World Photography Day

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Photography

Yesterday was World Photography Day, did you know?  No I didn’t either until it was posted as the new theme over on Sticky Fingers for week 71 of The Gallery.

Last week the theme was black and white and inspired by all those family photographs I decided to make a small montage of my own to celebrate World Photography Day, my family and something of the journey photography has taken through a family.  So here it is:

I think it tells something of part of the story of photography, the quality of the photographs reflecting the quality of the cameras and printing of the time, but let me tell you who everyone is.

The black and white photograph top left is my maternal Granddad, taken during the war in his uniform.  He was in Burma and never talked of it, he was a short man but stood tall and proud a poker straight back all his life.  He loved to make things out of wood, was a motorbike fan of the first degree and loved to tinker with cars.  He taught me how to swim in the sea, and how to ride a bike and passed on to me a passion for cars and justice.

Next with that cherub of a face peeking out from that white fur collar is my precious daughter, she loved that coat as much as I did, it had a matching muff and even once the weather was too warm for it she would insist on wearing it and her red wellingtons.  I can’t recall what finally became of it, probably passed on to someone at the school gate as many things were.  That photograph was taken up at Loch Melfort some 20 years ago this October, a very special place in my heart and an even more special person in my heart together in one snap.

Beside her is my mum, concentrating hard, early 80′s vintage this one.  My mum is known throughout the family for her smiles, her laugh and her countless hugs, so seeing her so serious is something of a novel pose, but that particular week it was far from unusual.  She, my father, my sister and I were taking our third canal holiday, this time my brother wasn’t with us (I have no idea where he was) and also this time it wasn’t in a canal boat.  Mum had been learning to drive throughout all our childhood years and was trying again during this period, in fact I seem to recall she finally passed her test around this time.  Anyway, my father decided that she could try to drive the boat, she drove it straight into a canal bridge!  Not hard enough to do any damage, she had seen the catastrophe coming and had tried to stop and steer away, but hard enough for to give us all a shock.  My father rather than the shout we were expecting, said “Well Ann, you better find reverse.”  She continued to be chief helm the rest of the holiday, but every time she got behind the wheel the concentration was fierce and we were always shoo’ed away with a smile as a bridge approached.  My mum taught me how to love totally and completely without condition and passed on a cooking instict that rarely fails me.

On the top right is my father with my son helping in the garden.  The funny thing when I was looking through the photographs for one of dad was that 98% of them were of him either in some official pose, sleeping or eating.  He was a busy man, a really busy man, busy all the time, he worked hard all day at home and away, all round the world.  Then worked hard all evening and weekend looking after the house and garden, being on committees and work groups, when he wasn’t working to pay the bills.  So maybe it was only when he ate, slept, or posed formally, he was still enough to catch in a photograph.  I loved him dearly, still do, still miss him and guess I always will.  We didn’t really understand each other until my late twenties I suppose, but then the way we used to be able to communicate with each other would freak my mother out.  After he had his first couple of strokes and started to turn into a terrible three-year old, she would phone me up and say something like ‘I have been trying to get your father to put his coat on for the last 15 minutes, we are going to be late for the doctors, talk to him for me please.’  She would put him on the phone I would simply say ‘Put your coat on, Dad.’  He would do it as he chuckled, we never knew if he was playing games or simply the way I said it reminded him of his mother or someone else whose request he really thought really he should comply with.  My father taught me that there is a right way and the best way and finally the wisdom to know the difference (I was maybe, okay no maybe about it, a little slow on picking up on that bit).  This photograph was taken back in the late 80′s, probable the last time my son had a trowel in his hand, he is not the most green fingered of people, but there are other things that he has in abundance which make him the unique, special and lovable person who I am proud to call my son (well most of the time) and even though he moved out – supposedly this time for the last time – not even a month ago I miss him more than I would have thought.  (btw I didn’t always dress them in red sheer coincidence.)  I don’t know if son remembers or not (I should ask him, he doesn’t read the blog), but he and my dad used to be thick as thieves with noses pressed in books or playing on the carpet floor – something that mum said he never had the time to do with the three of us – the joy of grandchildren.

Below that is a very grainy picture of my brother, taking a picture of me taking a picture of him.  Yes there are better photographs I could have chosen of him, but as the theme was World Photography Day I thought this one was apt, especially as he like me still has a passion for photography.  He is also the one who holds the majority of the family photographs, I have but a few which came from my grandma’s private things after she died.  There is a plea to him at the bottom of this post which I hope he can help me with.

The little photo in the centre is of my and my maternal grandmother the one whose vanity case with a pile of papers I was handed.  My sister and I used to spend the summer holidays with our Grandma and Granddad in Devon.  My sister, I am guessing, took this picture as there is matching one of her the other side of Grandma which I presume I took.  Two things will always remind me of Grandma; mini coopers hers was racing green and pear drops which she used to keep in a tin on the shelf of the beach hut.  We spent a lot of time at that hut in those summer days when the sun shone and the rain was so brief that the beach pebbles would dry and too hot to walk on once more within a hanful of minutes.  I remember her swimming costume so clearly, the blue washed out by countless hours of sun and countless tiny daisies.  She always made a lemon meringue pie, dressed a crab and pressed an ox tongue for when mum, dad and Big Brother arrived for the finally two weeks of the holiday, the pie and crab were for tea when they arrived.  I will always remember her fishmonger telling me that the crab that moved the quickest would be the best meat as I would edge my way out the door as he raced them along the counter toward me.  The ox tongue, which I hated then and still hate now, would have been sitting in a stone pot made for the purpose on the kitchen  worktop with a pile of weights and a tea towel over it for the week that had elapsed since it stunk the house out being boiled before being skinned and rolled by Grandma as the two of us watched on with a mixture of fascination and disgust.  She would also make Chelsea buns which were Granddad’s favourites which she would knowingly leave us too whilst still warm with ice-cream floats and then come back and say: “Sydney,” in a gently scolding tone, “your stomach has got used to all kinds of things like warm yeast, the girls have gentler stomachs and what with all that fizz as well.”  Then she would laugh and squeeze in beside the three of us with her own feast of warm and cold.  She taught me never to judge anyone, I don’t think I ever heard her say a bad word about anyone, expect that is my father after she in her later years moved in with mum and dad.  Living with her daughter again reminded her of during the war when it had just been the two of them and she struggled with the fact there was a man in the house for there shouldn’t have been.

To the left is a picture of my sister and I taken in 1968, she is in the foreground and I am the one with the white hair!  Yes it was that colour until at puberty it turned red for a while – sorry son it’s all my fault – before settling on mousey brown, my hope is that just like my Grandma my hair will go back to white in my dotage.  The photo is taken in the garden of the house we grew up in, although I can not think for even a minute what we are trying to do with the garage doors.  We were so very very lucky to have that garden, with its trees and vast areas of grass that would take my father all day to cut and us three childhoods to imagine and play in.  There was a drive that circumnavigated the house which meant we could cycle round and round and hold races on bikes and scooters and whatever with our friends.  Oh the hours we spent in its little noocks and crannies, up its trees, building snowmen, bouncing balls of walls, grazing knees, swinging so high on the vast metal swing that it felt as if we could simply fly right over the house and into the field across the road, or barring the dreaded BB from the summer-house which was for girls only!

Last picture, beneath and in the centre my two in the middle with my sister’s two either side.  The most recent of all the photographs and the clarity of colours sings forth the next generation coming to the fore ‘C’ on the left will start her nursing degree at Herriot Watt University next month ‘J’ on the right is still at school.  My two are out in the big bad world on their own.  Well no that will never be the case for I will always be here for them – and they know it – and when I am not for that day will come, but not for a long time yet I hope, I know and trust that someone else will be there to love and care for them, to dry their tears and share their joys; plus they will always have each other.

Finally although the trip round the montage is complete a plea for my BB, four people are missing that I would have liked to be there.  Nan, she was the person we knew as the fraternal grandmother, my Grandpa’s second wife, I was sure I had a picture of her taken outside her bungalow but can’t find it – she always smelt of lavender, what she didn’t know about gardening wasn’t worth knowing and she crocheted, both children had wonders created in love by her.  Grandpa, the proudest English Scot I thought I would ever know – Hubby put Scots on his census form earlier this year so maybe he has stolen that crown.  He was a Macfarlane to his marrow, he probably wore his kilt more in his lifetime than many a Scot ever did back then and maybe even more than many do now.  His kilt I say, well yes and no, for while it will always be his, my father and my brother have worn it and now the person who wears it is my son.  He wears it with just as much pride regardless of whether it is at a football stadium or for a wedding speech, Grandpa would have been so proud to know that at last the genes had returned true, a red-haired Scot through and through.  His first wife, my father’s mother is someone else I don’t have a picture of and would love to.  I never knew her although she did know me briefly before she died but in a special way she has always been with me.  When we moved to Glasgow her rocking chair found a home in my bedroom.  It had lived in her kitchen where apparently she would work and read and from which she would as my mum puts it ‘hold court from’.  When I left home it came with me, I nursed my children on that chair, much as she did my father I guess.  The last person that would complete that photo of photographs is Great Auntie Gladys.  She lived in a Victorian terraced house within the smells of the Bournville factory in Birmingham before the days of renovation.  We used to visit her on our way back home from Devon, the house she shared with Hilda May was full of wonderful old things that spell-bound me, stairs that I remember my mother complaining about and a kitchen that was really little more than a sink a pantry and a table with a couple of stools. While in the corner by the tap which just came out of the wall without a sink beneath a tub, brush and board, for they didn’t own a washing machine prefpering to wash their clothes as they always had.  I have a silver and marcasite ring that once was hers and which I still occasionally wear, not worth tuppence in monetary terms but priceless in my eyes and heart.  A couple of times I seem to recall that she came to visit us, I think dad drove down to bring her up, for I have in my head a vivid picture of her sitting in the rocking chair that once belonged to her sister and now belongs to me.

Photographs aren’t just for a day or even indeed for a lifetime but they can and always will be the stuff that records and brings back memories.

Black and White

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Photography

Two memories sprung to mind as I thought on this weeks Gallery theme, black and white.  In June 1975 as I said goodbye to primary school I, along with all my classmates, was presented with a dictionary.  For the next 8 years until I left home it lived on my ‘big girl’s’ desk which my father got me as I moved on up to the big school.  It stayed on that desk until after the birth of my son and then was moved onto the bookcase in the hall so that he, when the time came, would have easy access to its bounty.

Before that balmy June in ’75 there were two dictionaries in our childhood home, my father’s was a big tomb with a tooled green leather binding which I was constantly being sent to when I asked him how to spell a word – he couldn’t spell either.  The other belonged to my mother, it was smaller bound in brown leather I seem to recall and much more worn which didn’t strike me at the time as odd, even though she was the one who could spell, for she is a wordsmith a walking talking thesaurus.  (Despite my brother being only a year above me at the same school I don’t remember him getting one when he left the village primary but maybe he did, maybe his lay treasured yet unseen in his room where little sisters feared to go.)  Regardless now I too had the prized treasure of my own dictionary not bound in rich deep leather but in bright red card.

Something to pour long and hard over discovering new words but chiefly for trying to find out how to spell that elusive word which didn’t quite look right, or was underscored in red in work returned to me.  It is difficult to find a word you can’t spell in a dictionary which requires by the very nature of a dictoinaries dna the need to know the order of the letters in said word to find it amidst the columns of its compatriots – especially when the word you are searching for is ‘ceiling’ under ‘s’ – yes I spent a long time looking for that but must admit to never having forgotten again that ceiling starts with a ‘c’!  Mostly however it was needed for the ‘i’s’ and ‘e’s’ – the rule never works when you need it to; ‘b’s’ and ‘p’s’ – didn’t know back then I had dyslexia; and double letters in words – how many ‘c’s’ in necessary, how many ‘s’s in Mississippi; and did I mean their or there, were or where, know or now the list went on and on but you get the picture, without the need for me to continue.  Oh the countless hours I would have saved had computers and their spell  and grammer checks been around back then.

Which brings me to my other childhood memory, that of my piano teacher who I can see clearly when I close my eyes, whose voice I can hear counting out a beat to the swing of the metronome but whose name I can’t recall at all.  I swear her favourite phrase was “There is no such thing as impossible”.  Well it certainly seemed to be to me as I struggled with a piece of music until in desperation I would declare it was “impossible”.  Then she in turn would utter her degree and send her nimble fingers melodiously over the black and white keys a couple of octaves higher giving irrefutable evidence that, impossible, it most certainly wasn’t.

So I got my old dictionary from the shelf it now sits on mostly unused except for the occasional scrabble game dispute and on the once black and white page took the picture that heads this post – no such thing as impossible?  The camera never lies, or so they say but maybe in this case it does, for those words from my childhood have echoed through my life when things seemed impossible but usually turned out to require a different approach, a bit more effort or simply a helping hand.

Wren

There is a little wren in our garden.  I love wrens, they always remind me of my childhood, but you don’t get to see them very often, in fact despite being fortunate to be brought up in a house with a very big garden I don’t remember seeing wrens in it as a child.  I think actually my childhood memories of wrens have more to do with when my grandfather used to visit.

He smoked a pipe and the tobacco he used came in a cylindrical tin.  He would put a shinny farthing in an empty tobacco tin and roll it across the hallway for us to chase after, if we caught it before it fell over we got to keep the farthing.  I can’t remember or not – maybe BB can help here – whether if we didn’t catch it he rolled it again for us or we then went farthing-less, maybe we always succeeded!

40 Years Ago

I remember being woken – in what my memory says was the middle of the night – and being herded into my parents bedroom with my brother (I don’t remember my sister being there maybe my parents decided she was too young, she was only 2).  That was back before the days when people actually had televisions in their bedrooms but they had moved the television from downstairs up there.  All four of us climbed into their big bed, something that usually only happened on birthdays and we watched transfixed as the Eagle landed and after what seemed like an eternity first Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldren stepped out onto the moon.

It is probably the clearest of my early childhood memories, I was 5 at the time, I really was one of the children of the space race.  We believed that by 2000, never mind 2009 trips to the moon would be common place, that people would be living on the moon, that mars would have been visited to see for definite if that planet was the home of friendly or hostile aliens.

As I look back today the reality is completely different, it has been decades since the last one of our species stepped foot on the lunar surface.  Space travel for average individual is still the stuff of sci-fi; despite having an international space station in orbit around this blue planet colonies away from the pull of its gravity is still a long way off; and while probes have journeyed passed the moon we still haven’t.

Disasters such as Apollo 13 no doubt slowed things down, but today as I think back it seems as if we have not just slowed down but almost ground to a stop.

The events of 40 years ago pointed to a bright new future, a future of new discoveries and new frontiers, what happened?  Maybe the dreams and hopes of a 5 year old were always unrealistic after all no one can deny the fact that the space race did indeed change the world.  The technology that got us to the moon is now part of our daily lives just not in the way an excited child woken in the middle of the night envisioned.

Childhood Memories

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Books

As a child I was always an avid reader and a book was rarely if ever only read once, Enid Blyton’s stories about the Faraway Tree were amongst the most read.

Jo, Bessie and Fanny have an Enchanted Wood near their home the tree grow very thickly there and in the middle of this wood is an enormous tree; the magicial Faraway Tree.  It is the home to enchanted people such as Moonface (who has a face like a moon), Silky (who is a fairy) and the Saucepan Man (whose clothes are saucepans!), but the tree holds more surprises than the people who live in it.  This tree reaches right up into the sky and at the top there is a ladder which goes into the clouds and strange lands of witches, goblins, giants to name but a few.  The quickest way from the top to the bottom was via a giant helter-skelter down the inside of the tree.

Although these books played a big part in my childhood and my daughter read them as avidly when she was young, I rarely think about them now.  However, yesterday it all came flooding back when I spied this tree.  Now the tree is nowhere near big enough, and it isn’t in a wood, but if I had seen this as a child I know that I would have wanted to climb up it and see if there were any strange and wonderful lands at the top of it, and have a go at the helter-skelter that would have had me re-appearing down this slide.  I think Hubby was glad that I settled for just taking the picture!

Memories Old And New

Many, many years ago my sister and I used to spend the whole of the summer holidays in Budleigh Salterton with our maternal grandparents.  The sound of waves sucking the pebbles back into the sea sent always awakens my memories of those days.  The red cliffs – I never understood why people always talked about white cliffs for me cliffs at the sea were always red; my grandparents’ beach house with the old tea tin filled with pear drops up on the shelf, and the hooks which housed our damp costumes so they would be dry for next time.  We never minded that there was no sand on the beach the sea and pebbles kept us occupied for hours.  Swimming; sitting on the shore line so that the sea pulled the pebbles from underneath us and sent our legs into the air; building stone castles; seeing how long we could stand on the stones that had been made hot by the sun; running down the big banks of stones after a storm only to find that our grandparents warning of we wouldn’t be able to get back up always came true, then crawling back up on our hands and knees taking an age as the pebbles moved beneath us.  The café where on sunny days we got our ice-cream and on colder days toasted teacakes and hot chocolate, my father seemed to always have a teacake even when the sun was out.   The house they lived in was still being built first time we visited and down its steep driveway would sit my grandmothers green mini, while the garage housed whatever new car my grandfather had got this year.

A few miles down the coast over the border and into Dorset and unknown to me at the time Hubby was spending many a happy summer holiday in Lyme Regis, the beach had sand when the tide was out, but we rarely visited Lyme, for us Budleigh was home from home. 

Today is Hubby and my second wedding anniversary, Hubby has to work today but for a surprise Hubby arranged that we would visit this old haunt together and share our old memories and make some new ones.  We stayed in Lyme Regis in a hotel overlooking the beach and the Cob, and were well looked after by the staff.  I don’t really remember much about Lyme, however it is quaint with some good shops, the bank manager certainly knew where we were!  The weather the first couple of days wasn’t too great but we finally managed a walk along ‘The Cob’ and sat in the sun watching the cormorants drying on the rocks. There is also a water mill which still produces some flour, but more of that at another time. 

 

 

 

 

Of course we visited Budleigh, even drove past my grandparents old house, a shiver went down my spine when there in the drive was a mini. 

 

 

 

For me no visit back to the area would be complete without a visit to Bicton Park, which seemed far smaller than I remembered it, I was glad the train still ran as while up at the Hermitage the rain started and we got back in the relative dry for a most enjoyable ‘cream tea’.  Then it was a wander through the glass houses as Hubby agreed with me that if money ever became no object we would have a Palm House just like the one at Bicton. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Hubby the caves at Beer were a must, and just as Bicton was new for him, Beer caves were new to me.  The caves were made by the mining of the rock and it is like some grand undercoft of a cathedral.  An added bonus that we weren’t expecting was that bats hibernate in the caves and some were still some greater horseshoes bats hanging like washing on a line and dotted around the caves lesser horseshoes too.  It was wonderful photo opportunity but as taking photographs of hibernating bats is prohibited one that had to pass us by.  Our guide Heather was a fount of knowledge and tales of the people and things that went on down in the caves and also in the surrounding area.

 

 

More from our travels tomorrow.

Gingerbread Houses

Every birthday my mother produced a cake for us, not just a sponge with candles on it, but something special, the one I remember most is my gingerbread house. It had chocolate matchsticks piled up as logs outside, and making a fence around the garden, chocolate buttons for roof tiles, jelly tots decorating the windows, liquorice lining the path, parma violets and more jelly tots filling the flower borders, After Eights making the chimney and a host of other tasty treats bedecking the house and garden. It was stuck together with icing sugar and we all enjoyed pieces of gingerbread over the following week as we slowly devoured the roof, walls, doors, windows and garden. It is a birthday cake I will always remember with great fondness not only because I remember being awestruck when I saw it but also because I have now come to appreciate the amount of time and love that must have gone into making it. Whenever I see a gingerbread man I think of it and smile, down through the years I have told countless people about that house with most of them looking blankly not quite getting it – guess you had to be there, and I once even tried, and failed to do the same for my daughter.

Anyway, I was reminded of it yet again today when I read about what is happening to gingerbread houses in Sweden . All I can say is I am glad that in January in the early 70′s there was no global warming in Scotland, otherwise I would have been denied one of my most precious memories.

Caterpillers, Butterflies and Pottys

It would appear that this year there are a whole lot of butterflies about. Maybe the weather has been just right for them, but I for one can not remember seeing so many in a long time.

They have a wonderful circle of life starting as they do on the ground as caterpillars and then turning into a cocoon for their transformation for a short spell into butterflies. Thinking about them always brings a smile to my face.

My son when he was a child used to love the book, the Hungry Caterpillar, he would want it read over and over again, pre-empting the words – you know what children can be like! Anyway the fascination for this particular book was during his potty training phase and I can remember with great clarity the day he first managed to use the potty successfully for #2′s. Was I allowed to dispose of it, was I hell as like! His offering was a cocoon which would turn into a butterfly and the last place it was going was down the toilet. Try as I might I couldn’t convince him and in the end had to be very sneaky about the whole thing. How I could have done with the perfusion of butterflies that day, although that in itself might have led to more problems in the long run – having to find a butterfly every time he was successful!

A caterpillar’s life revolves around survival, avoid being eaten and in turn, do as much eating as possible. Okay so unless we travel to somewhere where there are lions or crocodiles that first part is unlikely to effect us, and we really shouldn’t do as much eating as possible for our own health’s sake – but we are still remarkably like caterpillars, getting on with life, trying to avoid the pitfalls that will slow or stop our progress, looking for the greener grass! A caterpillar’s aim is to become a cocoon, to transform into a butterfly and reach its full potential. What is our aim? What are we striving to achieve, to become, as we go about our day, our life?

For Christians the caterpillars’ transformation into a butterfly speaks of death and rebirth into a new life free from the bounds of the earth and all that holds us back, a life of beauty and sweetness. A life after death but also a life of freedom here and now, a life that means whatever the world throws at us we can rise above it, into the beauty of God’s presence.

‘For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.’

Romans 8:19-21

Fairy Bridge

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Photography

As a child I remember my mother always telling me that that the sound of a bubbling brook flowing underneath a bridge was the sound of fairies singing – it echoed round and out so that we humans could hear that they were happy. (Trolls lived under busy road bridges – I think that was one of my mothers’ way of teaching safety so we didn’t go under them.) I can remember standing for the longest time during a long hot summer in my childhood wondering what had happened to the fairies that used to live under the bridge of the stream that ran through our village, it had all but dried up and there was no fairy singing. I sometimes wonder if my fascination for angels grew out of those early years and tales of fairies, under bridges, at the bottom of the garden, fairy rings under trees – which we had a lot of in our garden – and of course proper fairy lights – cobweb and spider flight threads glistening with early morning dew.

As we grow older the world grabs hold of us and shakes out those childish thoughts and ideas. Some people manage to hold on to them and are often seen as sixpence short of a shilling, but why? What is wrong with holding onto things which make us happy – as long as we still are aware of the real world around us?

I still stand and listen ever time I see a brook and a bridge like when I saw this one – I am not listening for fairies though – I am listening for memories and they in themselves make me happy.