Like this:

“I’m glad you like the photo, Dad.  I did my best to repair it, but some of it I just couldn’t fix.  If you look closely at Sheila’s face I don’t think even a professional could have mended the photo completely.”  ”Well it looks all right to me,” Dad replied.  His voice quavered on the phone, and despite the fact that he was in his eighties, it was the first time that I’d thought of him as old.  I worried that it was a consequence of the mini-stroke that he’d just had.  He said “Mike says he had an unhappy childhood.  He doesn’t look unhappy in the photo.”   This conversation could go about a thousand ways, I thought.

On either end of the phone line we were looking at a black and white 8×10 portrait of Dad’s three children with Mum.  I remembered the excitement of it being taken; the door-to-door photographer had knocked one afternoon in early summer, and I was surprised when Mum let him in, as the only usual adult visitor was our neighbour Mrs Needleman.  I noticed that he smelled of smoke when he came in.  He set up his chest-high tripod, fixed the concertinaed camera on top of it and erected a blue sheet behind the dining-room table.  We clambered on to the table, with Sheila, the eldest, kneeling behind and between Mike and me.  ”Watch the birdie!” the photographer called, and shook a bedraggled toy parakeet beside the lens.  ”Say ‘Cheese!’”  he said, and I noticed his yellow teeth.  ”Cheese!” we responded dutifully, with in my case, no idea why, and the bulb lit up in its reflective holder, sealing our smiles.

These days I prefer to dress anonymously, but I remember the Ladybird T-shirt I was wearing that day – it had red and cream vertical stripes, and I would have worn it every day of the summer if I had been allowed, and I probably was allowed more often than not.  Sheila and Mike were in their school uniforms, Mike with a hand-knitted grey jumper over his shirt and tie.  It must have been near the end of term, the final one before I joined them at infants school.

When Dad got home we heard him shouting at Mum in the kitchen about wasting the housekeeping on a photograph.  Mum stood up for herself for once and said that it was going to be a Christmas present for her parents, and surely he couldn’t begrudge her that.  Anyway, he hadn’t been here to say no.  She’d phoned him at the office, where had he been?  He was never here.  I knew that it had been a bad idea for her to let the man in.  As usual the row ended with Mum slamming the door and running up the stairs to their bedroom.  I adopted my familiar tactic of going to play in the garden out of sight of the window, where I would be safe for a while.

Where had Dad been?  That was a good question.  Depending on the time of year he may have been climbing a mountain in Wales, skiing in Austria or being entertained by “Auntie” Vi in her bungalow opposite Epping Forest. On Sunday afternoons he would take us children to the forest “so that your Mother can get some peace,” and would leave us to play by the side of the ponds while he disappeared.  There was a particular musty smell about the edges of the pond which I can summon up now, and I have an image of the holes our wellingtons made almost knee-deep in the mud, while tiny flies flitted around in the fetid air.  I had no sense of danger, apart from the ever-present childhood fear of strangers.  We did not need to worry too much about how muddy we became, as Dad was always cheerful on his reappearance, and would sing risqué rugby songs to us on the way home.  Through some instinctive childhood knowledge I knew that it would be unwise to mention Dad’s absences to Mum when we got home.

Mike was the usual target of Dad’s rage.  Time after time I would hear Dad shout “I’ll tan your hide!” and he would lift his hand as if to inflict the punishment.  The words in the phrase didn’t make much sense to me, but the meaning was perfectly clear.  I don’t know where he got the expression from – maybe his father had said it to him, perhaps he took it from a western.  It seems a peculiar term, but at the time it was as commonly heard as “go to bed” or “time to get up.”  Even now a sharply raised hand or voice makes me flinch reflexively.  I escaped the threat by making myself invisible, trying not to gain attention.  This behaviour carried over into school, where I was known for being bright but very quiet, except for Maths.  Maths has definite answers, so it was safe to venture an answer without being shouted down for idiocy.  For Mike the consequences were much worse.  He was always visible and the cause of Dad’s wrath.  It was never clear what course of action might arouse Dad’s anger, but Mike always seemed to be able to find it.  As Mike grew older, his relationship with his father was beyond repair, and as an adult he eventually refused to have anything to do with Dad. I continued to prefer invisibility.

For years the photo had sat in its thin aluminium frame on the windowsill of our grandparents’ bedroom, and I used to sneak in to look at it every time we visited.  The room had heavy curtains and never seemed brighter than gloomy any time that I dared to enter, nor warmer than chilly from the brick-filled storage heaters.  After Gran died, I rescued the photo from the windowsill, next to the condensation-covered window.  The photographic paper had warped and was stuck to the glass in spots, but I was happy to have it at home.  I displayed it for a while on the mantle-piece, but around the time that my wife started ripping my clothes and scratching my LP’s, I hid it out of harm’s way.

Once the dust of my divorce had settled I retrieved the photo and displayed it again.  By now the edges of the paper where it was stuck to the glass had begun to yellow, and I felt that I had to try and repair it or it would be ruined.  Firstly I scanned it in its frame in case of further damage.  Then I folded out the flimsy wire clips and removed the back section.  June 1965 was written on the reverse of the photo.  It was a pleasant surprise when the sections of the photo which adhered to the glass peeled away without ripping, but even so they stuck out from the surface with jagged edges.  I scanned it at the highest resolution possible, which only revealed its many flaws.  I realized that the photographer had not done a brilliant job – it was framed so that half the picture was of the screen behind us, and it was over-exposed, bleaching our faces.  I spent many hours with Photoshop, blending in the background, sharpening the edges and trying to repair the damage the best I could.  I wasn’t completely satisfied but eventually made copies for all of us in the family.

“Hello, are you still there?” asked Dad, interrupting my thoughts.  He continued: “Mike looks happy.  He says he had an unhappy childhood, but he doesn’t look unhappy in the photo.”  Taking a deep breath, I replied “Dad, he’s happy because you weren’t there.”

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