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The Pulse Glass by Gillian Tindall review – hidden histories and heirlooms

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/10/the-pulse-glass-by-gillian-tindall-review-personal-history-through-objects

An exploration of loss and remembrance told through inherited and found objects is revelatory yet reticent

Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to glean the stories they might conceal. “Most objects, like all people, disappear in the end,” she writes at the start of The Pulse Glass, an excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance. And yet not everything crumbles to dust; some bits and pieces defy the odds by surviving, and it is Tindall’s delight – albeit of a measured and low-key sort – to describe their escape from “the quiet darkness of forgetting”.

Take, for instance, the scrap of tightly folded paper recently discovered in the crack of a wall at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, possibly to stop up a draught; when examined, it turned out to be a fragment of a musical score by Thomas Tallis, from a service held in St Paul’s in 1544. Or the case of an attic clearance in Westminster Abbey where debris was found strewn across the floor. It was about to be tipped away when an archaeologist happened to notice many tiny shards of coloured glass mixed in there: closer study uncovered 30,000 fragments, which when put together revealed details of “exquisite workmanship” dating back to the 13th century – literally a window on a lost world.

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