The Photograph (2009)

 

There is a colour photograph, printed on Kodak paper, taken about thirty-eight years ago, of a tallish, thin man, with a long goatee beard, holding a well wrapped infant in his arms. Although the photograph suffers a little yellowing from age, and one corner of the 6x4 print has become creased, revealing the paper beneath the photographic coating, the image nevertheless remains clear – that of a proud father with his first born child.

In the photograph I am twenty years and hold my first child of a few months. I wear a newly purchased two tone leather jacket, bought as a birthday present from the sales in a local leather store, and hold the young child firmly in my grip, tilting my daughter a little towards the camera so that her mother can take the photograph, and clearly see her puffy cheeked daughter.

It is the tail end of winter and we are all a little fresh faced from the cool of the wind. I rest against a wooden gate, a prop for the image, and behind the slightly cloudy sky reveals a pale chilled blue. We are glad that the child is well wrapped, safe from the elements, and, after the photograph is taken, the child is placed back in the buggy, strapped in for safety and comfort, the small canopy rearranged to protect the child from the chilling wind, and the three of us turn and walk back towards our newly rented council house.

Times are a little lean. I have recently accepted an appointment as a carer to eleven elderly men, at a home for the aged, and have bought a cycle to help me travel the two miles to work, twice daily, as the job entails split shifts. I spend most of my week cleaning and caring for the men whose relatives prefer the dirty work done by others, shaving and bathing the ex-husbands, fathers and grandfathers who are tucked away, out of harm’s reach, and out of sight of their children and their children’s children, because growing older is a messy business. Perhaps some of this is evident in the leanness of my face, or the trimness of the cut of the leather jacket I wear, or maybe in the smiling, yet somewhat distant eyes that look towards, and through, the camera holder.

The child’s mother had given up her job in the bakery, selling fresh yeasty bread in the mornings from the home bakery which scented Head Street with its satisfying essence, to look after the child she had borne, but, in time, would have to recommence her working life as a domestic helper, cleaning in a residence sheltering nurses and enabling them to continue to care for the sick and the injured.

It was not an easy time, and the white frame surrounding the photographic image puts a neat boundary around that image of father and daughter, slicing but a fragment from the reality of life beyond the lens, and denying the complexity of our lives lived in the 1970s. The photograph is unable to depict the smallness of the lives we lived then, unless the observant viewer can see from the size of the photograph that we were unable to purchase a larger size, to place upon our mantelpiece, to admire the captured resemblance of father and daughter.

The fact that this photograph never had a frame perhaps indicates choices we had to make, between the decorative and the functional, with the functional, inevitably, and constantly, winning out. We were a couple with a small child, living in the now, not thinking to protect this image from time’s ravages, and the future yellowing of the paper from the sun as it frequently brushed our mantelpiece, glancing through infrequently cleaned windows.

We were a young couple caught up in the living of life, unable to afford a thought for the future, wrapped in the present and struggling to have a future, any kind of future, as long as the future was there.

On days other than that depicted in the photograph I would enjoy the company of my small child, she in her buggy, and I pushing, walking behind, making sounds and noises I expected a small child to recognise or appreciate, the slight feathering of snow giving us both cause for a smile, until, out of fatherly concern, I fix the plastic protection over the front of the buggy sheltering the child from the weather, and also from the connection we had.

Alternatively, the child, now growing beyond her years in the photograph would attempt to catch snow and meld it into a snowball, failing as the loose white frozen water falls apart and onto the ground, but nevertheless laughing and clapping her mitten covered hands as she does so, with small clumps of snow relentlessly clinging onto the wool of the gloves. She slips and falls in the snow, laughing but with a slight quiver to her lip as the surprise of the fall gives her a shock. I rush out of parental concern, to see that she is fine and once again struggling to her feet and tasting snow on her face with her pink tongue, and laughing in that endearing way a very small child has, drawing you into her moment and sharing the joy and innocence of the child.

But it is another time. The photograph is an aide memoir. It brings back the child from thirty eight years in the past and delivers her to my sight, stirring my recollections, memories and emotions in a way that little else can. There is much happiness in the recalling, but a little sadness too that I am unable to reach out and touch that child, take her, once more, in my arms and pose for a photograph.

I can only look and remember, and in remembering consider what is lost from memory and what little still remains of that photograph, of my memory and of the bond we had when she was young.