I spent this afternoon looking through two tin boxes of old photographs. And I mean old. I don’t think there’s a single photo beyond, I would guess, 1970. Many photos, almost all in black and white, are beginning to fade rather like my memory. They are mostly photographs of my mum, her mum, her brother, some members of her family, my paternal grandparents, one of her father who died in 1954 and one of my father. Apart from the ones with me in, pretty well everyone else is dead. It was a sad experience, as it always is when I decide I want to take a trip back in time.
One thing is very clear, though. My mum didn’t have a camera. Someone else – my paternal grandfather, maybe? – did, so I am inclined to believe many were taken by him. Someone in Rotterdam, the land of my mother, must have had a camera, too, as well as a puzzling lack of imagination, so samey and drab that most photos were.
The effort to pose is incredible. There is one of my mother smartly dressed appearing to mow the lawn. There’s one of her mother wearing her Sunday best doing exactly the same thing. Stilted, wooden poses everywhere. Very odd.
The photos of me are downright weird. There’s one from 1963 where I am in the back garden standing next to a snowman that’s smaller than me. I reckon my dad, who may have been on shore leave from the merchant navy, took that one because said snowman had a pipe in his mouth and my dad smoked a pipe at the time. But then, so did my grandfather, so maybe he took it? Who knows? It doesn’t much matter either way. Then, there’s one of me wearing a kilt to a wedding. I cried all morning after I was told to wear that. There’s me on a donkey at Weston, me with Muffin the Mule and me a few hours old. Of course, I don’t remember any of it. None of these children and babies look like me. Maybe there was a swap with someone else’s child? This little ‘un was so much better looking than I am.
As well as the photos, I found some other stuff. My parents’ wedding certificate for one thing. Proof of my vaccines. A postcard of – and I am not making this up – the Rotterdam Hospital of Tropical Diseases which was posted by Marinus Johansen, my Dutch grandfather who was inconsiderate enough to die long before I was born. And he didn’t write anything other than his name and the address of the hospital on it. Was this his last message to his daughter and son in law? Did he die of a tropical disease? I was told he died of lung cancer or something like asbestosis.
Then a telegram from my mum’s brother and his wife, my only uncle and auntie, dated the day after I was born, followed by a letter in perfect Dutch, which is a bit of a bugger because although I learned to speak the language fluently no one thought to teach me to write it. I can read some words, like the Dutch for “congratulations” but the rest of it might as well be in Mandarin Chinese.
There are quite a few photos which were taken in West Bay, which aside from the Netherlands was the only place we ever went on holiday. There we are outside the caravan, there’s my grandfather taking me rowing, there we are outside the caravan again. I have no memories of doing very much in West Bay because, I suspect, we didn’t do very much. Maybe my memory isn’t as bad as I thought it was because there was nothing to remember?
I thought of scanning some of them to put on social media. After all, some people have trouble sleeping and a shed load of dreary photos of me and my family from the 1960s and before might be just the thing they need to get a decent 40 winks. I might just do it, too, if only to spite those people who show endless photos of their childhood while the rest of us wonder, “Why the hell would you share that?” They could do that to me with interest.
I was also reminded that actually things weren’t always that great in the old days. There are no indoor photos from our house and none from my paternal grandparents’ house either. My grandparents had an outside toilet and literally no bathroom at all, something that didn’t occur to me was odd until I had grown up, which in my case was my thirties. There exist no photos of any of us after, I think, 1970. It’s such a contrast to today where most of us have smart phones containing literally thousands of photos.
The photos are random, few tell a story. There isn’t a single photo with my mother and me beyond my toddler years, none at all with my father. There’s nothing sinister about any of this. Not everyone had a camera, we certainly didn’t. I may have lost some photos when my disastrous first marriage failed and I was forced to escape violence from my partner. Whether she binned them or they simply got lost along the way, I cannot know. But perhaps the fact I have the patchiest of memories meant that we didn’t do much. I’ll never know.
The boxes are going back into storage tomorrow. I now know a few things I didn’t know – they are so trivial, I won’t bore you with them – but many of the mysteries remain mysteries. They always will. And maybe that’s for the best.
