Wearable History

Lucy was sitting at her kitchen table on Boxing Day, her hands wrapped around a large cup of tea, the ring adorning her left hand sparkling in the morning sunlight. It had been a truly magical Christmas this year and she was thankful for this quiet time to reflect on the past few days.

Marc proposed on Christmas Eve, after they came back from her parent’s house. He knew her well and didn’t go for the grand gesture or the proposal in front of her family. It had been just the two of them. It had been perfect.

The proposal hadn’t really been the surprise though. They had been together for a little over two years and they had been discussing about getting hitched for the past few months. What had been a surprise was the ring. A simple white gold band, adorned with a 2.79 carats cushion cut blush sapphire in the middle, flanked by two small 0.53 carats round cut diamonds, themselves flanked by two 1.65 carats heart shaped cut peach pink garnets.

It was quite expected nowadays to get a ring with one big diamond or another imposing gem, but she never quite saw the appeal. Hers was a beautiful, understated ring that just spoke to her, but it was more than that. Marc had used the gems he inherited from his Grandma Rose. This made this ring ever so special, because she had been such a beautiful soul and Lucy had been heartbroken when she passed away just 5 months ago.

Rose had lived an extraordinary life and each of the items she owned had its own story. She had regaled them with their tales every time they came to visit. Lucy thought she would have been excited by the engagement.

Rose was born in London in 1923, in what was a difficult time for Britain. The post-war boom had exhausted itself and unemployment in the country was at an all-time high. Lucy had looked in the National Archives website and discovered the terrible economic situation of the period. She thought strike was a French invention, but she had read that there were so many strikes in Britain, in the post-World War I period, that in 1921 alone there were 85 million working days lost, in a country of 37 million people; a situation which culminated with the General Strike of 1926. During that time, Rose’s father had been lucky enough to secure a position as a secretary with a well to do aristocratic family. Somehow, they did not get massively affected by The Great Slump of 1929, which meant Rose’s family, while not wealthy, had a roof over their head and food on the table at a time where many did not. This also meant that Rose was able to go all the way to secondary school, rather than being forced to leave school at 14 to find work, like was the habit at the time. The school leaving age had been 12 before the 1918 Act. Lucy could not imagine a 12 year old child leaving school to work, this sounded inconceivable nowadays.

Just as the country bounced back, World War II broke. Her father had to stay in London as his employer was a member of government. Her mother had insisted the whole family stayed together, despite the government request that children and women be evacuated from London in September 1939 during Operation Pied Piper. So, the family remained in London during the war, and survived the Blitz unhurt, which was no small feat. They must have had a guardian angel.

London is also where Rose met Colin, in 1940. He was part of the Royal Engineers deployed over London to diffuse unexploded bombs dropped by the German. She fell madly in love with this rowdy Scottish man, and it seems he worshipped the ground she walked on. And so, they got married in 1941.

After the war, Colin left the military and started travelling extensively as an engineer, working on countries infrastructure all around the world. Rose accompanied him quite often, and she told tales of the places she saw, where very few people, at least westerners, had ever been. Lucy was a little bit envious of the things Rose must have seen, the events she witnessed and the people she met. Since then, with the vulgarisation of travel, and the improvement of working life, there were only so many places you could go where you would not be met by hordes of tourists. But Rose, she was in Argentina with Colin in 1954, and she witnessed the wild inflation of the country. They left few months before Peron was deposed. What it must have been like to witness history in the making!

Colin had been a generous and rambunctious man, with a passion for poker and good whisky, while, thankfully, never quite becoming a serious gambler or an alcoholic. And this is how, while consulting on the Suez Canal, he ended up one evening of June 1952 (barely a month before the 1952 Revolution) at the Shepheard’s Hotel, in Cairo, sitting across from a French adventurer and winning two round cut diamonds for his Rose, said to have been found in Brazil in 1789. They had allegedly been destined for a French Duke, but by the time the diamonds made it back to France, the Revolution was in full swing, and all aristocrats were busy running for their lives or being imprisoned. Those two gems had travelled in the pockets of sailors, adventurers, entrepreneurs for almost two centuries before ending up in Cairo on that evening.

Lucy had always associated diamonds with South Africa and the De Beers company, but it so happened that the story of diamonds was so much more interesting. Modern diamonds came from India since the 1400s, then as India’s diamond supply dwindled, in the 1700s from Brazil. Brazil dominated the market for the next 150 years, until the end of the twentieth century and the emergence of new markets such as African countries, Russia, as well as Australia (since the 1980s) and Canada (since 2000s). Canada, really? Isn’t it strange to think that all you think you know, end up being a lot more complex than you thought. And how on earth did we live before Wikipedia, Lucy thought.

Now, the sapphire adorning the centre of her ring came from Burma, or rather what is known as Myanmar since 1989. How a country plagued by a civil war since its independence in 1948 managed to produce such beautiful gems was mind blowing to her. Colin had befriended the owner of a local mine in 1956, while he was working on the construction of the Engineering College of Rangoon University (and yes, Rangoon spelling also changed to Yangon in 1989; none of those politicians think about the kids having to re-learn their geography at school when they make such changes). That friend gave him first pick on some stones that were mined on the day he visited. And so, a beautiful pink peach unheated sapphire was gifted to Rose.

Sadly, Colin passed away in 1962 in London, of a heart attack, at the age of 51. Rose was left alone with their three children. She met Henry a year later, an Englishman, working in the New Court headquarters of Rothschild Inc., in their mergers-acquisitions sector. They got married in 1964. He, just like Colin, travelled a lot for work, and more often than not, Rose went with him.

And this is how Rose ended up in Tanzania, a young nation barely 14 years old, formed by the union of Tanganyika and the coastal archipelago of Zanzibar. Henry and Rose visited in 1978, barely few weeks before the Kagera War between Tanzania and Uganda started, but also just when Umbalite was first discovered in the Umba Valley of the Tanga Region. And so, Rose went home with two peach pink garnets, which her husband got cut in heart shape.

The loop was complete, and Lucy was now carrying a ring with stones from several continents, associated with historical events. You could even argue that the white gold band had a link to history, as it replaced the traditional platinum, when that metal became prized to make weapon during World War II. This is why that alloy of gold and other metal, usually nickel for rings, discovered in the early 1700s became fashionable in the mid-1900s. She could go on about the history of gold too. For example, did you know that gold smelting was first achieved by Egyptians in 3,600 BC? Pull one thread and it unravels and follow human history.

Lucy took a long sip of her Earl Grey. There were more to that ring though, she thought. Humanity developed its skills at using tools, at mining for metal or gems, at melting and purifying metal, at cutting gems, but all those source materials were so much older.

Lucy had to research that too, but she had been amazed at what she had discovered. Diamonds were formed 1 to 3.5 billion years ago and sapphire about 2 billion years. Yes, you read right, billions of years. Garnets are supposed to be more recent, having been formed 88 to 90 million years ago. Some of the gold had been dated back to 4.5 billion years, the age of our planet.

She was 28 years old, and she was wearing a ring made of elements dating billions of years. She struggled to come to term with that. The fact there were Roman ruins few miles up the road, that were 2,000 years old were already impressive to her, but the elements of her rings, that was the next level of history. All the components on her rings had already been formed when Dinosaurs roamed the earth 245 to 66 million years ago. They had been there when homo habilis emerged 2 million years ago, and when modern humans appeared in Africa only 300,000 years ago. They were children in the history of this world.

This was sobering to her. Those children kept consuming all those elements as if there were no limits, as if they were renewable or an immediate commodity. What would happen the day all that had been created was mined and used and exhausted?

Lucy sighed loudly and finished her tea. She had really gone down a rabbit hole today, she thought, pulling one thread after another! But it was time to get back to reality and get cracking. Both Marc’s and her own parents were coming for lunch, to celebrate their engagement and there was still much to do, which could not wait a billion years.