Picture Perfect

It's a typical photograph from just about any family album from the 1970's.

 

If taken by my Father it is likely to have remained undeveloped for a couple of years if there were a few exposures left on the roll of 35mm film. This always made for a great surprise when the pictures were eventually developed.

 

It was a long process in those days, none of this 'while you wait' printing, no presentations on a CD or just inserting a photo card into a coin or credit card operated self service machine. A loose collection of completed rolls of film would have to be either left at Boots The Chemists or sent away in a brightly coloured pre-paid stick down envelope to Bonusprint, wherever they were located.

 

The potential for this latter arrangement to result in lost or damaged films was tremendous and I expect many family albums still have blank pages from that period eagerly anticipating long overdue return of the photo's to mount on corners above the already scrawled description of what you should be looking at.

 

Father was a keen photographer and in his youth he would develop and print his own work. The resulting snaps were small and black and white but very evocative of his formative years. There are some very glam photo's of Mother in their courting days, to be expected of such a stunner and rightfully trouncing the competition to become Miss Electrolux. 

 

The chemicals and bulky equipment followed our family in successive house moves over 50 years, always being carefully secreted away in the attic spaces as though with some forlorn hope that us siblings would have a go one day. There was just too much science and time involved so we tended to leave that part of the process to the likes of Maximillian Spielmann and his contemporaries.

 

The single picture below shows me as a gawky, scrawny kid lacking confidence, with a very unfashionable hair style if it could at all be described as a style, dodgy swimming trunks and sandals and with a sticky vinyl camera case on my bare torso.

 

If not entirely clear, Yes, it is me on the right of the pair. The small child is my younger brother Mark, he must have been about 3  years old at the time which would date the picture to 1978.

 

I can confirm this because on the same family holiday I remember sitting on the steps of the caravan and listening to the Chart Countdown and 'If the Kids are United' by Sham 69 was playing.

 

The photo is now a bit jaundiced around the edges but then so am I some 35 years older. In the background is a house that was owned by my Father's cousins. The fields in between were part of the same farming estate in a beautiful part of Somerset, complete with rolling hills, woodland, a stream with fishing rights and a small encampment containing a group of squatting distant relatives (us).



 

 

It was an idyllic holiday and I remember having a complete strop with my parents when they explained that it was not really possible for me to stay on in the caravan in that grassy meadow and become a farmhand rather than return to do my O' Levels at school. I sulked for the entire journey back to Lincolnshire when it was time to pack up and go back to normality.

After about a week at home I forgot about becoming a farmer and tormented my loving parents with an announcement that I was going to join the Army.

I was, it is clear to see from the album snap , not obviously cut out for a vocation in a field, agricultural or battle.

Perhaps I was always destined to be a Chartered Surveyor....discuss.