The Stowaway Treasure — A Silver Spoon. Part 1.

About three months ago, in the middle of a period in which several spheres of my life seemed almost comically on fire, and the persistent feeling of time slipping through my fingers poked at my brain, I opened my coffee tin one morning.

The tin was a recent addition to my kitchen – I had wanted to find a nice, old container, but the right one had never come along. So, I had resorted to buying one myself: plain black with a brass-coloured edge around the lid. I decided I would need a special coffee spoon, so I opened my cutlery drawer to pick one out, and identified a battered silverish looking thing I rescued 11 years ago when clearing out my grandfather’s house after his death. That would do.

That morning, eyes crusty and mind slow, I paid attention to the spoon fully for the first time, and traced my fingers over the pattern along the edge of the handle, and then over the initials, faint under silver stains and patches of discolouration: SCM.  

I registered them properly and realised they weren’t at all familiar. I asked my father. He had no idea who they might refer to, but suggested they may have been related in some way to my great-grandmother, Fanny Monroe (or was it Monro or Munro?, he thought out loud), on account of the ‘M’ at the end.  He knew she married my great-grandfather William Campbell around 1915. If this were correct, the spoon would have been from Fanny’s life pre-marriage, or may have belonged to a member of her own family who had kept the surname.

I adjusted my glasses, rolled up my metaphorical sleeves, and, armed with silver polish and a flicker of something resembling excitement, I gave the spoon a rub down. Something interesting happens when you look closely at anything for a more than a few seconds —very soon I had kick-started a feeling of delight and wonder, at the thought that I had had this spoon in my house all this time, a little stowaway tucked away in the drawer. Who was SCM?