The table

The whole family was standing expectantly outside our new house, ‘Byeways’ in Mill Lane. We have three boys, Roger the eldest, John and Peter, who was the youngest. Mary and I had decided to invest in this rather rambling old three storey property in order to give each of the boys a room to themselves as they grew up.
At some time in the past, three bedrooms had been built in the half of the attic facing the front garden.
Each bedroom had a dormer window built out from the slanting ceiling imposed by the original roof. The unconverted back half of the attic could be accessed from a small hatch in the corridor of the floor below and offered a large storage space where the usual accumulation of household rubbish could be hidden.
One of the stipulations for the purchase had been my insistence that the property complied with the legal definition of ‘vacant possession’, yet the first thing we saw upon opening the front door of our new home was an old table standing in the hall. The table in itself wasn’t unsightly; it was the sort of furniture that any newly wed couple would be proud to own. It was well made and could be very useful. However it was very old and uncared for and its presence was in contravention of the ‘vacant possession’ clause agreed by the previous owners.
But it was only a matter of moments for the removal men to take the offending table into an adjacent room, clearing a way for them to carry in the furniture from our previous home.
“Sandwiches for now and you’ll all get cooked food,” said Mary, “once the crates in the kitchen had been unpacked”
This was the signal for the boys to grab their sandwiches and disappear to their own rooms to start unloading their boxes, arranging the contents in their own individual styles of confusion.
Ten minutes later the unexpected sound of footsteps thundering down two flights of stairs towards the kitchen implied an impending problem.
“It’s not fair, Roger’s got that old table in his room and he always gets everything,” moaned John and Peter together as the boys burst into the room. This was the only time any two boys in our brood agreed about anything.
“I saw the table being put into the living room to make way for the removals men, don’t tell me you carried it upstairs by yourself!”
“Never touched it dad, honest!” replied Roger; “it was in my room when I went in. I like it and I want to put all my models on it. I could even use it to do my homework on,” he added hopefully.
“Just leave it where it is for the time being” I replied against a rising tide of protest from the two younger boys. “When we’ve got the house arranged to mum’s liking we’ll sort out who has the table!”
Roger went back upstairs happily, followed by his grumbling brothers.
From past experience I knew Mary’s ideas on home making, so I’d taken a week off work to help arrange and rearrange the furniture to her liking. It took three days, but at last we agreed that everything was now in its proper place. On the fourth day we were relaxing in bed with our early morning cup of tea, when a tremendous row broke out upstairs.
One thing we had managed to instil into the family was that their parent’s morning cup of tea was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Even so, the noise from the boys’ rooms soon made us sure that once again the whereabouts of the table was the subject under such heated discussion.
Getting downstairs in time for breakfast was not the strongest point of the boys’ daily lives, but on this particular morning Roger arrived just in advance of his brothers.
“Dad, you said I could keep the table until we’d all settled down. John must have come into my room last night and taken it for himself, its in his room now!”
John started shouting that he’d had nothing to do with it, while both Peter and Roger yelled at him that if he hadn’t taken it, then who had?
I could see the rest of the week being spent deciding the future of the table unless I took drastic action. Leaving Mary to finish her breakfast in peace and quiet, the rest of us trooped upstairs to John’s room to make a decision about the future ownership of the offending piece of furniture.
It wasn’t there!
Roger ran along the corridor to his own room with a happy smile on his face. As soon as we heard his door open there was a yell of disappointment, then he shouted in triumph as he opened the door to Peter’s room on his way back to us.
“The kid’s taken it!
Peter looked at me in genuine surprise, before we all hurried to his room. Sure enough the table was up against the window between the wall and his bed. Peter certainly wasn’t able to have moved it from his older brother’s room on his own, nor could he have moved the bed and made all tidy again in the time available.
“Now listen to me you three. Let’s just go downstairs and finish our breakfast, then you can argue amongst yourselves as to who has the table. I’ve got some gardening to do while your mother cleans the kitchen. By lunchtime we can settle this once and for all, I suggest you might like to take it in turns to have the thing, since you all seem to like it so much. But if you can’t agree sensibly amongst yourselves then I’ll take it down to the dump and that’ll be the end of the matter!”
At lunchtime the three boys were already sitting round the dining room table, looking, at me glumly as I came in from the garden.
“You said you wouldn’t take it to the dump until we’d made up our minds,” said Roger accusingly.
“I haven’t touched it, I’ve been out in the back garden all morning!”
A general rumble of dissent assured me that the table wasn’t in any of the rooms in the house, so it must have been me that had got rid of it.
There was only one thing to do, so we all inspected every room in the house, starting from the ground floor and progressing upstairs, including our own bedroom.
“Only one place left,” said Roger, “it has to be in the attic!”
In order to keep the peace I agreed to open the hatch and lower the ladder and one of the boys shinned up with a torch. I was explaining that no one had opened the hatch since we’d arrived, when a triumphant shout sent me up the ladder to see what had been found.
The table was up there alright! It was lying upside down across the bare joists with its legs in the air. I took the torch from Peter and stepped across carefully to have a closer look. It was our table sure enough, though how it could have got up there was beyond belief. A sudden thought struck me and I sent one of the boys to get a tape measure. As I’d suspected the table was too big to get through the rather small access hatch even if it had been turned carefully to pass between the corners of the opening.
This was becoming impossible! I stared at the underside of the table now being seen for the first time. Carefully cut into the wood was a complicated monogram followed by the figure 3, it meant nothing to me, but once again I sent down one of the boys, this time to fetch my camera. Photograph taken, we all trooped back down to the kitchen.
“So where is it this time?” asked Mary with a laugh.
The babble of reply was rather more subdued than usual, but for once the boys were all in agreement.

“It has to be magic mum! It’s in the loft but it’s too big to get up there. No one has ever moved it; it just keeps moving itself. We think dad frightened it when he said he’d take it to the dump, so it went up there to hide.”
Mary looked at me in astonishment. I shrugged my shoulders with a puzzled look on my face.
“I’m going to take some time off from my holiday to try and sort this out. Once I’ve printed the photograph I’ll do some research to see if that monogram has any meaning.”
Thank goodness for the Internet. As you’d expect from children nowadays, Roger was a wizard on the keyboard. Even so he took a good half-hour before he finally found a match for our picture.
The table had been made by one Gepetto Grimm, who had emigrated from Austria to York in the early 1700’s. The house where he’d lived was still standing apparently, although it was no longer listed as a business.
York was too far from home to drive, so I took the train, accompanied by the boys who refused to be left at home while I was having fun with the detective work. Half an hour into the journey I suddenly remembered why the name Gepetto sounded familiar.
“I think some one on that website is having a laugh! Gepetto was the name of the old wood carver who made the puppet Pinocchio in one of Grimm’s fairy tales.”
There was a general chorus of disappointment. They’d all seen the cartoon film on television during one of its many repeats. Still we were stuck on the train now and decided to follow the search through and then have a good day out while we were in the city.
The house was located in the Shambles, an area of York where the old mediaeval buildings overhang the road to the point where people in the top stories can lean out of their windows and shake hands with their neighbours on the other side of the road.
Repeated knocking on the door eventually produced a result; footsteps could be heard shuffling nearer and nearer along the hallway, until at last a very old man opened the door. An assortment of woodworking tools were sticking out of the large front pocket of his leather apron, while he peered at us over the top of a pair of half moon spectacles.
“Sorry to trouble you sir, but we’re trying to find a Mr. Grimm or one of his descendants.”
“No one of that name here!” he mumbled
“He was a wood worker as you appear to be, he made tables a very long time ago”
“Never heard of him!”
I was just going to leave in despair, when Roger produced the photograph of the table’s monogram. It had a miraculous effect on the old man.
He looked closely at the picture, then took a magnifying glass from his apron pocket. ‘GG3’ he muttered under his breath, ‘ I don’t believe it!’
“Where did you find this?” he asked aloud in a much more reasonable tone.
I explained our interest in the occasional appearances and disappearances of our mystery table. To our great surprise he burst out laughing and beckoned us into the house. He excused himself for a moment while he walked off to find a manuscript he thought would be of interest. We all looked at each other in mounting excitement as he came back blowing the dust from a parchment scroll. He unrolled it nearly back to the beginning before pausing.
“Number three your painting says!”
A rather strange way of putting it I thought but agreed that the picture did show a number three after the monogram.
“Number three was the first successful model of that design that was made,” he told us. “The trouble was that it was too successful, so old Gepetto never made another. Lots of people in later years copied the style of course, but you appear to own the genuine original. You say it went up into the roof of your house? I suppose you’d suggested chopping it up for firewood or something similar!”
I explained that I had threatened to throw it onto the local dump just to get rid of it.
“Well that would do it of course, far too sensitive that one was.”
“How on earth can a table be sensitive to remarks made about it?”
“With magic of course, similar to that puppet he made that came to life. He just seemed to have the knack with such things.”
“But why does it move about, sometimes in one room and sometimes in another?”
The old man looked at me pityingly over the top of his spectacles.
“You really don’t know do you?”
We all shook our heads at the same time. He looked at us all with a broad grin on his face, as he announced proudly. “It’s the only genuine occasional table ever made.”