Writing with Light (Photography)
Sitting the other morning having a coffee in the precincts of Bath Abbey, I watched people with small pocket cameras taking photographs of the magnificent frontage of the building.
Above the Abbey was the brilliant mid-summmer sun. It was blazing straight towards the photographers, straight into their camera lenses.
I was sitting in the shade. I wanted to race over to them and drag them into the shade because, with the sun shining into their lens they would get a dark, almost featureless Abbey and some funny splodges of unwanted light all round it; I wanted to tell to them to have another go from my shady spot. The Abbey would be bright and full of detail.
This is important: I'm referring only to simple and inexpensive pocket cameras. You might be lucky enough to have one that can compensate for sun-into-the-lens. Many are not.
Yes, you will sometimes see professionals shooting straight into the sun; they’ve made quick, manual adjustments to their professional cameras that will actually use the blast of sunlight to produce for them a stunning picture. But you can’t do that with your little compact. Either (look at the top picture) keep the sunlight behind you - that is, keep your own shadow in front of you or (look at the bottom picture) if you can’t do that, go and stand where the sun does not shine on to your camera.
The Flash Question
Still referring only to simple pocket cameras with just the one button to press: I also noticed that most people’s cameras had tiny flash units; I saw them twinkle as the button was pressed. The light from these little flash lights is not powerful enough to light-up anything more than a dozen or so paces away.
This fact was unknown by a certain lady visiting Athens.
I was standing with a group of sightseers at one of the popular viewpoints for the distant Acropolis, with the sunlit Parthenon against the skyline. I had my camera to my eye when I became aware of a tapping of the left forearm.
It turned out to be a woman standing close beside me. I greeted her, muttering something about how glorious it all was. She interrupted me.
‘Last year, sir, last year I came up here to see the Parthenon by full moon. And I took pictures. I took a whole lot of pictures. And you know what?’
I shook my head.
‘No pictures! All black!’
I was tut-tutting when she gave me an extravagant wink. ‘But I shall be up here tonight, sir -’ and she tapped the front of her little camera.
‘Flash!’ she said. She gave me a knowing smile and re-joined her friends.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Reflections
Photography being the quirky thing it is, all professionals have stories. A photographer I shall call Dave told me this one.
He was once commissioned by an international arts magazine to photograph a collection of figurines in the Arts Museum of a European city which I think should also remain anonymous. It was to be done on a day when the museum was closed to the public.
He arrived, and was shown to the room by the curator. The figurines, some six inches high, were stunningly beautiful, arranged neatly under a large glass dome-like cover. He saw immediately how he would photograph them. Flash, reflected off a white sheet. A nice, soft light.
He thanked the curator and asked him, ‘-The cover - shall I lift it off - or would you rather do that yourself?’
The curator gaped at him. ‘The cover? Oh, no! The cover must not be removed on any account. The cover must remain at all times.’
He turned and left.
It was just one of those things that the professional has to put up with. But it was a big problem. The cover was reflecting the windows and the figurines were partly obscured. Also, any gear he used in front of the glass would be reflected. And, naturally, flash, even indirect reflected flash, was out of the question.
But, somehow, he must make a roll of pictures.
There was a way.
He went out and bought a huge roll of black paper and some strong adhesive tape. He borrowed a ladder from the curator - having explained how he was solving the problem - switched on the lights and, four hours later, all windows were blacked out so that not a hint of window was visible in the glass. The figurines were laid bare. He switched off the lights. There was just enough daylight for photography filtering down from three small skylights.
Shooting would take half an hour. He'd get the paper down, set off to the airport and hope for a flight home.
He was getting out his gear when the door opened and a small man in overalls came in, carrying a workbox. He placed this on the floor next to the glass dome. Then, with Dave staring at him, unbelieving, he embraced the dome, lifted it off, placed it gently on the floor, took a feather duster from his workbox and began dusting the figurines. He looked up and gave Dave a crooked smile.
That’s professional photography for you.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Blue Blurs
High-qualty luggage with yellow-and-black gaffer tape wrapped round it says absolutely nothing about your tastes in luggage design.
But it’s jolly handy. Take the farrago in Reykjavik.
The photographer and I had just landed at Reykjavik and seen our luggage wheeled out to where several buses were standing. The person at the desk told us to join the queue beside the bus being loaded. We hoisted two each of the photographer’s cases of paraphernalia (he never let these out of his sight), went out and stood in the queue for the bright blue bus.
The loading of luggage was almost completed. The job done, the horizontal door was slammed shut and a man by the passengers’ gangway holding his clipboard began ticking off each passenger as they boarded.
When it was our turn he walked away to attend to other matters. We wondered about this but waited patiently.
Then the engine started, the door slammed, the bus moved off and we stood gazing after it.
I shot back to the desk person. ‘Our bus,’ I said. ‘It’s gone with our luggage’.
She looked over my shoulder, smiled and shook her head.
‘No, sir! You have not missed it. It is due to leave in a few minutes.’ She pointed. ‘There it is.’ And there stood a red bus, now revealed by the departure of the blue one and being loaded.
‘But - the blue one?’
‘The blue one? Oh, that is an American group on a ten-day tour round Iceland.’
Relative to Australia, Iceland is small. But when you see three weeks’ baggage vanishing into its distances it becomes vast.
At this point memory fails me. Some sort of investigation occurred, I think. The next I remember is that we were in a taxi, telling the driver to follow the route of the blue bus. He seemed delighted to obey and we shot off, eyes skinned for anything blue.
Blue is a popular colour in Iceland. Many houses have doors and woodwork picked out in blue. Its small fishing vessels pulled up along its beaches are often bright blue. I was sweating hard and sitting on the edge of my seat, gripping the back of the seat in front. Blue blurs were flashing past our windows.
We had been bounding along for some ten minutes when the image of school buildings and a splash of blue paintwork went streaking by.
‘Stop!’ I shrieked.
It was an irrational decision. For one patch of blue among the dozens already passed we could be making the search more difficult than before. He stood on the brake, stopped and reversed for a few yards and there, being unloaded in the yard, was the rear end of a blue bus. Luggage was being taken into the building. We ran through the gates and into the building and started burrowing in the pile of exceedingly heavy and colourful baggage. I had no idea that baggage could be quite so heavy and colourful.
Then ours, with its startling bands of broad yellow-and-black gaffer tape plastered all over it, shone out from all the rest. We gave hoots of delight and began dragging it all out.
We became aware of an elderly American couple, standing quite still and looking at us. We gave them a smile. They smiled back and told us to have a nice day.
Which, by then, is exactly what it was.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
R F Dagnall and Inflatable Dinghies
‘Now, watch out. That casing’s going to blow apart. OK?’ I stood clear. The youngish shirtsleeved man was holding a length of cord attached to a white, barrel-sized cylinder. He gave it a sharp tug.
There followed the sound like that of an enormous beast breaking wind, and the cylinder flew apart. From inside there appeared a swiftly-growing vertical black pillar supporting a bright red tent. This was surrounded by a black ring of inflating black rubberised canvas.
It was an inflatable liferaft for ships and aircraft and it was my first day at a new job with the RFD Company in Godalming, Surrey.
Moving to a new job was old hat. By the time I was 30 I had moved to six, so I was experienced. Each of them had been either the learn-it-in-a-day sort or requiring knowledge which, to some extent, I already possessed.
But moving to this one was different: I knew absolutely nothing about the subject. It was an entirely new field. And I had to write about it.
I had accepted the job because I was becoming bored with the current one. Although it was thirty miles away from home and meant moving house it required the writing of technical stuff about the design and maintenance of lifesaving equipment. Liferafts, lifejackets. Things that saved you from drowning. And this, I felt, would be good. I would start learning from day one and work hard at learning the lot. I was enthused. I might even have rubbed my hands.
My girlfriend and I had just married. We moved to Guildford. Much nicer than Hendon, we found. A detached house, just completed and situated at the end of a close. This, we knew, was going to be good.
I learned all that I needed to learn about the operation and plunged into the writing of maintenance manuals and booklets. Technical authors who are newcomers to a subject usually do a good job because they instinctively write from the new user’s angle. I gathered I was conforming to type and giving satisfaction. I engaged a secretary. Very efficient, she was.
And then I discovered something else.
The representative for one of the design agencies I used was keen and anxious to please. One morning we had just completed a briefing when he invited me to have lunch with him at a small restaurant in the village.
Now, this will sound ludicrous: in fifteen years of working life I had never been invited to a business lunch. This might of course have been due to bad breath or some unpleasant habit of which I was unaware. But here I was, here he was, and off we went.
It was pleasant in the little, low-lit room. Quiet and inoffensive music, a scattering of customers, brisk waiters, crisp linen. My host asked which wine I would like, red or white. I did not know. I had tasted wine now and then when pressed by those older and wiser than I, but that is all. Tentative halves of cider on holiday had been my limit. I chose red and wondered how it would taste.
I liked it.
Conversation grew more relaxed. Surroundings became evanescent. The pudding was delicious but I couldn’t remember choosing it. We ended the meal and, on the way out, I had the impression that I was not having to put any effort into either propulsion or steering. Tables simply moved apart as I approached, the carpet slid backwards at every step, the doorway to the street widened as the tide upon which I floated carried me through it. I had discovered what it is to be slightly, pleasantly, drunk.
The work continued but a few years on I found I was becoming stale. And it was probably noticeable. Something was wrong. I was using one of the knacks I had developed, the ability to write fairly clear prose. But little else. And wasn't there something better for me to do? I knew my work was suffering. I needed a new scene.
I asked for an assistant, someone who would be able to move into my chair and do the job as well as, and preferably better than, I had managed. I selected a delightful chap with a fine moustache who, comically, turned out to have been an RAF Wing Commander. From nine ranks below and for the next few months I introduced him to the products and their individual requirements, watched him carry it all with ease, and resigned.
I told a knowledgeable acquaintance in London I was available for anything that he happened to hear of.
One Saturday morning he rang.
‘I think I’ve found exactly the sort of thing you’re looking for.’
‘Wonderful! Not too far away, I hope?’
‘Well -’
‘Ah, I see. Miles away up North, I suppose?’
‘Oh no. Nothing like that.’ He left a nicely-judged pause.
‘India.’
And if you've forgotten what happened then, scroll back to March 8th, 'New Arrivals'.
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NOTE: I’m grateful to our very good family friend from Guildford days, Roger Lake, for sending me a Surrey Advertiser cutting announcing an exhibition to be held next year in Godalming Museum, presenting the story of R F Dagnall and the history of the RFD Company. It seeks contributions from all who once worked at RFD. It was this cutting that prompted me to write about my own few years with the company.
For those who won’t be able to manage Godalming, here is the gist of a cutting from the magazine Flight for November 1942. It is their obituary for Reginald Foster Dagnall. He was born in London in 1888. He developed a fascination for the design and construction of small airships. In 1920 he formed his own company, RFD Ltd, Godalming, in the design and manufacture of pneumatic dinghies and barrage balloons. He died on November 16, 1942. The company later amalgamated with the Beaufort Company and is now RFD Beaufort.
Bonfires
Bonfires have always held a fascination for me. The lighting, the re-lighting, the coaxing and stoking, the sheer excitement of being in complete control. Lovely.
We had one a couple of years ago. I was in my armchair at the time and control was not quite complete.
I was watching the one-o’clock News and eating cheese and dry biscuits. The news was tedious. Real life is so much more exciting.
Like the thin coil of black smoke rising from the top of the set. Now, that was news and reasonably exciting.
I was alone in the house. My wife was on the bus to the city to do shopping. I wrenched the mains plug from its socket and spent perhaps one minute in trying the instinctive ways of putting fires out but to little effect, abandoned them and concentrated on the now obvious solution: getting the set outside.
Smoke does so get in your eyes. Black carbon-rich smoke from fired-up plastic is a great tear-generator. But worse was the weight of this set. It was an old cathode ray tube type and, having got hold of the thing and started lifting, I knew within seconds that gravity was winning fast. I dropped it on the stone hearth, grabbed the phone and called the Fire chaps.
The smoke was now accompanied by small drips of flaming plastic; our pale beige carpet welcomed them and joined the party. As I ran outside I noticed that the bottom of one long curtain was well alight. Once outside and across the road I could see the thick column of black smoke rising vertically from the house and words like ‘demolition’ and ‘reconstruction’ floated across my vision.
The Fire Service arrived unbelievably quickly and its crew found me sitting on a neighbour’s low front-garden wall and being served sweet tea by the owner.
There was a charming interlude as the fire was being dealt with. Two ambulances drew up. The driver of the first one checked that I was unharmed, and left. But the other said, almost apologetically, that he had been on his way back to base after attending a little plane crash over the hill. He had heard the alarm and had just popped round to see if he could help.
They’re like that round here.
It was six months before we could return to the house. Rebuilding work had been done, with complete redecoration and refurnishing. With our daughter helping enormously and the whole family rallying round, the entire operation was handled brilliantly by my wife. Me, I tried to look helpful.
In the evening of the day it happened Barbara said, ‘You know what today is, don't you.'
I shook my head. Barbara usually knows these things.
'It was ten years ago today that we moved in.'
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Simple pleasures
Unless you happen to know about the Film Studios there, you’ve probably never heard of the place called Elstree.
It’s a village 15 miles or so north-west of central London. When I knew it in the 1930s it was a truly rural, countryside area, chiefly a place of narrow, twisty lanes edged by tall hedgerows. Today its lanes are still edged with high hedges and you can imagine yourself in deepest rural England. But much building of housing estates has gone on and the hedges today can hide a multitude of bricks and mortar.
Only five miles from our house in Bushey its airfield was the ideal Saturday afternoon bike-ride for a schoolfriend and me. And by ‘airfield’ I mean an actual field with one short landing strip, a well-rolled and hardened strip of level soil. Dotted about were a few sheds acting as hangars.
Within shouting distance there was another attraction, Elstree Reservoir, a wide stretch of water edged by trees and grassland. Small sailing craft and rowing dinghies were always there, in fine weather and foul, with men calling themselves ‘skippers’ and frequently proving themselves to be quite otherwise.
But the reservoir was not for us, in spite of its many attractions for small boys like the deliciously muddy banks and shallow water that made it ideal for sailing one’s model yacht. Compared with dangerous, noisy, daredevil aeroplanes that might crash at any moment, sailing dinghies were dreary and predictable. They moved slowly and went nowhere. (Twenty years later I was to discover otherwise; every year had a fortnight reserved for sailing 30ft sloops on the Norfolk Broads and teaching others to sail.)
Our viewpoint for watching the airfield activity could not have been better. Just off one of the lanes, through trees and on to a grassy space, was the wooden perimeter fence; as I remember it, low and widely-spaced posts with a single rail. We could see the entire field, sheds and all.
With a couple of slices of fruit cake and a bottle of lemonade between us we would flop down onto the grass close by the railings, and just watch. Planes many years old would be active, biplanes that had served in the years of the 1914-18 war. But newer types like the Gipsy Moth were there, too. The racing types, the trainers, all were there. Not many were actually based there; they would arrive and depart mounted on long trailers, their wings folded or removed, and towed by powerful cars.
The take-offs were not exciting. It was the landings that had the attraction and, on our arrival, the wind-sock was the first thing we looked at. There was only one runway, running roughly east-west; when the wind veered it made all the difference to the difficulty of the job. A sudden sideways gust would send these lightweight and mostly canvas-and wood aircraft staggering. We watched the pilots, mostly very efficient, coax their machines with stick and rudder until they were correctly lined-up, then gently sink them onto the strip. We hoped for the less-experienced; they achieved the most wonderfully dangerous landings, bouncing high as they hit ground and continuing to bounce as they raced nearer and nearer to the perimeter trees.
Elstree Airport, as it is now named, is today a busy recreation and training centre. There is still only the single landing strip but now it’s hard and white-lined. Look at the Google map and imagine it as it was, with us revelling in the sunshine, an excellent front-row view, a chunk of Mum’s rich currant cake and a bottle of pop.
Ah, nostalgia. What would I do without you?
(By the way, if you’re interested in the history and development of airfields round Britain have a look at Airport Information Exchange. Very helpful, they are. As their Dave Robinson told me, ‘. . . there's no greater knowledge base on UK Airfields than AiX’.)
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Night Train
You board a main line train, you sit back comfortably, it starts to move and you listen to the delightful sound that comes from somewhere under your bottom.
It’s the sound of smooth metal rolling over smooth metal, with the regular clunk as the wheels pass over each joint.
You know that within a minute or so the sound will have developed into a soft, brisk clickety-click, clickety-click, accelerating until it dissolves into a delightful and sleep-inducing lullaby.
Yes, I do know that welded rails produce neither clickety nor clunk. The story I am about to tell happened shortly after Noah did his stuff with the Flood, and they didn’t do welding then.
A colleague and I were on our way East, quite a long way East, for a fourteen-day photographic job. We had endured all the usual travelling irritations from London onwards and were at last, with a considerable amount of personal and professional baggage, boarding the night train that would carry us some 500 miles to our destination.
We had expected to get rid of the baggage in the Guard’s van but were very politely turned away. So in our small compartment we stacked it on the narrow racks above our heads and on the floor. By the time we had finished there was barely room to plant a foot.
We sank back into our seats and mopped brows.
The train began to move.
There came that lovely sound. Clunk, followed shortly afterwards by er, ty, and clunk. Slowly, the sounds came slightly more quickly. Then more quickly. We were now travelling at fully twenty miles per hour.
Five minutes later we were still doing twenty. We consulted each other on the likelihood of going a little faster at some point. But it seemed this was to be our speed for the next 499 miles. Still sweating gently from our exertions we grinned at each other and agreed that this was fate. Jack reached into a bag and produced two cans of warm beer.
It was not a good idea. It happened to be Jack’s birthday and we had already rendered ourselves fragile by unwise drinking on the air journey and at the station bar.
With the combination of our weariness and the beer starting to get familiar with the gin, etc, we found ourselves tending to giggle at the least trigger.
Then I had a brainwave. I got my small tape recorder out and found a space on the overhead rack. I pressed the button, wished Jack a happy birthday and the engaging, rhythmic Jacques Loussier Trio began their version of a Bach concerto. Jack was a great admirer of Loussier and he grinned his appreciation. We drank more beer.
As we did so the cassette battery started running out. Loussier on an inexorably dying glissando was so depressing that, with the alcoholic disturbances beginning to take over, the whole thing became funny and we started giggling. It turned into plain hysterics. We rolled, we doubled up, tears flowed copiously.
In the middle of this the compartment door slid open and we controlled ourselves as a friendly and earnest railway gentleman served us fried rice with pieces of meat on plates. These bore clear evidence of earlier repasts. The food was tepid. With this came tepid tea made with condensed milk. The man left.
Then, for no sensible reason, I told Jack that my music teacher had known Elgar.
He exploded, wiped a tear and said, ‘Oh, really? I myself knew Bach quite well.’
‘They used to go for bike rides together.’
He spilt his beer laughing. Almost but not quite yet in control he said, ‘Now let me tell you something. Stockhausen once wrote something for four groups, you see, and each group had to stand in a different corner of the room and each group played a -’
He was unable to continue. I couldn’t see him for tears.
‘Trombone?’ I suggested.
Bright pink and speechless he wagged his head. ‘- a different piece of music,’ he said, and at this point the waiter opened the door and spoke.
‘I am hoping you like your meal?’
Our mental state rendered this the funniest line ever. We howled with laughter. The poor man gaped at us, half smiling and a little frightened. The sound and sight of two middle-aged men doubled up and collapsing in spilt beer obviously left him in no doubt as to the normal behaviour of the Englishman abroad. He left.
Our speed did eventually improve and, many hours later, we arrived at our destination.
We had seriously bad headaches.
Snakes
My apologies to all who were able to see the announcement on last 'Monday'. Technical difficulties and other doubts made me decide not to start it. Further thought will be given to the idea, however.
Friends probably have the impression that my life has been filled with snakes. I have met two. I suppose there's food for thought there, somewhere.
Working once with the Australian photographer John Garrett on the very small island of La Digue in the Seychelles, I nearly stepped on a very small variety of the species.
It was early morning and we had just got up. John was ready before me and was waiting in the breakfast bar at the foot of the hill.
I was tripping lightly down the rough, narrow path feeling hungry when I spotted it. My right foot was descending and, on one leg, I froze. Its twinkling eyes gazed at me from the shadow of my erstwhile-descending foot. Somehow, I retained my balance and very, very slowly lowered my foot and touched earth as far behind the other foot as I could.
We looked at each other. The thing was utterly motionless. It's astonishing just how long snakes can remain still.
Remembering the other experience in Rangoon I knew that it’s the small ones that are often fastest and deadliest. I finally decided that it was not going to move and that if it didn’t do so before old age set in I would have to move first. I moved away backwards at little more than the speed of the average tectonic plate, watching the snake as I have seldom watched anything before. When I had backed away by some six feet I felt I was safe. I inched smoothly and daintily into the steeply downward-sloping grassy bank on my right and skirted the snake in a wide arc.
I ran down to the bar. I told the Reception boy where it was. He leaped up, gave a shout and he and three men shot out of the door, waving forked sticks.
I joined John at our table. At the noise, he said, ‘What’s all that about?’ I told him, with suitable heroics, about my phlegmatic style, the steady nerve. After breakfast we left, passing the three snake-killers who had returned and were now reading their newspapers. The boy said something and gave us a little bow. The others looked at us over their newspapers, grinning. I asked the boy if they had caught the snake.
His face cracked open into an enormous smile of big white teeth.
‘Ah, snake! Yes, sir.’
‘You got it? Killed it?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why not?’
‘No snake, sir.'
'What?'
'No snake, sir. Just skin, sir. Have a nice day, sir.’
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Immense gratification
I have never once turned head over heels. Neither have I ever swum or played football or rugger, but I have played cricket now and then on the back lawn.
In my early years my father, my big brother and everyone else who felt their mission in life was to make a man of me insisted daily that I should at least learn to swim.
Being by nature a peacemaker I would allow Dad and my older brother Arthur every Saturday morning to march me down the cinder path of the local ‘rec’, a recreation ground with swings, roundabout, see-saw and, unfortunately, an open-air swimming pool.
The limit of my partaking in this weekly ritual was to splash about at the shallow end. I think I developed a fair imitation of somebody swimming whilst not actually doing so.
On what was to be the last of these visits I took a long time to change into what was then called the ‘swimming costume’. I did not like cold water, in the early morning or at any other time. I heard Dad and Arthur give my my cubicle door a bang as they padded wetly past and that slowed me down even more.
I emerged from my cubicle and looked round to see what were the chances of being pushed in by some idiot. I stood watching Dad and Arthur swimming, racing each other. They reached the rail, spluttering and laughing and began teasing me about my apparent reluctance actually to get in the water. I tried to semaphor the message that they should hang on a bit, be patient, as I was merely thinking.
Then something gave me a shove between the shoulder blades.
Spewing heavily-chlorinated water, I found the bottom and stood up. My companions were treading water, snorting and laughing their heads off. The boy who did it was also laughing with delight, doubled-up, slapping his legs, whooping with joy. Immense gratification all round.
Well, I’ve always liked to oblige.
Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Grandpa Stead, the Brave
When you're 235 feet up a ship’s mast above a raging sea, hanging on to a lump of wood and being thrown from side to side by the heaving iron ship underneath you, I reckon you can call yourself brave.
My grandfather Charlie Stead (pronounced 'Sted') did that for a living. He was ship’s carpenter in the Royal Navy in the late 1800s. His ship was the HMS Comus, a three-masted barque, fully-armed, with coal-powered steam engine. She was commissioned for service, with 19-year-old Charlie on board, on October 23rd, 1879. He served on her for four years and for much of the time in the South China Sea.
And if some bit of rigging up one of the three masts got itself wrenched out of gear, he was the one who went up there to fix it.
I learned a little of the sort of man he was from my mother, the second of five girls in the family, whom I remember pestering for stories ‘about when you were a little girl’. One of these was about the mornings he would go into the girls’ room when they were small, load as many of them as he could manage on arms and shoulders and amid their shrieks of laughter and pretended terror go flying down the two flights of stairs with his feet seeming to slither over the edge of each stair, then into the morning room where he would dump them in a heap on to the big, plump sofa.
My own memory of him was a man in his middle fifties, a Plymouth Brother of the most exclusive strain, patrician, gentle, funny, quietly-suited, slightly portly, wearing a snow-white wing collar and tie and a Homburg, with a gold watch-chain and pince-nez.
I have those pince-nez now; one of our granddaughters used to like trying them on. I would tell her they did not fit her but she could not agree. On a top shelf in front of me I have his tattered, marbled-cover diary.
When he left the Royal Navy he was known all over Ramsgate both for the soundness of his work as a builder and decorator and for his charity of character.
In Ramsgate he would move the family from one house to another, re-fitting and decorating each one, inside and out, and then put it up for sale. The final house in Hollicondane Road he built himself and there the family grew up and lived until they were well into adulthood. Whenever I stayed with them as a 7 - 10 year-old he would take me to his workroom. It smelt of wood, paint and turps and whenever I smell those things now they remind me of his precise gilt lettering on half-finished black shop fascias leaning, drying, against the wall and smaller oak-grained panels for genteel Ramsgate front gates and on bows and sterns of ocean-going ships.
The signwriter in him could be seen in his handwriting; every letter, every quick note, was written in copperplate script. It was something that I admired. I wanted to write like that myself but I knew I never would. For as well as being a stammerer I was left-handed and no left-handed man on earth could possibly get anywhere near that beautiful right-sloping script.
One memory is of a visit he made to us. Someone suggested a trip over to the Ruislip Reservoir, a quiet place surrounded then by green pastures and reached in an hour or so on the 158 London Transport Bus. We went, and Grandpa, having selected the best of the skiffs from the little yard, helped us both on board and took charge of the oars. After pulling for some ten minutes, slowly and rhythmically, he began to recite the whole of the 23rd Psalm. I hear his voice now, quiet, as though he was thinking aloud, the words beautifully enunciated. The lake was silent; sheep grazed by the shore, and we listened.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff
they comfort me.
Within weeks of that visit he became ill and in the middle of the morning on October 26, 1936, the telegraph boy knocked on the Venetian-red front door of our new Bushey house. My mother opened it and took the little yellow envelope. The boy touched his cap and left. The telegram said, simply, ‘Father much worse. Chris.’ He died the next day, aged 76.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

