Jun 22, 2008 04:30 AM
LESLIE SCRIVENER
FEATURE WRITER
The child’s canvas shoe, entombed for decades, has the grey, dead look of a flattened mouse. Holes in the toe and the heel are roughly stitched with red thread, and a scrap of dark cotton has been poorly sewn to the rubber sole.
I’m loath to touch this object, which my husband found within the plaster walls of the small house in Etobicoke we’re rebuilding, and long to throw it away. Yet there is mystery to it. Who did it belong to? Why was it hidden? Was it lost or put there purposely? If the latter, for what reason?
We’d found other discards in the course of construction. Whisky bottles from Gooderham & Worts fell out of the eaves. Vanilla extract bottles, mustard tins and an OXO mug were retrieved from beneath the floorboards.
Most often we found what we took to be remnants of workers’ lunches – milk bottles, the remains of a pork chop, magazines (we presume they were used to wrap food) including Canadian Motorist, Live Stories (sentimental tales for women readers) and a cowboy adventure periodical called Ace-High Magazine. They are all from June 1925 – we can imagine a family 83 years ago doing what we are doing this summer, building a house.
But there was something poignant and haunting about this shabby running shoe – its poverty, of course, but also the fact that a child, perhaps a 6-year-old, had worn the life out of it.
A visiting friend with some knowledge of folklore believed the shoe had a function. She was familiar with the centuries-old English superstition of secreting shoes during house construction for good luck. They have a name: “concealed” or “concealment shoes.”
A call to Elizabeth Semmelhack, curator of Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, provides details. She gets inquiries from homeowners who have found shoes while renovating 19th- and early-20th-century houses. (In Britain, the practice is so common there’s a registry of concealed shoes.) The Bata, the world’s largest shoe museum, has one concealed shoe – a desiccated man’s work shoe – in its collection of 13,000.
Strangely, when she talks about the most common concealed shoe, it seems she’s describing the very one we found. “Typically, it’s a child shoe and it’s well-worn, extremely well-worn,” she says. “Who had the money to put a brand new pair of shoes in a wall? Often, it’s a single shoe, put in to keep away bad luck, though it’s morphed into a symbol of good luck.”
The metal aglets – sleeves on the tips of the laces – are a clue that our shoe dates from the Twenties or Thirties. Eventually, looking at a photo of it, Semmelhack can’t say definitively that the shoe is of that vintage or is indeed a concealed shoe, but it seems likely.
The shabby patch job is another hint. “It looks like the repair had nothing to do with making the shoe more wearable,” she says. “That makes it more likely it was repaired to function in an apotropaic role in the wall rather for the child to wear it again.” “Apotropaic,” she explains, is the term for an object used as a talisman to ward off evil, like a charm bracelet. By stitching the shoe, it became more of a vessel to contain bad spirits.
When she renovated her Danforth-area house, Semmelhack concealed a pair of her husband’s shoes with a note explaining why his Kenneth Coles were in the walls.
Most often concealed shoes are placed in chimneys or over doors and windows – “areas of the house considered susceptible, or weak, where something could come into the property,” says Josephine Hickin, shoe heritage development officer at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery in England.
She adds that shoes are one of the few personal items that retain the shape and, according to some beliefs, carry the spirit of the owner. The concealed shoe is connected with the animist notion that the shoe is “protected by the spirit of the owner. And children are believed to have a stronger spirits than adults.”
Traditionally, shoes have been symbols of authority also linked to fertility – remember the old tradition of tying old shoes to the car bumper of newlyweds – and good luck.
The study of concealed shoes began in 1957 when June Swann, keeper of the boot and shoe collection at the Northampton Museum, and a fellow curator each received a half-dozen shoes for identification. Most had been hidden near chimneys. Swann could find no literature on shoes concealed in houses. She wrote in a 1996 article in Costume Society Journal about how her curiosity was piqued especially by the discovery of a pair of child’s boots in the thatched roof of a cottage in Northamptonshire. “I had this vision of a tiny child on the thatched roof,” Swann, now 79 and retired, told the Star, “and I wondered, `What kind of family does this?’ … Not being superstitious, it took me a long while to convince myself that all my finds were (put there deliberately).”
Since then, the Northampton Museum has become a repository of concealed shoes. It has a collection of 246 of them and a database recording some 1,700 hidden shoes found around the world. Some are from Ontario – including a pair of brown boots, from 1830 to 1845, discovered in a house in Palgrave, and six ankle boots, dating from 1870, from a house in Kincardine.
Most of the shoes in the index are from Britain, but concealed shoes have been reported in Germany, France, Australia and the eastern U.S., especially the New England states. While a few date from the 15th century, the practice appears to have grown more common after that, peaking in the 19th century and then falling away after the 1930s.
Almost all are thoroughly worn, most beyond repair, and suggest working-class owners; nearly half are children’s shoes. Some have been found with knives or other sharp objects, chicken bones or cat bones and may be linked to some kind of ritual sacrifice. (We also found a pair of skate blades in our walls.)
Swann notes in another article that the study of concealed shoes is incomplete, in part because of the “reticence of the finders of footwear, which is usually in a disgusting condition,” and because tradesmen working on old houses will discard shoes, not knowing their significance.
We know, from searching property records, a farmer named William Golding owned our Etobicoke house in the early 1920s. But by 1925 it belonged to Thomas Bruce, whose name appears on the magazine labels. and who was a stock keeper and salesman for Hyslop Brothers, a bicycle manufacturer at Victoria and Shuter Sts. Golding may have left the house unfinished – some dwellings in the area were built as cottages – and Bruce may have put in the plaster walls.
Following the Northampton Museum’s recommendation, we will likely return the shoe to the walls, not out of superstition, but in the spirit of continuity. And we will adopt a new perspective on the shoe as suggested by Elizabeth Semmelhack, who says, “Think of it as a symbol of a new beginning for those people. They have a child and want to keep bad luck at bay.
“The shoe is devoted to hope in the future.”
