Snaps

So, at last I’ve done it! A half decent selfie which I shall now print and add for posterity to the massive box of old photos which I have just inherited from my lately deceased sister.

I am still reeling from being part of a family of ten siblings to only four, in just four years, apart from the eldest brother who left this mortal coil several years ago. I suppose the effects of old age were bound to make themselves felt sooner or later, but this rate of diminishing family feels a bit drastic by any standard! Brothers and sisters falling by the wayside, reminding those few remaining of our mortality!

Now, what to do with the jumbled heap of black and white memories assembled haphazardly in the old cardboard box, with the well-remembered wallpaper stuck precariously on the outside to camouflage the original contents? They must have spent the last twenty years or so sitting in my sister’s loft, gathering dust along with other unheeded stuff left for someone else to dispose of.

But yet…I remember the feel of excitement opening the lid of the box on a wet day when successful pleas to mum won over her automatic negative response! A similar reaction would have been displayed to requests to play Monopoly, or Snakes and Ladders, though I’d guess the photos would at least have been a more peaceful pursuit. I remember well the shouting and stamping that Monopoly usually caused, so looking at our older siblings when they were but toddlers would almost certainly have been preferable to that chaos. However, our mother had doubtless understood that reserving the pleasures of the photo box to a minimum was a necessity, if the enthusiasm and interest were to be maintained over the years.

Now, lucky me, I can gaze within as often and for as long as I like. Still, it needs someone to share the pleasure with. I phone my last remaining sister to invite her over for a cuppa and use the added inducement of the guilty pleasure of unlimited time and no unexpected interference while we browse. Not for us the continued interruption of neighbours or noisy children while we sip our cups of proper tea, milk first and no sugar.

I quickly make a batch of her favourite rock cakes, sweetly flavoured with cinnamon and fat juicy raisins, so they will still be warm when she arrives. The memories invoked will be spiced with the smell of our mother’s kitchen as she would always have a fruit scone or rice pudding in the Aga, hearty goodness to fill us up when meat was scarce and vegetables reliant on the weather and my father’s attention to the task of growing them.

I make sure the heating is on; she feels the cold and I am reminded she is six years older than me before I make any judgement. We know from our own, and our diminished family’s experience, how quickly one’s body can deteriorate however carefully we try to nurture it.

My sister Vida arrives, looking as always slim, neat and pretty, despite her age of eighty-two. Sensible shoes, and a bag containing slippers no doubt, and her endless task of crochet squares, ready to be joined into blankets or cushions for her three daughters, and their daughters, and their daughters! So, she is obviously here for the rest of the day. I feel content with that, and look forward to discussion about the placement of colours of the crochet almost as much as the patchwork of pictures we are about to rediscover.

We drink our tea, and she approves of the rock cakes, amply spread with best butter, and pronounces them delicious, although mentioning the fact that she has taken to adding chopped cherries to the mix. Just to be sure I don’t develop delusions of grandeur!

So then, we finally lift the lid on the ancient box, remarking as usual that it will surely start to fall apart before too long, and how much stronger cardboard was back in our days. The comments regarding the condition of the container have been by and large unchanged over the years, but we like to reinforce the sentiments.

Our brothers and sisters have died generally in the correct age sequence, but there was a brother, John, between we two, who jumped out of order. Typically, he was always a rebel, and not content to wait his turn; as in life, so he was in death. He was the only one of us who loved to tease and exasperate, but so charming when he wanted to be that we mostly gave in to his aggravations. We often wonder why he had this urge to irritate and cause disturbance. The few photographs of him always show a cheeky, smiling child, full of mischief, but there was more to him than that. Typical that he died sooner than we would have foreseen. I’m sure he thought he would outlive us all!

There is no order to the contents. One photo at a time, even when there is a glimpse of that one of Kathleen’s wedding when we are all around the table laden with food. It can be seen temptingly poking through, underneath several smaller ones. However, every single photo is precious and thought provoking; each one of us over the years has passed down their own personal recollection, so it depends on who you have been with previously on the adventure as to which story you call to mind.

Take this one for example. Here we have Frances, Henry, Anne, Kathleen, Brenda and Vida. Vida is but a baby, and cannot remember anything about the day, apart from what the others have told her over the years. They are playing in an old tin bath outside, splashing, partly undressed, laughing and happy. Who decided they would take a photo? It must surely have been my mother. How would we have owned such a luxury as a camera? These questions sadly cannot be answered now, but I suspect my father had been to a recent auction sale and possibly found the camera in a box of ‘bits and pieces’, as this was one of his favourite purchases. He would snap up little bargains such as a bucket or box of completely unrelated objects, and there would nearly always be one item which he could sell on at a decent profit. Considering our photographs were rarely of a uniform size or standard, I suspect he would just take one film as a test, then have it developed to be certain the camera worked. If my theory is correct there must have been more than one incident of a camera finding its way to us from the sale room, and of course I have no way of knowing if this was actually the case, but it seems reasonably feasible. The few toys we had were often only with us between sales, so why not a camera?

Apart from the wedding photographs, which were usually taken by professionals, my parents were rarely seen in any family snapshot. The same cannot be said for my older siblings. There are several images of a line of children, all properly posed in an interesting line, in age order with my oldest sister Frances at one end and usually Vida at the other. The girls were all beautiful, usually with wavy hair , and often dressed in pretty Fair Isle jumpers which my mother knitted. Later photos showed myself with my two younger brothers, Peter and Mark, but John, four years older than me, was rarely seen in any group, although I did find one with myself and Vida sitting cross legged in the grass outside our house called ‘Hilltop’.

I laugh at how often I made it to the forefront of the wedding portraits as a bridesmaid. The old saying of ‘three times a bridesmaid, never a bride’ fortunately didn’t come true in my case, as because I was the youngest girl, I always made the front row of any wedding picture. Not that the results were particularly glamorous. Our dresses would be borrowed, or home made by my mother on her old Singer sewing machine, but in the photographs the groups pass muster, as a cluster of pretty little girls must surely do.

As we look through, there is never any doubt as to whose faces we see smiling back at us. There is one interesting little selection which must have been taken on one day, small square pictures of just a single face of each of the girls, similar but completely identifiable.

Somewhat older than the bulk of the selection are a few tensely posed pictures of Edwardian ladies who appear very serious. These are of my grandmother and her sister, long skirts and hair tied up in a bun, and one of my mother aged four outside the Bell Inn in Pitstone, which was owned by her father. I love these more than any other. Proof that my mother had been a child who was very loved and cossetted by her parents.

A sad reminder of the ravages of war is a beautiful photograph of two handsome young men, cousins of my mother, taken just before they went off to the Great War, never to return. How tragic and wasteful; lives lost for no good reason.

We continue, with recollection of sadness and disbelief that this could have happened. ‘Oh, gosh, do you remember?’ I wonder how many times we have spoken those words over the years, and I wonder if we do remember, or is our perception based on recurring views, and repeated comments from the past.

Slightly separate from the random history perceived in the box, is an album. An unusual documentary of circumstances that would, and probably should, have stayed largely forgotten but for the ingenuity of a couple of newspaper reporters who heard about an unusually large family who moved en masse from Buckinghamshire to Wiltshire in 1957. The patriarch in his indomitable way had discovered an enormous house which had been built two or three hundred years before as three quarters of a square. Situated in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside it had been variously inhabited as a group of cottages, a hospital, workhouse, then finally a beautiful, reconstructed hotel, sadly left at the end of the second world war to fall into disrepair. There were massive kitchens, with an ancient Aga, and literally dozens of rooms.

My father bought it for approximately £1100 and most of his offspring moved westward to occupy its fragile beauty, converting the rooms into self-contained apartments housing their growing families. There were only five siblings unmarried at this time, while the older members of the family had by now started producing a new generation. For myself and my two younger brothers it was like a dream come true. A couple of acres of land and interesting broken outbuildings were the stuff adventures were made of, and there was even a ballroom with a stage, with a massive dining room next door housing a ‘dumb waiter’ which we could play in, at great risk to our safety!

After some years we were finally ‘discovered’ and our situation deemed unusual, even curious. Reporters and photographers descended on the tiny, difficult to reach hamlet to eke out a story of improbable domestic harmony. There were perfectly posed photographs of us in magazines, living the dream, and generally having endlessly entertaining and enjoyable lives, which I suppose we were to a point. Unfortunately, there was a double edged sword at play. Through the publicity, my father re-kindled his interest with a woman he had known many years before, and eventually the property was sold, ten years after we moved there.

We sigh, and smile, putting everything back in the box apart from the album, but I have decided that now we are only a small family of four siblings, I would like to see a more visible record of us all. I have decided that I will make a collage of the most significant photos, and place them on a wall in our house for people to see, and wonder what we were really like behind the sometimes blurred black and white images.

Another cup of tea is in order, and we sit together looking through the album, as although it is over sixty years old, these pictures are some of the most recent additions to this particular collection. After this time the married family members spread their wings to fly across the country, and those who were unmarried, soon became wives and husbands as well, to make their own photographic narratives, and forge their own lives independently.

The photographs of that time in the 1960s were large and beautifully produced, but there is a bitter trace to them now. Many more years passed before my parents reconciled, and remarried, but that is another story.