‘No, Gran. You’ll know it when you see it.’
THE DARKROOM
They crossed the border and Luke spoke of the letters Harry had sent to Anne in their early years. He wanted to help her picture things and put her story together, for him and for her, in readiness for Blackpool. He wanted to establish her good times. She didn’t ask him how he had come to read them, as if their contents must have been known to him all along. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You came to Glasgow from America about 1955. You gave up your apartment. You came back to look after the aunts in Atholl Gardens.’
‘Is that my house?’
‘Theirs. Up the West End.’
‘Gardens.’
‘That’s right.’
‘A lot of bedrooms.’
‘You were looking after them. And after a few years you joined a photography club. Do you remember?’
‘My Auntie Anna died.’
‘You joined the Glasgow Camera Club.’
‘Was it in a long street?’
‘Sauchiehall Street.’
‘I used to go there.’
‘And in 1958 the club went to Blackpool. It was a trip. You all went down on a bus.’
‘That’s where Harry lived.’
‘No. Harry lived in Manchester. You saw him give a talk at the Masonic Hall.’
‘In Blackpool?’
‘Adelaide Street. You went with your friends to hear him talk about photography.’
‘Harry spoke.’
‘Yes. He sent you a cutting about it that was in the paper. The talk was called “The Ethics of Documentary Photography”. I think that’s what it was. He wrote to you about it once you were back in Glasgow.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘My voice is different. I have an accent.’
‘He spoke about Bert Hardy and the man who took the pictures of the children on the streets in London.’
‘I know Bert Hardy.’
Bert phoned and said there’s an editor from America who wants the youth of today.
Luke mentioned more dates and details he’d gleaned from the letters. He went carefully. Some made her nod while others silenced her. Harry’s letters spoke of these men, the Young Meteors he called them, who had a new approach to capturing life in Britain. ‘And you kept going back to Blackpool. Did you have other friends there?’
‘Harry lived near there, in Manchester.’
‘Right.’
‘We’d meet at Woolworth’s. Under the clock tower.’
It was obvious from the letters that Anne had started taking pictures again when she met Harry. She was looking after the aunts, but she went to the Camera Club to escape, then Blackpool to escape, and the photographs she began taking were different from her previous ones. Luke couldn’t understand what would make someone who had taken pictures of random objects suddenly want to photograph poor people standing at factory gates. He’d seen examples of both. He remembered seeing prints when he was a child and drawing on the back of them and never knowing where they came from.
She fell in love and it changed her style. That much he’d gleaned before they set out, reading the letters, thinking her thoughts. But he didn’t know why she gave it all up again in 1963. He felt there must be an answer lurking quietly in her current confusions, but it lay deep down. When he was growing up he had questioned her about the photographs and she said it had become important to capture real lives. The conversations between them had made them close. It was like a kind of teaching. Yes, he thought: she gave him lessons in how to aim above himself. She made him unusual, and she helped him to believe that a readiness for art was equal to a capacity for life. ‘Art is a moral adventure,’ he said to her in his university days and she’d winked at him. He’d got it. He was hers. She had no suspicion that this kind of hope would lead him into the world in a different way, but she supported him when he joined up, feeling it was all part of some secret quest that both of them understood.
‘Harry liked the shipyards,’ she said as they drove along. ‘And they were lovely people.’
‘The workers?’
‘Harry and the men.’
‘And did you sell any pictures?’
‘Bert worked for the Picture Post.’
‘And Harry would help you?’
‘Harry was in the war. Same as you.’
The horizon was orange and the crowd at Blackpool was already on the promenade. He slowed the car and saw the dirty sea through the painted railings. He saw the North Pier, the new public art, the laughing men with their mates and their chips. A sudden feeling of excitement filled the air between them and Anne giggled before Luke turned right at a bookmaker’s shop. It was late afternoon and the greyness of the town was expiring before their eyes. Kids had glow-sticks and coloured windmills made of light. ‘In one hundred yards you have reached your destination,’ the sat nav said. Anne sat up and craned her neck to see above the buildings.
‘Tower,’ she said.
He parked in York Street and Sheila answered the door. ‘Ee, Mrs Blake!’ she said. ‘Lord Jesus, Mrs Blake, come in.’ The paint was peeling on the door and the hall was filled with orange light as Anne stepped inside. Luke wasn’t sure if she had any proper memory of Sheila, or her sister, who was standing in the hall with a tea towel and a glass of beer. But she certainly recognised the house and was beaming into the carpet and the stairs. It was as if they’d walked in on a family celebration. ‘You’ll see some changes, Mrs Blake,’ said Sheila. ‘Tony’s a builder. He’s renovated, God, a dozen times, since Mam died. Did you know Mam died, Mrs Blake?’
Anne just smiled. She saw the lady talking and then wiping her nose. ‘Don’t mind me, I get emotional,’ Sheila said.
‘I know your mum,’ Anne said.
‘Of course, you did. Of course. And she spoke fondly of you all her life, Mrs Blake.’ The woman looked at her sister and bit her lip and took the towel to dab her eyes. ‘Look, I’m away again!’
Anne stared contentedly down the hall, as if seeing a great deal there, her own life and the lives of other people, and when she turned to the old hall mirror she remembered Harry. She asked herself if the bed upstairs would still be the one they bought.
Luke went out to get the bags and stopped to look up. It seemed for a minute that everything around him was available, and he knew, just there, standing at the open boot of the car, that this was a night he would always remember. Years on, perhaps, when it happened he was sixty or seventy, he would remember York Street and the look of the promenade and would still see Anne in the lighted hall with those women. The house was tall and it looked like an old B&B with lace curtains. Before he went back in he thought about Harry’s letters. They were full of advice about how she could develop her photographs, about how to work with contrast not only to get at life but to enhance it. Luke saw their past with Harry’s voice in his head, and realised he could hear a conversation between them. When he brought the bags in to the hall he could see Anne standing apart from the women, contented but lost, and he returned Harry’s words to her without opening his mouth. I love you darling for your promise and the things I never had. It takes courage to be a true artist and I don’t even have enough to catch the train.
Don’t talk to me about what’s true, Harry. No more, do you hear me? No more about the truth. Life isn’t a photograph.
Isn’t it, darling?
Anne reached over and touched some scarves that were hanging on the pegs, a few coloured scarves, one of them with mittens sewn in at each end. She took off her glove and gently put her hand into one of the mittens, and smiled.
‘Will she be okay with the stairs?’ Sheila asked.
‘No bother,’ Luke said. ‘Thank you.’ She reached up and kissed his cheek, then turned to Anne.
‘I’m leaving you to get settled in,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be here, Mrs Blake, if there’s anything you need. If there’s anything at all you want you just tell me, okay?’
Anne mo
ved with surprising steadiness up the stairs and Luke came behind with the bags. At one point, on a high landing, she stopped and he waited a few steps behind. When he looked at her face he saw a trace of something young, as if the landing light knew and liked her. For a moment he imagined a young woman contemplating a fresh start, coming up the stairs with a vision of work and the man she loved. Did he ever come? Framed drawings of seabirds were hung around the landing.
It was warm inside, curiously warm, as if the heating had only recently been turned on again in the room. When they stepped inside Anne just walked to the middle and stopped. ‘Don’t put the light on,’ she said. He closed the door and stood with his back against it and watched her step around the bed and put her hands on the window. The sky outside seemed blue in the way time itself can be blue, a perfect dusk with Blackpool framed in the windows. Anne looked out as if the scene was something she had always known. She didn’t move. And after a moment she turned.
‘Is that you, Harry?’
A MIND OF WINTER
The truth would keep for another day. Anne was sitting by the window with a cup of tea in her lap and Luke was unpacking the bags and placing things in the bathroom. On the keyring there were smaller keys which Sheila said were for cupboards above the sink. She said they were full of old things belonging to Anne. ‘Mostly papers, I think. My mother warned the whole family not to interfere with Mrs Blake’s privacy.’ Luke asked her why her mother was so strict about it. ‘I’ll tell you when we sit down and have a drink, love. Your grandmother was good to us. She was good to us and we don’t forget.’
He’d never seen one before, a bedsitter. That’s what it was, a fine old bedsitter in Blackpool. The bed was under the windows and was made up with a fresh white eiderdown. There was a table with two chairs and a vase of roses Sheila had placed there. Anne bent down to sniff the flowers and she said how nice and warm it was in the room. Along the wall on the other side was a bed settee that Sheila had made up for Luke. The light was dim and perfect, Anne thought: just enough to make you concentrate on the view, because that’s what you came for. ‘I’ll tell you,’ Anne said. ‘We got a lot of things wrong but we got a lot of things right.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Because we knew what to look for, just like you.’
‘Why do you say that, Gran? I’m not a photographer and I never did any of the things you did.’
‘Yes, but you’ve got the spirit.’
‘That’s nice to hear.’
‘Some of them said there was … that’s right … justice in it.’
‘Justice? That’s a big word.’
‘That’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Making it real.’
She rocked a little in the chair. She rocked and the movement gave something to her words and to the evening light that came from the window and made a pattern on the bed.
‘Are you all right, Gran?’
‘I could just sit here.’
Luke pulled a bottle of Talisker from his rucksack and poured himself a decent measure. Sometimes whisky is just right for finding and knowing the heart. Across from the bed, two large photographs hung in simple frames. One of them had a label, saying ‘Winter, Fifth Avenue. Alfred Stieglitz’ and the second showed the old Wills cigarette factory in Glasgow, a flyover and a motorway in the foreground. He knew it from walks his gran took him on when he was a child.
Two full bottles of bleach stood in the sink. Luke didn’t know for sure that other people often stayed here, but the feeling was confirmed when he found some loose Argos bags in the wardrobe and a Zippo in a cereal bowl. It was a guesthouse and the landlady had said rooms could be scarce in Blackpool in the summer months. What Luke found harder to understand was why Sheila and her family would’ve kept faith with ‘Mrs Blake’ through twenty-odd years of her hardly ever being here. Did she phone them regularly when her mind was right? Had she come on trips without saying to anyone back home?
He bent down to see the books. Roger Mayne: London Photographs. Mark MacDonald: The American Still Life. Darkroom Handbook and Formulary by Morris Germain. On the bottom shelf, he found another series and he put down the glass. They were his university books. Here they were, all the stuff he had studied for his degree, the novels, the textbooks, set out next to each other. Good God. The Trumpet Major. Seeing them together gave solidity to some part of himself that he’d never considered defined. Here it was: personal history. He had met the world with these books, and seeing them together made him nostalgic for a person who was once keen to be transformed. Long before he became a soldier, the mystery of life was all in the mind, and now his books were physical evidence of what Anne once called ‘your itinerary’.
He looked over to where she sat. She had preserved what she could of his young mind’s entanglements. Up to a certain point she had kept pace with what he was learning and she must have known he would travel into other worlds, as she had, into fresh landscapes with their own souvenirs. She had taken steps to know him in the real time of his experience, not because she knew better but because she loved him.
‘You’re something else,’ he said. And when she turned it was as if the holiday spirit rested with her.
‘It’s a nice night. Can we go down?’
You could hear voices on the street. You could hear the crowd gathering and the car horns. He picked out one of the books and it fell open at a place held by a Glasgow train ticket. It was something he’d loved when he was eighteen, ‘The Snow Man’, a poem by Wallace Stevens that he’d never forgotten. ‘One must have a mind of winter,’ it said, ‘To regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow.’
THE ILLUMINATIONS
They weren’t in a hurry to cross the road. They let people pass in front of them, moving faster, girls with buggies, men with beer. Anne was actually laughing: she pointed to a cockles-and-mussels van as if wonders would never cease. She said the Tower Ballroom was once on fire and if you wanted to know a nice shop in Blackpool it was the Camera Corner. She moved in and out of lucidity, in and out of herself. They strolled along the dark street and she appeared completely unbothered by the darting children and the girls in cowboy hats.
‘Mods and rockers,’ she said. He didn’t know why she said it but it didn’t matter. The tower soared above them. The crowd poured into the road and the kids were excited. Luke found a bench on the promenade with a good view of the bandstand, the compère and his teeth and the microphone up to his chin. ‘Quiet, everybody!’ he shouted and you could hear the bleeps of the coin machines behind the sudden hush. ‘Welcome to the world famous Blackpool Illuminations. With one switch, ladies and gentleman, we will light the city from Squires Gate to Redbank Road, over one million individual bulbs and strips of neon!’
Luke had once seen a lit-up Ferris wheel on the cover of a book, the yellow lights revealing a face in the dark blue magic of the sky, and he thought of it again on the prom at Blackpool. He was sure that the lights were made to reveal them all. Waiting for the switch-on, the crowd grew nostalgic and swayed as one, seeming to sense an unknown social purpose in the loveliness of the spectacle. The everyday street lamps of Blackpool appeared in those final minutes to concede their own dullness in the face of what was coming, and they dimmed. ‘Have a wee drink, missus,’ said a drunk young man behind them. Anne smiled up at him and took the cup and stared at it.
‘Is this mine?’ she said.
‘Pear cider. Top gear. Get it down ye, missus.’ Anne put the cup to her mouth and the man seemed pleased and Luke just shook his head and laughed. A blonde pop singer jumped up and down on the stage and blew a kiss to the cheering crowd. Luke put his hand down to take Anne’s when the countdown got low, squeezing it gently. The crowd was familiar with this annual spectacle, the Illuminations, yet the sense of anticipation seemed palpable, as if it was happening for the very first time. The pop singer hit the button and light travelled up the tower and spread from there like a beautiful, endless halo over the whole city. Anne stood up
. The bulbs going towards the sea were perfect dots of red and they swung above the crowd. Luke’s stomach lurched to see them, the red dots going into the dark, but when he looked in other directions he only saw people laughing and hoisting their kids. Gold light was falling from all the buildings and it fell on Anne, too: he could see it reflected in the wet surface of her eyes. Her face showed not only the happy time she was having but all the happy times she had ever had. He leaned over and put his arms around her. ‘I’m so glad you came with me. So glad.’
‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’
The sky was something else. As they walked on to see the illuminations beyond the North Pier, Luke thought of how the sky had looked above Kajaki the night they finished. He’d heard the last of the grenades and the fighting was over and when he looked up he felt there was nothing but cold stars.
They went through the crowd and Anne put both hands on his arm and they walked slowly. Children darted past them and around them and the movement seemed to please her, as if this was what children should do on a night like this. They came onto the North Pier and he felt the heat of the many bulbs. They walked among the old slot machines, peep shows, one-armed bandits. How to Choose a Sweetheart. What the Butler Saw. Ghost Story. She touched each of the booths as if she knew them. And the one called The Gypsy she especially liked: a lady with a headscarf of coins dispensing predictions from behind glass.
Look at the sunset, Harry. And she says, she says … You don’t need a camera for that.
Some things you just remember.
Life isn’t a photograph, Harry.
Isn’t it, darling?
They walked further down the pier and stopped to look back at the tower and the lights. Luke could see blue reflected light on the ridges of the sea. A man was playing a tin guitar next to one of the sweet kiosks and Anne pointed to him as they passed and squeezed Luke’s arm. ‘We used to go and see all the groups that played,’ she said. ‘Those four boys with the haircuts. The drummer was nothing to look at.’
‘Did you go to the pubs?’
The Illuminations Page 21