Oh Baby Baby

I've been riveted by the baby photos that have been coming up on blip, and even more by the histories that accompany them, so naturally I've had a rummage through mine. Trouble is, although I think my parents had a Box Brownie that sometimes worked, photographs seemed mostly to be taken with or by visitors, on social occasions for which I would be obliged to wear a frock and in consequence a scowl on my face.

The best one, on the left here, was taken, I believe, by a family friend who was a professional photographer. I suppose I would be about a year old and was wearing dungarees, made, like most of my clothes, by my mother. I was her much desired and only child (my father, already in middle age, had had a son many years earlier.) She was intensely proud of my blonde hair, brown eyes and sunny disposition - ' you were a perfect baby',  but my hair like my character darkened with age.

Top right is my christening day. Odd, because neither of my parents was a believer or attended church and they had only married, in a register office, after being together for ten years. But they were keen to make use of the tiny ancient church of Partrishow a few miles away from our small farmhouse in the Welsh borders. So remote and hard to find, Partishow church escaped the destruction wrought by the Protestant reformers in the 16th century, and thus retains its original rood screen,  and a skeletal doom mural that presided over my baptism.
In the picture my father and mother are on the left - her trademark headscarf and cameo brooch were to become very familiar to me; on the right is the  rector, Ogwyn Davies, who my father privately referred to as the rectum, owing to the state of déshabille in which the reverend was sometimes to be found (I do not think he was a total abstainer); I am being held  here by his wife, who kept the show on the road; behind is  dear friend and neighbour Winnie, who died only a few years ago at the age of 102 (I am still in touch with her family). The photograph was taken by my father's very old friend, my godfather, who was also the grandfather of Saffi.

Below is a photo of me with my father in the fields near our home. He's wearing his usual attire of felt hat (he went bald at an early age and never went out with his head uncovered), shabby old clothes held together with a Swiss cow bell collar, and wooden sabots (clogs).  My mother told me it didn't matter because he always looked and sounded like a gentleman.