Fragments – An Autobiography Of Sorts.

Many months ago, after listening to a story about his grandfather he ‘d probably  heard several dozen times before,  my son asked  me to write down my memories so the stories would never be lost to him.  When I posted  the piece called  ‘Lineage‘ in my Facebook writer’s  group, there was an immediate call for me to write the rest of my story. Our family history is fragmented, the gaps unbridgeable because I  have never known the people who may  have been able to fill them in, but I have vivid memories of the places and the people of my childhood. I am,therefore, recording a series of mental snapshots that begin when I was four years old.   Selections of these will be posted here.

PHOTOGRAPH ONE

My earliest memories are snapshots. Moments of time in freeze frame; all that preceded and all that followed things outside the shot. Kept in mental albums, flicked though in 2 am silences, when sleep won’t come, opened to share with my son stories of the grandfather he loved, the grandmother he never knew and the place I still think of as home but can never return to.  I open the album –imagining a cover of cracked burgundy leather, gold-edged pages, interleaved with fine tissue paper – and the first pictures are a series of three making up a single scene.

 Birch Green, Hertfordshire, 1961

I am four years old, holding my father’s hand as we walk along an unpaved country road with high hedges on either side. He is a man of average height and build, not particularly muscular but still with the physical, strength to stack hay bales, swing a sack of corn to his shoulder and carry it down a field or spend all day digging the garden. He has a kind face, weather beaten and deeply lined even in middle age, the skin permanently tanned from working out doors in all weathers.  I was always tall for my age with wispy ash blonde hair.  I was probably wearing my favourite red shoes, my love of bright colours started early.

Our walk takes us under a railway bridge to a field where a polo match is in progress.  Dad sits me on a bench, behind me are huge greenhouses. He buys me a hotdog and goes to talk to a group of men standing close by.

I look at these pictures and I wonder – what is going on outside the shots?  As we walked along, did I look up at him; perhaps receive that warm gentle smile, one of the few ways he showed his emotions?  Did he say anything to me, while we were walking or at the field? He was always a man of few words. Not taciturn only quiet. We may well have taken that walk and returned home in silence.  But if he spoke I can hear what he would probably have said as he handed me the hotdog, “there you are, ducks.” As I said a man of few words.