The Repair Shop’s Will Kirk was left concerned when guest Tracy Emery walked in with her grandfather’s dessert wine holder after it had been charred under her kitchen light.
During the new episode, jeweller Richard Talman met a mother-daughter duo – Halina and Lesley – who brought him a broken silver ring given to Halina’s mother in Warsaw in the Second World War as a thank you for risking her life to pass food to families imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto.
Leather expert Suzie Fletcher met with Gordon and his sons James and Ross who brought in a pair of curling stones that were used in Gordon’s father’s team victory in the Grand Match of 1979.
Angelina Bakalarou was tasked with repairing a vintage film poster of the Bollywood film Sholay, however, it was Kirk who was tasked with the mammoth job of restoring charred wood for Emery.
Walking into the barn, Emery placed the wooden chef on the table and explained: “It is a wooden chef, well it was a wooden chef. It is actually a desert wine holder, so it opens up! It holds a bottle of wine but he had a little accident.
“He was sitting in the kitchen under the counter light and somebody put the light on and he got a little bit burnt. So the only thing that has been left intact from the top was the face, which is amazing because it is the best bit.”
Kirk was curious as to who was to blame for the fire, leaving Emery to explain: “Well we don’t 100 per cent know, but, we think it was my dad. I was away for two nights and they were going to look after my cat, and he didn’t like my cat being left in the dark, so he turned the under-counter light on and left it for the night and it was when my mum came back in the morning that they found it burnt.
“But we were very lucky that it was just this and the light that got damaged and I am very lucky that it didn’t catch on anywhere else. Unfortunate for me because it is one of my favourite objects.”
The guest went on to explain that she inherited it from her grandfather after he and his wife bought it for the pub they used to run, propping him up on the food counter.
She added: “When my grandad passed away, my gran asked if there was anything we wanted and I of course said the wooden chef, he just sums up my entire childhood to me and when he was sitting in my kitchen, it was like my grandad was still telling his stories to me.
“I actually keep the speech that I did at his funeral inside the wooden chef, that is what is kept inside there. [Dad was] tremendously guilty, he’s the one who wanted to get it fixed for me, knowing how much it meant for me.
“Unfortunately, he became poorly and passed away about a year ago. So now it just has an extra meaning to get fixed, because we all now have a memory of him trying to get this fixed and it was the one thing he wasn’t able to do before he passed. Please, try your best, bring his stories back.”
Taking the wooden chef to his workbench, Kirk studied it further and admitted: “This is in really bad condition, I have never seen something so charred on my workbench. I have never had to restore charcoal before and that is pretty much what this is.
“So I know the face should sit there… oh my god, so I am missing lots of wood, basically missing a whole section from the top of the hat and some bits from the outside. So I need to glue back together what I do have here, in a way so I can work out what is missing.”
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After working his magic and getting the wooden chef back to his original state, Emery was invited back to the barn where she was left in floods of tears at the sight of her childhood memory.
Struggling to keep back her tears, she gasped: “Oh my god! Oh my god thank you so much! Can I pick him up? Oh, thank you! He is beautiful! He is so lovely thank you, thank you for all your hard work!
“Look at him he is perfect! Look at his face! Spot on, thank you so much! Being little and being loved by my grandad so much, I know what my grandad would be saying, he would be looking at him saying ‘He’s brilliant’, that’s what he would be saying.
“I lost the two men in my life and now I have him back so yeah, just means everything. He’s so good! He’s going to go in the kitchen but he is going to have a shelf all to himself, no lights, absolutely not.”
