Eyes glimpsed through bubble wrap

I often get asked what is the one thing I would save from my rather large collection (aside from Mrs Tilly of course) in the event of say a fire.   Its certainly a better question than how do you dust, which I laugh at.  But there is one thing above all that has my heart – a small spotted enamel toad.

In my 20s and 30s I yearned for a Bilston enamel box, I loved them for their colours and naïve paintings and mottos, Esteem the Giver,  or unlikely as it may seem, A Trifle from Hull with a pair of doves. I especially loved the ones shaped like animals, which I came to know were sweet holders known as bonbonnieres. The ones with mirrors inside were to hold ladies patches (often made from mouse fur), the positioning of the patches on the cheeks were often a coded message not quite a dating app with GSOH, although presumably one needed a certain sense of humour to wander round with mouse fur on your face.     I was working in those days for a theatrical agent just off Bond Street  and my lunch time walks would take me past Halycon Days, which sold modern versions of the enamel boxes (which the Georgians referred to as ‘toys’), but they also had a glass topped display table showing early  boxes, which I occasionally went and stared longingly at. Both the modern versions and the older ones, going back to 1760, were completely out of my price range until the glorious day  in 1999 when my luck turned.

I had started going to the weekly Cornhall Antiques Market in Cirencester on a Friday morning, and felt slightly out of my depth. I was a collector of a very minor sort and wasn’t sure I should even be there amongst the dealers. I loved the buzz and energy and the language and was  especially fascinated by the way the dealers thronged round the table of 2 older ladies. I could rarely maneuver myself to the front and when I did I didn’t stand a change with arms reaching over me and grabbing things and asking for the ‘best’ on this or that.  Then it happened. One day I ended up in prime position in the middle of the table. Physically hemmed in by a press of bodies far worse than a crowded tube in the rush hour, when I spotted (in a box being unpacked) a pair of very round eyes staring back at me through bubble wrap.  No-one else had spotted the eyes.  I asked politely if I might have a look at ‘that’, pointing at the eyes with no idea what sort of creature they might belong to.

The seller, Cherry, now a friend, looked very embarrassed, wrung her hands slightly (yes truly wrung her hands) and winced as she reached into the box explaining…..

‘I’m so sorry. Its very A/F’.

Ah now this I knew.  A/F, as found, dealer speak meaning broken to hell and utterly unsaleable should you ever wish to part with it again.  Cherry unwrapped the bubble and placed on my outstretched hand a bonbonniere of a charmingly dappled toad, in gentle russets and greens.    The frenzy round the table fell oddly quiet, dealers holding their breath and feigning interest in something vaguely in the direction of where I was standing, or looking skittishly away and then back but no-one uttering a word. Dealers etiquette, such as it is, being that when someone is looking at something they have the right to take their time doing so, while an interested dealer will go to some lengths to conceal the intensity of their desire.  A table full of dealers scenting an 18thC enamel box suddenly became as poised and deadly as a pack of  hunting hyenas.

‘You need to turn it over’ said Cherry, clearly mortified to be offering anything that was this damaged and apparently unfazed by the hush that had fallen.

At this point I was initially unsure whether it was a modern Chinese copy as old as yesterday’s lunch or, dare I even think it, old. It was all happening rather quickly.  Either way I was smitten with longing.  I turned the toad over as instructed. 

The underneath was a frankly bashed painting of a Romanesque scene but it was undoubtedly early, the colours were soft and stylistically  it was like the ones I had eyed before. My heart was pounding when Cherry added, with such apology,  ‘I’m sorry it has to be £6.’

My hands closed as tight as a clam shell over the toad and a rush of endorphins coursed through my body.  Reader o

f course I bought it and would have bloody married it in a heart beat too.  With the toad firmly in my hand and with money exchanged, the hubble bubble of dealers resumed their cacophony of ‘what’s your best on this Cherry’.  I moved away from the table floating across the hall.   I sought out a dealer I didn’t know well then but instinctively trusted and asked if he might give me an opinion on my toad.  I remembered his exact words when he saw it.

He  reverentially took the toad from me, audibly sucked in his breath and pronounced. ‘Stuff like this wot keeps you in the game in’it?’ 

When I asked if it was Bilston, he shrugged. ‘Don’t really matter, could be Bilston, could be continental but its right.’   

My, what I call an endorphin high, lasted well across the weekend. I couldn’t believe my luck at finding an early box and one that I could afford. The toad is such a charmer with his spots mimicking the warty spots of the real thing and never ceases to make me smile transporting me back to the moment of spying him through the bubble wrap.

 My friend was right, Bilston enamels and Continental enamels of the same era, around from 1760 to 1820ish, are difficult to distinguish.  Everybody copied everybody else.   Bilston boxes made in the Black Country were often the product of many hands, different painters and different people specializing in making the hinges and the box settings.  Early animal bonbonnieres, when perfect still fetch extraordinary sums. My toad has his problems, he’s not as damaged as the  underneath landscape but he sometimes lifts out of his hinges and has a bash on one haunch,  but all in all I am very happy with his A/F-ness for I have no temptation to part with him .