Childhood


My parents kept a large iron box in which they stored all the photographs taken in their lifetimes and probably the lives of other people that they had passed along the way. My Mother had a little Brownie box camera and we all posed like stock-still puppets while she walked backwards and forwards cupping her hand over the front end of that little black box to block out the sun. We had to gaze into the sun so that the light would be in front and not in the back. So with watering eyes we smiled until just the right moment when we would be captured on paper for almost all eternity.

Wow, the miracle of modern technology... So anyway you're probably asking yourself "So what, all things being equal, all people everywhere did the exact same thing and what's so damn special about this, that I have to waste my time reading about it??"

Well, the answer therein lies in the fact that when I was a child I hated images that portrayed me. I used to wait until my parents went out of the house.. Sneaky, yes, devious, yes, because I had a plan. My parents always locked all cupboards on their departure even if it was for a short while...did they not trust their kids?? Don't know! Anyway this story continues in the strangest way imaginable. I used to break into my parents wardrobe with a knife and look in the usual spot for the iron box of photographs. Dragging the full and heavy box out the cupboard and making sure the other family members were not around, I would systematically go through thousands of old black and white pictures until I came across those that held captive my own image and destroy them........ Oh yes, a few today while I had my private moments, a few the next time my parents left the house and so on and so forth, until I was sure they were all gone.. I never revealed this act to anyone ever, until much later. Unbeknownst to me, other people had copies of the pictures and of course there were the negatives that I had forgotten about. I wonder what I would have done had I realised that I had not totally destroyed my image..

About 3 years ago, I visited my parents home and in a tender moment of reminiscing, my Mother dragged from under a stairway a big box.. Obviously , well perhaps not so obvious, my family had moved Countries three times in all those years, mmmm lets see now, that would be about 40 years had passed. So to get back to the story, I was looking at old photographs and low and behold, I found old negatives of me (that damn child didn't know about the negs, naughty, naughty girl). I was fascinated and took the photographs to be processed. You know???? the pictures were of a very ordinary, rather serious and skinny blond child. Nothing special, except for the absence of the smiles that kids so often give when they know they are being photographed. I have wondered many times "Why did I do that, why??" "What was so wrong in my life?" "Why were people not allowed to see me" "Did I start building that inevitable wall of safety way back then?" "Did I know then, that the wall would be broken down and re-built many times in my life time?" A few things have revealed themselves during visits to a psychiatrist after one disastrous marriage break up, but then that's another story..