Jacqueline: Photo

When I remember things from years ago, it starts as a snapshot in my mind that seems to come from nowhere, although I expect there's always a trigger.  It must be the same for everyone, memories starting like that I mean.  I wonder if it's true that as you age - I mean get really old - you take more pleasure in those memories, and just by switching on a sort of slide show in your head, you sit and smile at the outline of that memory, not quite remembering what lay behind those images? I quite like that idea - that one day I will see my life from a safe distance as a series of images on shiny Kodak paper.

You see!  There's a trigger....  I have an actual snapshot in mind now, and somewhere in this world, the actual photograph may still exist, though I think it unlikely.  My mother (having once taken to building a bonfire from the hundreds of photographs she'd amassed) is unlikely to have saved it.  Why should she?  I do like to think, though, of her looking at it for one last time before watching it curl in the heat, then turn to ash.  Anyone glancing at that photo would have seen a little girl, with a camera to her eye, standing alone in the middle of a pier.  She's expensively, but formally dressed, her coat a little old-fashioned, her beret slightly askew.  Someone of course must be taking the photograph of her, and naturally it's Mama, probably pretending that we're enjoying ourselves, because the little girl is me.  Perhaps she is enjoying herself, at least at that moment, but I am not, even though we're seeing a lot of new places in England, where I have never been before.  I should be happy with our daily visual feast of buildings, sea, and people, but the search for my errant father is relentless, and we chase from place to place following the smallest clue to his whereabouts.  Why she should believe that he's on a pier in Brighton is for her to know and me to only guess at.

I, of course, think I see him everywhere.  Mama tells me frequently that I look like him, and when she says this she looks angry.  I look for him because I want to see him.  I never have.  But most of all, I want her to be happy like she is sometimes at home in Dijon when she has a bottle of wine in front of her, and the sun in shining, and the chickens are clucking outside.  Consequently, I take a photograph of any male who happens to come close enough for me to see that he's tall, and dark-haired, with the same dark eyes as me.  Men like this, however, seem in short supply.  They are mostly fair, and not so tall, but occasionally I make a click of the button on the camera, and think how happy Mama will be when she sees that I've found him.