Precious jewels

I know exactly when and where it all began: summer 1966, at the desk under the sloping window in the attic of the house where I was born. It was a new house, but the attic was as attics should be: obscure, and separate from our daily lives. My father used it from time to time, as a retreat or to do his tax returns – who knows? He kept papers there that he was secretive about, and I was not always allowed to go in. But I would join him on the odd Sunday morning, and I remember how I would stare, squinting, at the hexagonal bottle on the desk that reflected sunshine like a phial of liquid light. It contained ‘real glue’, which my brother and I were not allowed to use. When we wanted to make a car of a shoebox, or daffodils out of an egg-carton, we had to make do with an opaque white paste that smelt of potato peelings and was dug out of its plastic container with three sticky fingers. The real glue, gum Arabic, was only for those who knew how to produce a clear, clean, honey-coloured drop from the bottle by lightly pushing its red rubber cap onto a surface, and it was assumed that I just wasn't up to the task. Sometimes, under my father's watchful eye, I was allowed to fidget with the cap. Dried gum, like sugar, would peel off cleanly. But even better than that was being able to hold the bottle up to the window and turn it round in the light. I thought it was part of a chandelier, like one I must have seen in a picture book or a shop window somewhere. And I understood that what I saw was lustre.

This particular bottle, which many people in Germany and the Netherlands still see in their mind's eye when gum Arabic is mentioned, was designed for the Gimborn company by the famous Dutch glass designer, A. D. Copier, in 1936. Consciously or not, he had captured an association with gum Arabic that now has a long history.