Kaleidoscope

“We all know, with reference to our own lives, the curious ways in which truth can be not so much distorted as multi-faceted.  Give the kaleidoscope a shake and a different picture forms.  Each of us sees through a glass darkly, impeded not just by the frailties of memory but by our own convictions.”

Penelope Lively, According to Mark

The old red family album is falling to pieces - pages empty, gaps and glue marks on the thick black paper.  Prints are dispersed around the house, the museum of our lives randomly curated and re-curated on the mantelpiece like the shuffling and muddling of memories.  Objects, photographs, articles and other mementos appear, sit together for a while and then disappear as we shake the kaleidoscope and the story’s emphasis shifts.  The clock stopped some time ago at five past two, but mantelpiece-time does not stand still.  It’s all snapshots and vignettes and fragments from up and down the decades.

Something about middle age, something about the shock of sudden losses and the long process of grieving-in-advance, something about the thread of dementia that winds its way down the generations - something about all this compels me to set a narrative down, to fix the past, and the present too, before it all slips from my grasp forever, before I too forget.

But each time I shake the kaleidoscope, a different picture forms.  

This is one of those pictures.

My mother’s photographic life began in the mid-1960s, when, as a teenager, she started work as a museum photographer at the Ashmolean in Oxford.  The experience has remained very much part of her identity; she still tells stories of those days.

In 1968 she married David Carpenter.  David (himself from a family of photographers) was a photography student at the London College of Printing: he stayed on to teach there for the whole of his working life.  Through Oxford University they rented a cold, damp, thatched cottage a couple of miles off the road at Nuneham Courtenay.  They had a studio on Oxford High Street, but the tumbledown outbuildings at home made for great photography, and the two were granted permission to carry out freelance photographic work from the house.  An afternoon in that archive is like a shake of the kaleidoscope.

Caroline left the Ashmolean when I was born, and later changed career completely.  But photography remained central to her life for a long time.  My earliest memories are of the darkroom at home, all red lights, chemical smells, and magic.  While my father taught me semiotics, my mother taught me how to light a face.  it seemed to me that photography was not only embedded in the family identity, but also forever associated with that cold, damp, wonderful house on the edge of the woods.

Photography has threaded its way down the family line, and so too has Alzheimer’s Disease.  My maternal grandmother Ruby was diagnosed in the mid-80s. She came to live with us, and there were good, if sometimes difficult and chaotic times.  Joy in her last years came from singing old songs to my new brother, and from walking.

One afternoon in 1990, apparently by accident, Ruby wandered on to the railway line.  She was hit by an oncoming coal train and died in the John Radcliffe Hospital later that evening.

*

Fast-forward three decades, and both photography and dementia have continued their path down the generations.  Caroline’s older sister Pat was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease about five years ago.  Caroline, too young by far, got her own diagnosis a little while later: Posterior Cortical Atrophy variant Alzheimer’s.  Before it comes for the memory, it attacks the visual processing centres in the brain; the world becomes contorted, distorted, unrecognisable.  My mother can no longer use a camera.

*

March 2020, and in the space of two short weeks, the following happens. My father, fourteen days after routine surgery, drops dead in the street of a pulmonary embolism.  A week later, my mother’s beloved, creaky old cat joins him.  And not a week after that, on the first day of the Covid lockdown, my aunt’s dog goes too.

Pat moves in with Caroline, each sister battling her own losses and form of dementia.  The law permits us to visit and take care of them together.  They escape Covid - for now - but the isolation is pernicious.

Here they remain. It is not easy, but they are brilliant, resilient.  Old songs bring joy, and so does the garden. Dave’s ashes are there, under the standard box tree that my mother tends, scattered together with the cat’s.  Next to the shed, the dog’s grave that my brother dug by torchlight.  In the house, the old objects, prints, snaps and articles that convene and reconvene on the mantelpiece.  Shakes of the kaleidoscope.

*

And here I am, still reeling from the shock of the loss and the relentless anticipatory grief. I am glad of the consolations of photography as I muddle my way through and reflect on what it all means for me.  The very act of photography is an act of nostalgia; it has threaded its way down the generations of my family and is a homecoming of sorts.  As for the other thread - of course, I wonder whether that is coming for me too.  In response, I think, I’m drawn to the woods, to the uncanny, tangled fractals of the trees, where I can at once play with my fears and simultaneously keep them at bay.

Anticipating the losses and the forgetting to come, I photograph life in that house, in that home that we seek to keep happy for as long as we humanly can.  With my mother’s blessing and companionship, I am exploring the family archive to tell a version of her story, and with it, a part of my own.