A Chip off the Old Block!

It's early summer and the garden is green and beautiful. I am not a natural gardener, despite being British. My sister is 9 years older than me so we grew up in different phases of our father's life. When my sister was in her formative years, Dad was into gardening. Liz was born in London, just after the war. Housing was in short supply in London, due to wartime bombing, so the New Towns Act was passed in 1946, to relieve the housing pressures by building new towns outside the city. The new towns were built in phases, each as an extension of an established community.  The new, planned communities represented a big step up from crowded London; they were the towns of the future!  Stevenage, the town where I grew up, was the first of the new towns. The pedestrianized shopping center was opened by Her Majesty, the Queen and the Queen Mother laid the foundation stone for the church of St Andrew and St George nearby. These are the honors of being the first!

When my parents and sister moved to the Broadwater neighborhood of Stevenage in the early 1950s, it was still a work in progress. I was born in neighboring Hitchin, because there was no hospital in Stevenage yet. My childhood home was a new, terraced house with a large garden and my parents soon set about making it beautiful. My dad built a wooden trellis for climbing roses and planted an almond tree. I remember a nesting box on the trellis, among the roses, which housed Blue Tits every year. My sister was old enough to be influenced by all this gardening activity and helped mum and dad in the garden. She has always been a keen gardener.

By the time I was about 4, my dad had discovered photography. He built a darkroom in the unused coal cellar to develop black and white pictures. There are not many photos of me as a baby but around this time, I suddenly became a frequent model. I was about 7 when dad introduced me to photography and eventually taught me to develop and print photos myself. I remember the tang of the developing chemicals and the red safety light. There was nothing more exciting than seeing those pictures swim into being, the same day they were taken! It gave photography an immediacy that I wouldn't experience again until I got my first digital camera.

I remember that many of Dad's black and white prints resided in the bottom drawer of a desk. When he and Mum split up, he moved out and the photos stayed there. When Mum went into a care home, I assume they went into the garbage. I would have loved the chance to go through them before they were binned!  When families are left to clear out a loved one's home, loose photos are often the first thing to go. Not everyone values family photos, especially if they don't know the people in them or the stories behind them. This is the "Why" behind Forever, the cloud storage company that I use and promote. Saving the memories, not the mess means that future generations will never have to wonder who the people in the pictures were and how they were related. 

There is one lost picture of me that I remember: I must have been about 4. I was wearing my sister's school hat, my teddy bear's scarf and I had just walked into the door jamb. I was bawling, crying in the dramatic way that only a young child can. Dad's first reaction was to take a picture of me before offering comfort. I think many photographers would do the same! On Father's Day, when I think of my Dad, it is always with a camera in his hand. As with many English fathers of that time, he was not a demonstrative parent but his photography has saved many memories for me as well as giving me a life-long passion.