Finally, after several years of dithering, I got around to opening two boxes of family photographs. I managed to save many, though not all, of them when my first marriage imploded and I had to move out of my house. Some photos are missing, probably long destroyed. What remained was fascinating.
Almost all of the photos were in black and white, which is always a bit of a jolt. And many of them are of me. I don’t mind looking at old photos of me. It’s almost like looking at someone else. It’s always been the me in the here and now I couldn’t abide looking at.
Only one of many hundreds of the photos features my dad. I suspected that there wouldn’t be many since he and my mum split up in the 1960s and he ended up going to Canada. Yet oddly, this photo was of him kicking a football around in what may have been Hyde Park. I wasn’t even in the picture and it occurred to me someone else took it and maybe I wasn’t there when it was taken. I’ll never know.
Most photos feature my mum who, and I know I am biased, was a very attractive woman. Tellingly, given the dreadful state of health she got into from middle age on onwards, she is smoking in virtually every one. When she was growing up, everyone smoked. I doubt that it occurred to her when she was young that everyone in her side of the family would die as a direct result of smoking. But they did, including her own father, my paternal Grandfather, who managed to die before I was born. Very thoughtless.
There’s me with my train set, me with our labrador Kim, me with our snowman in December 1963 (oh what a snowman), me with a face full of stitches when I had my keyhole shaped birthmark scraped out of my cheek (nice scar though), me with my mum, me on my bicycle which was a dozen sizes too big, me leaving home for the first day at senior school, me with my oldest and dearest friend Julie AKA Jules.
One of my favourite pictures is of the caravan we went to in West Bay. There were five of us – three grandparents, my mum and me. It doesn’t look big enough for me on my own. There was no telly, no cooking facilities and worst of all no bathroom. But then, I was used to being in a place with no bathroom because my paternal grandparents didn’t have a bathroom at all, just a freezing outdoor toilet. At the time, I thought nothing of it. It was only later when I found that my grandparents washed, at separate times of course, using a bowl of hot water in the living room. And there, in glorious black and white, was that house. Two up, two down, no bathroom yet two rooms, one up, one down, that were never used.
I even found my mum and dad’s marriage certificate from 1953 and have managed to work out, because I never knew before, that she was born in 1924, meaning that if she had been alive today – impossible given her tobacco habit and high fat diet – her 95th birthday would have been imminent.
I avoided looking at the pics for years. But now I am engaged in a writing project and I had to force myself. After an hour or so, I was shaking like a leaf, light headed and very emotional. It felt like a physical experience.
I wouldn’t say memories flood back because they didn’t. They kind of dripped back. And as of now, I am not sure if I did the right thing of not. Almost everyone in every picture is dead now. That was the strangest thing of all.
