Broken glass

I used to have a battered cardboard box of around 12 hand-painted glass Christmas balls that first decorated a tree in the 1950s when I was born. They were from Europe in the days when such things weren't found in Australia. They had been given to my father by the Poles who came out to Australia after World War Two to work on the great nation-building hydro electricty projects like the Snowys Mountains Scheme and the dams scattered throughout the Tasmanian Highlands. The Poles were still organised in their army units and wearing their uniforms when they arrived.

There were a few balls missing when I got them and over the years they have slowly but steadily diminished through breakages as I have moved around Australia. For the last year or more I have been reduced to four balls but last week I dropped two on the concrete floor in the basement and they shattered into thin slivers - only two left now. I suppose that's not too bad a record, about one loss every four and a bit years. Still that makes two breakages in one week look very negligent. Concrete and glass are a bad mixture.

Postscript: How unreliable family memory can be. I found the label off the cardboard box, which had been long since discarded. It confirmed that the balls were Polish but that they had been imported into Australia by a firm in Melbourne, so they were found in Australia after all.