Escaping the present

On the eve of a visit to the island of Arran, I thought I'd escape not only the relentless need to think about meals (we're going to a hotel!) but also the rather hideous present, with a photo from the summer of 1948. My excuse is that the researcher who interviewed me the other day asked if I had any photos from the past. My father was a keen photographer who developed and printed all his own photos, so this was far too much of a temptation to revisit the boxes  of black and white prints that have recently crept downstairs from the loft ...

We're on the beach in Brodick;  though the outline of Goatfell in the background is very hazy I feel I could still take you to the exact spot where we were sitting. (I think the weather may have been very warm and the haze meteorological rather than photographic). My father would be 40, and I can't help noticing that his originally very dark hair is already as white as I remember it being. My mother is expecting my baby sister to be born in five months.

That pins place and time and circumstance - but what I love about this picture is the story it suggests. The first thing is the question of who is taking it, and I suspect it would have been my father's friend Sam, the only close friend of his I remember, with whom he had shared a signals truck during the war in the Western Desert. I can just remember a holiday in which he came to stay with us in our holiday rented house in Douglas Row, and the enthusiasm with which he read stories to me in his English voice. I think he must have been using my father's Leica, which would account for the watchful eye being kept on the process. 

And then there's the small me. Hilariously, I think I was being awful. Look at that face! And look at my father's right hand, firmly clamped round my right foot to anchor it in one place - I don't think either of us was at all happy. My mother, on the other hand, is managing to look relatively serene - though the expression on her face is the one she might have assumed to ask me if I'd cleaned my teeth ...

So, a glimpse into my post-war past, a time my mother always remembered as being somehow miraculous in that my father had come unscathed home from the Middle East and then escaped the buzz bombs in an airbase in Essex at the end of the war; our house hadn't been damaged by the bombing that had destroyed a whole tenement just along the road; they'd succeeded in having the baby that she'd feared the war would somehow rob her of and now another was on the way.  

And they were able to have eight whole weeks of holiday in what was always their favourite place in this country. They'd been here when they heard that Germany had invaded Belgium, they'd met here on holiday in the early 30s. And I'll be there again. Maybe I'll get back to this beach ...