LITMIR.BIZ

      Me and Dad, discovering Ezra the Mormon and The Major’s Candlesticks

      I snapped away and heard Lara whisper to Cello, ‘Mum’s just taken a photo of the ground.’

      If things could be saved – if they weren’t stinking of mould or half-eaten by moths – we sometimes packed whatever it was into a box and dumped it in Dad’s garage to create a whole new problem for another day, saying to ourselves, ‘Well, you never know.’

      I framed a certificate I discovered in the sealed-up cupboard halfway up the stairs that still housed Aunty Marjorie’s Sue Barton books, the paint on the cupboard doors finally cracking from top to bottom as I wrenched them fully open. The certificate was from the Ministry of Agriculture’s ‘1944 Victory Churn Contest’ and had been awarded to the ‘farmers and farm labourers of New House Farm’ for increasing the farm’s milk yield by over 10 per cent during the country’s ‘time of need’.

      I took tarnished silver spoons home to Scotland and polished them until they shone, only to let them blacken again without using them. I put the headless dressmaker’s dummy, still set to Mum’s exact measurements, to stand vigil in Dad’s spare bedroom. I gathered stacks of photographs of unnamed, unknown people and tried to persuade aunts and cousins to identify them and take them away, largely without success. Some were marked but the markings left more questions than answers; on the back of one black and white photograph of a man in a suit and spectacles and bowler hat who looked like a bank manager, written in Grandma Mary’s hand was ‘Uncle Percy; cut his throat on a park bench’, or another of a woman in a 1930s dress, written in an unknown hand: ‘My mother.’ When I asked around about ‘Uncle Percy’, no one seemed to know.

      As Mum had not liked sharing her things, she had been equally unwilling to share information. Family anecdotes were treated like state secrets and any request for details was greeted with tight lips and a Stop mithering or a What do you want to know THAT for? Telling stories was ‘gossiping’, even if the people involved had been dead for a generation – which meant stacks of photographs were left untethered from their stories.

      There was a white box of wedding photographs showing my mother and father on the day they married in 1959; my mother beautiful without make-up and in a home-made dress – a lace and duchesse satin creation that could have come from a couture house. A dress I was disappointed as a child to discover she had chopped up to make satin cot quilts for us as babies – a decision that I now see makes perfect sense. In the black and white wedding photographs my father is handsome in a bespoke suit and white carnation and, in some, with what must be a bright red ‘L for Learner’ sign pinned to his back by my mother’s brothers.

      As a child I would have revelled in the glamour of these photographs and listened rapt to the details of the day, but those details were never divulged by my mother who kept the pictures out of sight at the bottom of the wardrobe with stacks of wool and material on top. We’d get tantalizing glimpses of the white box but were strictly forbidden to ‘root’. And now it was too late. Now my mother’s memories of the day were lost for ever. My mother wasted an opportunity to talk and to share and it still makes me mad with her, even though she has been dead ten years. What was the point of having these photographs at all if they were to be abandoned to moulder out of sight?