A Bequest

Wednesday 3.2.09

In the process of looking out patchwork books to inspire me to begin work on H's Uni quilt (I have less than three years to make it so best make a start), I came across something from the past. An A4 file, faded from mid-green to light, dusty. In it, photo negatives spanning two years (1992 - 4), my monochrome period, where I took up serious black and white photography and developed my own negatives.

H and I looked through it together. She can't remember me making the images, although there are some of her as a small baby sprawled on Nick's chest, being held by our midwife, propped on the sofa. All of the usual baby images. She remarked that she was a fat baby, and so she was. Sorry to disappoint the food fascists, but she was fully breastfed for six months, so it was all our own work and no Farlies. Now, she plans to study photography at college, so she was interested in the contents of the folder, from the effects of exhausted fix (now sending the black and white prints brown) to the spare plastic wallets that hold the negs.

For me, the past rushed in. The past that I was barely aware of when it was the present. In the self portraits, I see young woman of 24 or 26 unfashionably dressed, yet with a Suede haircut as the britpop scene that I was barely aware of was in ascendancy. I wasn't living the britpop life either. No raves, no snorting coke, no intense multi-partner relationships. Unless you count wife and motherhood. You didn't then. I wasn't doing the fashionable thing by being married with children. In many ways, I'm still not. Plenty of my contemporaries from school and college are without children or just getting started with the IVF. Tick tock.

I was zigging while others were zagging. I hung out with a bunch of women from the flats down the road. Just about tolerated by them, now I look back. I had no career plan. I took odd paid jobs in the voluntary sector and volunteered endlessly. In those two years, me and my mates from the local estates raised the money to build a nursery, at at time when there was only one other in the city. It's still there, although it went into private ownership a couple of years ago. The bricks are made of left wing principles, bought with right wing grant money and are, as a matter of fact, only a cladding for the prefab underneath that was brought in by lorry and hoisted by crane to the applause of two year olds. We also built a play area, took a massive group of primary school children to the theatre, helped out at carnivals, gossiped, ate veggie food, and supported Labour (but not Blair). Then there was the photography project. We were funded for that, creche and all. It was the only reason I went at the beginning, truth be known. Then, I fell in love with the darkroom. The photos are quite good, though I say it myself, especially when I was working in the reportage style.

Seeing my own young face there gave me no jolt. I wasn't an attractive young woman so now, I don't find getting older a hardship in the way that once pretty women sometimes do. I regret though that I wasn't aware then of how handsome Nick was. A geeky style of young man who would have been fashionable if he was turning thirty in this decade. He was serious looking in aviator specs and worn tee shirts, as though he was solving a maths problem while holding his children with the tenderness now lavished on his dog. There's a good one of him just yawning, which may represent that time for him. I'll ask about that. Now, I fear for him, getting older. Although we've been through all manner of stuff between then and now, I don't know how to ask him to take better care of himself, or if I could. We were never very good at talking about the serious stuff.

They're only photos. I enjoyed looking at them, and H has promised she will develop one of the negatives of Nick. I never got that far. Perhaps I didn't think they were good enough, or perhaps he didn't want me to. I don't remember. In return, I've passed the whole folder on. By the look on H's face, it is one of the best gifts I've bestowed. To quote her facebook status, that stayed up for a heartwarming twenty minutes, 'My Mum = proper legend.'