My family keeps photographs
My family keeps photographs.
When we fled Ash Wednesday bushfires, it was one of the only things my mother threw in the car, along with my toddler brother and one presumes her handbag. A giant tea chest size box and a small blonde boy in the back of a Citroen. It’s a strangely vivid memory from my childhood.
It occurs to me only now that the box contained hundreds of loose photographs, collected over decades and continents, evidence of momentous events and first smiles - of long forgotten summer holidays, and memorable trips.
Each time we moved or were forced to grab-what-we-could-and-go, those photos went with us. The volume of photos exploded in the 80s and 90s when film processing became relatively cheap, but random boxes brimming with unlabelled images was apparently our preferred method of storage. The box broke eventually, and was replaced by plastic tubs, and joined by photos inherited from relatives after their death. The non-labelled contents of other people’s archives melded with ours.
Most of our family photos remain in storage tubs even now. Locked away and unexamined. For some reason, very few of them ever made it into albums. A select few (mostly of my mother’s youth and socialite years) made it into a beautiful fuscia coloured album thoughtfully curated and beautifully labelled by my mother in the neatest smallest writing I had ever seen of hers. I don’t know when she made it, but suspect it was in the year before her death, before I came back to Australia to nurse her.
Recently, I’ve started the monumental task of sorting through our photos – now numbering in thousands – and working out what is there. Who is there. And some of its easy, and jolts back memories of my life, presumed missing or lost. Some is fuzzy – traces of familiar places or faces, but not names. And some is impossible. Photos of places I know my parents visited when they were first together. People who seemed cherished, loved even. People who look like other people.
All I can do is sort, and collate, and guess era based on fashion, or hair styles, or photographic paper.
What no one ever tells you about your parents’ death is this. You will not ever be able to remember all the stories they told you. If they told you at all. If they told you the whole story. You will not remember the names. You will not know to take notes because no child or adult for that matter is conscious of the fleeting time we may spend in each other’s company.
And there will be no one to ask.
Out of everything, I think this is the biggest guilt I feel. That I cannot be the storyteller I should be, that I am tasked with being, because I don’t know their stories nearly well enough.
This morning, I picked up a small handful of photos of my mother from a pile in my spare room. I chose them because the era is my favourite – 1970s photographic size and paper. Black & White and Kodachrome. Other than her face, there are no other things I am certain about in the photos. So I make up a story.
B&W photo – Sue and two other women and a blonde toddler. It’s a picnic outdoors and a day that’s colder than everyone wanted it to be. My mother looks at the camera, almost seductively (but I think that’s how she looked at everyone back then) and perhaps towards the small child. She was an older mother for her generation. Maybe she wanted a baby. Maybe she didn’t.
Standing in a field of lavender in a lavender hat. Tres chic – possibly France? Fashion says early 1970s? I just turned over the photo and realised that on the back says “print made by Kodak - Nov.72” A breakthrough!
Susan stands in a copse of trees with hands on hips in blue & white horizontal striped top. Reminds me so much of my friend Tess. Maybe they were similar personalities? Kodak tells me this is Dec. 72
Tanned woman in bikini walks on beach like Ursula Andress. Water glitters in the background with just a faint trace of mountains in the distance. A yacht is moored on the left of shot. Perhaps she swam to shore? Kodak tells me this is Aug. 73
Follow me, she says. A vixen looking over her left shoulder playfully calling to her love. Tanned skin, beautiful curves, palm trees on the beach. Somewhere in the Pacific. Kodak tells me this is Aug. 73
Today marks 17 years since her death. For all the questions never asked, and stories half forgotten. For missed birthdays, and teenage misdemeanours, I beg forgiveness.
Remembering Susan Lawrence (1943-2007)
