have had my own rituals and belief system in place if I were), rather than one speaking at a point when the Christian religion is approaching extinction in my country, partly because families like mine have been not believing it for a century and more.
Chapter 7
That century is about as far as I can trace my family back. I have become, by default, our archivist. In a shallow drawer, a few yards from where I am writing, sits the entire corpus of documentation: the certificates of birth and marriage and death; the wills and grants of probate; the professional qualifications, references, and testimonials; the passports, ration cards, identity cards (and cartes d’identité ); the scrapbooks and notebooks and keepsakes. Here are the texts of patter songs my father wrote (to be performed in dinner jacket, leaning against the piano while a school or service colleague provided a languid nightclub accompaniment), his signed menus, theatre programmes and half-filled-in cricket scorecards. Here is my mother’s hostess book, her Christmas card lists and tabulations of stocks and shares. Here are the telegrams and wartime aerogrammes between them (but no letters). Here are their sons’ school reports and physical development cards, their prize-day programmes, swimming and athletics certificates—I see that in 1955 I came first in the long jump and third in the boot race, while my brother once came second in the wheelbarrow race with Dion Shirer—together with evidence of achievements long forgotten, like my certificate for Perfect Attendance during one primary-school term. Here too are Grandpa’s First World War medals—proofs of attendance in France, 1916–17, a time he would never talk about.
This shallow drawer is also big enough to contain the family’s photographic archive. Packets labelled “Us,” “The Boys,” and “Antiques” in my father’s handwriting. Here is Dad in schoolmaster’s gown and RAF uniform, black tie, hiking shorts and cricket whites, usually with cigarette in hand or pipe in mouth. Here is Mum in chic home-tailored clothes, unrevealing two-piece swimsuit, and swanky outfit for a Masonic dinner dance. Here is the French assistant who probably photographed Maxim: le chien and the later assistant who helped scatter my parents’ ashes on the west coast of France. Here are my brother and me in younger, blonder days, modelling a range of home knitwear, attended by dog, beach ball, and junior wheelbarrow; here we are athwart the same tricycle; here we are in multiple, scattershot polyphoto, and later cardboard-framed as Souvenirs of Nestlé’s Playland, Olympia 1950.
Here too is Grandpa’s photographic record, a red cloth-bound album titled “Scenes from Highways & Byways,” bought in Colwyn Bay in August 1913. It covers the period 1912 to 1917, after which, it seems, he laid down his camera. Here are Bert and his brother Percy, Bert and his fiancée Nell, then the two of them on their wedding day: 4th August 1914, the day the First World War broke out. Here, among the faded sepia prints of unidentifiable relations and chums, is a sudden defacement: the photograph of a woman in a white blouse, sitting in a deckchair, dated “Sept 1915.” Next to this date, a pencil marking—a name? a place?—has been more or less erased. The woman’s face has been venomously ripped and gouged until only her chin and her wiry, Weetabixy hair remain visible. I wonder who did that, and why, and to whom.
In my teens, I had my own photographic period, which included modest home processing: the plastic developing tank, orange darkroom light, and contact printing frame. At some point during this enthusiasm, I answered an advertisement in a magazine for an inexpensive yet magical product which promised to turn my humble black-and-white prints into rich and living colour. I can’t remember if I consulted my parents before sending away, or if I was disappointed when the promised kit turned out to consist of a