughter look happy and affectionate — and I wish their images still belonged to their descendants. No matter. I shall take care of them now.