Am I happy? was a question Maureen rarely left open long enough to respond to. As she spread out the latest batch of photographs picked up from the chemists, she was quick to divert her attention away from wading into any residual pools of sadness. Firmly reasserting that it had been such an enjoyable coach tour with her best friend Ida. Great weather in Cornwall, far better than last year. But then,the very next moment, she picked up one photo and with a pair of scissors aggressively lopped off the half blurred gentleman shown just to the right of her. Maureen was taken aback by the abruptness. But then, feelings, memories, photos themselves, always had the potential to divert ones attention.
There'd been no pause to consider whether or not to leave the gentleman in. The impulse to chop arose from the distortion in the man's face, that self-pitying beseeching look to his eyes. As if he knew a form of death voodoo was nearby, to be delivered by a pair of dinky blue handled pinking sheers, that had once come free with The People's Friend.
Having so brusquely snipped it off she picked the fragment up again. Did she know him? Was he one of their coach party? That quiet man who always sat on his own at the back of the coach or disconsolately played with his bacon at breakfast in the B&B. Tall, Brylcreem, back combed hair, walking stick seat, slightly abraded cord jacket. By the time she came back to herself, a largely fictitious narrative had been conjured out of one smudgy snippet from a photograph. Whoever he was, she felt a pang of regret. Censoring her photographs was just not the done thing.
She persisted with the musing. There was always 'the quiet single man' on coach excursions. Kept themselves to themselves, never said much, but you could usually extract from the tour rep that they were 'recently bereaved'. Hardly a wild guess, gentlemen who traveled alone on coach trips often were bereaved, or were, euphemistically speaking - 'light on their feet', sometimes both. Coach travelling being predominantly the mode for ladies of a mature age, accompanied by a female companion, also sympathetically bereaved. Single men stuck out.
Though Maureen had lost her Mother barely a year or two ago, her reasons for taking coach trip holidays had always been quite practical. When Mother had been alive, they had briefly taken her out of the narrow confines of a chronically deaf nonagenarian's world view. Her regular travel companion, Ida, was a close friend and old work colleague. It was a friendship largely forged around their shared spinsterhood and, once retired, a mutual desire to travel. They'd both worked out how to make going on holiday as a single woman work, in a world that penalised you financially for travelling alone. Travel together and share a room.
By the time your bosoms sagged and a colour rinse became essential, no one made anything of two women travelling together. It was as though society was certain that once a woman passed the menopause, the need for physical intimacy completely vanished. That all one needed from life then on, was the frisson of conspicuous pampering.
She continued rustling through the remaining photos on the low coffee table. Here was where the joy lay for her, in the composition. Contriving an artifice, a sequence of pleasant recollections, and to then make that feel casual and spontaneous. Emotionally the essence of a holiday experience was relived through the laying out, shaping, sorting and, very importantly, the labeling of her snaps. Apt ways to encapsulate in one brief sentence something perhaps not quite captured by the image. If indeed there was an image at all.
Over the years she'd become resigned to her camera's occasional malfunctioning There were venues where a small plastic point and press film camera would always take a dim view of the lack of light. Once processed and printed there would be a dark glossy rectangle with just the suggestion of a small vertical smudge centre left, that may have been Ida or herself smiling or pointing at something, also unidentifiable.
If the photo was of Maureen then the fault would obviously be Ida's, who was forever putting her short fat fingers over the lens. A pithy sentence underneath would make that abundantly clear - 'those sausage fingers are not mine!' - 'it's too close for flash Ida' - ' Ida, the camera strap, it's over the lens.' Even if it was almost a totally blank picture it would say - 'there's a large organ near me on the left hand side' - 'the flower festival in St Josephs was very colourful' - ' I had a lovely ham sandwich in the cafe here'. This was done without any sense of being archly ironic or tongue in cheek. It was simply to sketch a context into the overall visual darkness.
Most folk would have thrown these photographic failures away with a regretful sigh, but not Maureen. Everything means something, was a useful little phrase she'd picked up from the paper craft pages of a long forgotten magazine. It was shorthand for 'I don't know why this is here'. Her alignment with the spirit of wabi-sabi was completely unconscious. sticking into her albums every crashed exposure, shutter jamb, end of photo reel, and person or persons photographed only from the legs down - 'Everything looking ship shape down below' What did it matter if they were over exposed - It was a very bright delightful day.' The albums were a record of her travels, mishaps and all.
These short explanatory phrases attempted to make the calamitous nature if her photography, never exactly her fault. She frequently laced them with sarcasm about it being a reflection of her companions mood - ' It was Ida's time of the month again' - 'do put your glasses on woman' Ida was always the handy stooge. The snipped photo felt different, this continued to bemuse her, there was a reason to keep it. Somewhere in the backroom of her mind, a memory was currently peddling madly away from her.
Maureen never realised that when she proudly plonked the latest completed photo album on the knees of a family member, it produced in them an uneasy, if not sinking heart - 'my god, what appreciative response can I summon this time?' It wasn't that her photo albums were a glorious experience universally treasured. For some they were, but not quite in the way Maureen envisaged. For the regular visitor they were a too frequent and burdensome responsibility for even the most secretive of camp giggling.
A brief look around her small terraced house quickly revealed photo albums in plastic folders stuffed into every available nook and cranny. Rows and rows of them on bookshelves, packed in boxes in cupboards under stairs, large stacks left by armchairs on the lounge floor for causal perusal, dozens and dozens of them. In the kitchen and the bedroom we're other photo projects, as yet half finished. Works in progress were scattered across every available white melamine surface. For such tasks took time and consideration, with her Mother dead, the house, the space, and all the time in the world, were now her own.
She put so much into them, they became like small house extensions to her equally diminutive physical frame, gradually building up to an encyclopedic length. Her family thought her self-obsessed, teetering on the edge of narcissistic. Always ensuring it was her presence that was kept centre stage, either visually or in words. Never leaving authorship open to doubt. Maureen had turned herself singlehandedly into the curator and repository for her families history. Relishing the apocryphal tales in particular. No one else knew the extent of how embellished, and hence unreliable, these were.
Then, there was a suggestive feeling of a particular individual. One previously hung just outside conscious reach. Recollections began to bubble, then they arrived in a series of photographic flashes - there was a male tour guide.....in Penzance....flirtatious... quite amusing.. well oiled patter... flattered... felt bashful.... well he was half my age!... the delight... in masculine attention... appreciative....... touched....beyond that.....the edge of....... something soft..... tender ..mournful...... an emptiness......devoid of intimacy...... unlovable. Hold on, pull back, pull back, pull back, no no no no, this will not do, this will not happen. no wallowing Maureen! ........double warning.... exclamation marks...!!
She shook her head violently as if these thoughts and the feelings accompanying them only resided in her hair. The ground could easily have collapsed from beneath the triumph she'd made of living happily alone, and fallen into that sticky tar pit where her loneliness presided. Even as she dabbed back a trickle of tears, she was re-constructing the firm emotional staircase up and out. There was no point in dwelling now on what had not happened in the past. None whatsoever.
Composure eventually restored, she could gaze equanimous at the out of focus gentleman with a calmer kinder self regard. Progressing swiftly on to the practical issue of the photographs restoration, how should she do that? She could hardly pretend the crimped edges didn't exist by butting the two pieces back together, that would be too much like a badly concealed toupee. Eventually settling upon permitting a thin meandering river of white paper to show between the two parts.
Though this fully honoured 'the process' of its creation, something was still absent - the man's name. If she ever had known it, this refused to be unearthed from the fluster and bluster surrounding her melancholy. She wasn't venturing back into that. So she decided on this occasion to abandon her loyal allegiance to factual accuracy, and simply make one up. Drawing a dramatic arrow from outside the photo to right on the nose of the man's face, at the other end she wrote BRIAN! in blue Biro. She always loved using exclamation marks, two or more if possible, with their pert suggestion of surprise.
Her efforts concluded with the swiftly following breeze of a succinct title. Then having achieved satisfaction and a sense of closure, Maureen placed the completed album 'Penzance 1989' on the 'ready for viewing' pile. Beneath the now sensitively restored photo Maureen had written:-
'Oops!!!'
Written December 2020 by Stephen Lumb
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