2006-02-20
Apparently Jo could be seen on television over the weekend – second row, behind the baseline at Andy Roddick’s match with the great (only)British hope for tennis. I missed it too, but where you are maybe you can get reruns…My brother sent me a package that arrived on Saturday morning. Opening it up I was surprised to find just a video tape and nothing else. To start with I thought it was probably footage of his little daughter, but that suggested a degree of twee-ness that I just wouldn’t associate with him. Apart from a couple of photos which Lynne has loyally put on the fridge with a magnet, he hasn’t imposed much about his offspring in us. We’re a matter-of-fact family.
Curiosity finally got the better of me yesterday evening and I put it in to play. Ah ha! Perhaps ten months after promising to do so he’d finally got around to making a copy of the family cine films dating from times when I was between birth and three years old. I saw this tape when I was down with them a year and a half ago and I guess it’s nice to have, even if VHS will become obsolete in the same way as, and quicker than, the medium in which they were filmed.
I watched about twenty minutes worth last night but found myself getting rather sad. Catherine commented that it was like watching a silent film about a haunted house. Images of a long-lost past, of people and places that no longer exist. More than that - nothing in the films is the same in any way. My grandfather using a handle to start his ancient car, the roads almost free of traffic, the people thinner and wearing clothes you’d never see now, the holiday camp holidays and paddling pools. No television, a bakalite radio in the background, big baby carriages, metal buckets and spades on the beach, my sister being met from a big green bus, coming home from school on her own at only six.
But what was it that was making me feel sad, I wondered? Sure there were pictures of my two grandmothers and one of my grandfathers (the other didn’t feature and died before I was two – strange to think he must have gone only a few weeks after one of the Christmas scenes) who have all been dead thirty years or more. I have fond memories of at least one of them but in no sense does seeing them move and silently talk make me grieve for them. They have just become small fragments of my childhood memories and signify nothing more than the Primary School teachers and friends.
Driving in this morning I think I distilled the feeling down into three elements, but really in a way they’re the same thing.
Firstly there’s my mother. The most striking thing to notice about the films is my mother. Catherine said ‘Grandma was quite pretty then wasn’t she?’ Maybe so – but the difference is that she was so animated. This dates from a time when she still had sight in one eye, and so is running about and responding to other people in the way that all of sighted people take for granted. Of course she is so much older and the same person is in there now, but none of it shows as expressions in her face. It is sad to see her taking so much pleasure in sight, as it is sad to think that my father stopped taking film like this (quite advance for the age) when it ceased to have any meaning to her.
And then next there is me. I don’t remember my childhood as being all that happy: my father was always difficult to live with and the onset of my mother’s blindness put more responsibility on myself and sister than would be normal at that age – especially after my brother was born. But these scenes are from a time before, when it is quite clear I was a happy little toddler (splashing in a paddling pool, crawling after a cat), before I knew what it was to worry, to fear. A lost age of innocence that none of us can preserve. It would be nice to have a small portion of that feeling back.
But then also there is the fact that it has all changed so much. I look into that house we lived in and see that it was all so primitive. Fires that had to be lit every morning, no washing machine, no telephone, no internet, bath only once a week because heating water was a problem, the simple toys at Christmas, the delight on my grandmother’s face as she unwraps a clock to go on her wall, Grandad with his slicked back hair and my father in a pullover my great Aunt has hand-knitted, sugar from the CoOp in blue bags. And although there were so many difficulties in the process of living life then, it looks as though there were fewer immediate complications - the drudgery of existence gave no room for getting embroiled in things.
But I’m not nostalgic for that. Rather I was looking at the way they lived back in 1958 and feeling sad for them that there is now so much that they never ever knew about. I know that my grandfather would have been excited by something as simple as a pocket calculator, that my grandmother unveiling her wall-clock would have been extra delighted by one that you didn’t have to set, that told you the temperature and barometric pressure, that my mother would have loved the internet back then and that my great aunt would have had cable television and would have sat and watched DVD’s.
It’s such a shame that they never had the chance to experience any of these things because they lived and died too early. But that isn’t where the sadness really lies. Because I know that back at the end of the fifties my father was proud of his cine camera, that he was at the cutting edge of technology then. I know that my grandfather was proud of his old Austin car, and maybe when they sat down and watched these films originally they looked at what they had and felt some sadness for the generation before them that grew up with horses for transport, for the generation before that probably rarely saw a still image let lone a moving one.
So the sadness is for me, for us. Because if a hundred years ago was primitive for my family of nearly fifty years ago, then today will be horribly primitive fifty years in the future. I’m sad that there is so much wonder up ahead that I will never know about too.