A Family Affair

I love looking at old photographs, I can do it for hours at a time. Look at that one above; I wonder where it is? Is that a badge that the gentleman has fastened to his suit? Are they married? They seem quite comfortable with one another but there is no physical contact. Where did he buy that tie? Where did she get her hair done? I wonder if that house is till there? I wonder if I could stand on the exact spot they occupy in this photograph? But what I really want to know, what makes me look longer, is what lies beyond that open doorway. What stories and secrets loom within that everlasting darkness?

Actually, that last bit of flowery prose would be true in any other photograph but this one is different, that guy there is my Great Grandfather, the lass in heels and shapeless blouse could be my Great Grandmother, I’m not sure. And that is all I know..

Last week Caitlin sent me, as she does every week, her Times column to illustrate. She had written about ancestry with an emphasis on the titles we give ourselves in order to display to others our ethnic identities such as the oft used AngloIrishCypriotAmericanIndian. Anyway, as I’d recently been doing a spot of excavation work around the old family plot, where our tree stands, bent but not broken; I had a box of photographs that would supply the illustration (The column and illustration are in todays Times).

My Gran died in 1981, I had been playing football with Sice on the fields off Mosslands Drive and arrived home to find the house hushed. I can’t remember being told, I do remember asking my dad how old she was during tea that night, a typically tactless act. I loved my Gran, her laugh, her bunions, the fact that her name was Renie and that she had packets and packets of Renes in the heavy drawers of the big oak sideboard which sat against one of the walls of the cramped back room of the house in Altrincham where she lived with my Grandfather, Jim. She was a large lady, warm and funny. If we asked what was for pudding at the end of a meal she would say ‘A jump at the cupboard door and a bite of the knob’. Her friends called her Keekee because that was the noise she made when she laughed. I know that she had a brother, Roland who my dad remembers visiting in his Navy uniform. We think he emigrated to New Zealand. I can still hear her voice and remember the way she used to get up from her chair, it took a few attempts. I also swear that I remember her running for a bus when we lived in Leasowe in the early seventies but my Mum doesn’t think that would have been possible, even then. ‘You can’t put your arms around a memory’ sang Johnny Thunders but a memory can wrap it’s loving arms around you and the thoughts of all my Grandparents and their houses bring me great pleasure tinged with an inevitable sadness, an intoxicating combination for a hopeless melancholic such as myself.

Thing is, she was just my Gran, not a person with hopes, fears, dreams, desires… She existed solely to supply me, my brother and sister with an endless supply of cake and sweets and comics. That’s her above, how old is she? Where is she? I’ve many photographs of her as a young woman, speeding through countryside on a bicycle, sitting on the steps of an ornate gypsy caravan and laughing with friends. Who are these people? It almost aches not to know these things. Photographs are teasing, showing you what they want you to see and no more, the rest of the world hiding behind the faded and torn white borders, out of sight, gone forever. Like a Time Machine that freezes once it arrives at it’s destination on the very day that you get your neck brace fitted; photographs can often frustrate as much as illuminate. Where is she going? Where has she been? Does she think about having children? Grandchildren?

The photographs below are of my Dad and Grandad (all these pics are of my dad’s family because they are the pictures I have to hand). My Grandfather is the dude in the trilby. My dad is the image of my son.