by PN Moore
Vision
Emma photographed a little girl in a small French town and everything would change. Emma would be dead within months, and the little girl never seen again. The death of my daughter would unsettle the people of the little French town that would elevate Emma, by I believe, a process of projection into an angelic cult and the little girl into some sort of angel. They believed the little ‘ange’ etre-spirituel girl had come to take Emma away, I didn’t, I knew who took her away and she was no angel. But back then we knew nothing of any of this.
When Emma landed on the Normandy beaches did she run confidently to her future that would make her famous? A future that would make her a cult photographer across the world? No. She just ambled along at the back of the mob of students disembarking from the ferry; literally keeping her head down under a woolly hat, hoping there wouldn’t be any fuss. Losing her camera on the way over didn’t help. Yet this tall long-limbed quiet girl with shoulder length hair that always fell in her eyes, would make more money from one image than any of my family would make in a year. Of course she didn’t know that then, and even if she did, it wouldn’t have made much difference to her.
When she did go to art school she would say things like‘ There is nothing creative in the art college, anyway, its really only just copying one way or another’ These and other such artistic statements Emma would say to us, I didn’t know what she was taking about; it was all gobbledygook to me.
She saw through things like art hype and projection, which was unsettling for me, but that statement of hers would come back many times, I remember her saying things about art that she had witnessed, standing beside me gentle and quiet, blowing the fringe from her eyes. She would not be dogmatic or bitter, it was said as pure observation on her part.
When young, Emma showed no interest in art at all; in fact her reports were dreadful. But that did not bother us at all, why would it. I mean what good is art? it doesn’t give you anything to speak of, anything you can use. Art I thought, is really just like any of those extra-curricular activities one takes part in at school, such as Music and Movement. I remember that you run around the class-room to jolly music badly played by Mrs Reardon on the piano, then stretch up to the school hall ceiling pretending to be trees, dear oh dear. At school Emma could not draw, in fact she found it hard to trace. I recall her coming home in tears clutching a small portfolio of work. Two drawings stick out in my mind; a bicycle and a vase of flowers. The bicycle looked like a pair of cracked glasses or a couple of wonky wagon wheels. The vase of flowers looked like a fat woman with a ridiculous hat perched on her head, and this was the good stuff. But looking back on her ‘art’ report I just have to smile, I know Emma would have too. Not being able to draw a bicycle didn’t mean she was bad at art, it just meant she couldn’t draw a bicycle. Why on earth anybody would want to draw such a thing, or call the practice of doing so artistic, is beyond me. Since the invention of the camera, such strict visual representation has become meaningless. Technically perfect perhaps, but where’s the art? Evidently my dear, it’s elsewhere.
We did not have any real paintings at home. Kenneth had some golf pictures hung around the house. I had a picture of my old school and a small watercolour of the west of Scotland that was left to me by my Godmother. The pictures, like our house was as it should be; low key without pretension well made, but rather dull. We didn’t worry about Emma’s school art; we ‘recycled’ the lot after Emma had gone to bed.
Back then she was a quiet girl, shy, wore glasses for reading and being quite tall hid herself peeping under a her fringe. I suppose some may have seen her as ‘snobby’ but her confidence was low and really couldn’t handle the party scene. It was history that saved her at school as the other subjects were lacking, so she took a place at a local college, but things would change dramatically.
It was during Emma’s first year at college a field (literally) trip project was planned to visit the war-graves, battlefields and towns around Normandy France. This trip would combine both World wars and the D Day Landings. It was there that my daughter picked up a camera looked through the viewfinder and changed all our lives. During the trip, most of the students were taking photographs of the memorials and the gigantic war graveyards (after they had used up most of the film on each other, on the roll of film we got back had a boy setting light to his own wind). The students visited acres and acres of carefully tended grass lawns, filled with white crosses. Emma and her cohort were given St Andrew, a smallish historic town that suffered heavy losses not long after the D Day landings. We had given Emma enough money for a disposable camera to back up her research. Having mislaid her camera, and only having a very small allowance, a girl in her year lent Emma her camera. The other girls in Emma’s room had met some local boys, but being so shy my daughter declined the offer to sightsee with the others. She took herself off into the small French town with the hope of filling the project pages up with a few photographs. She was not confident; yet, having arrived at the monument for the soldiers and the civilians of the town, she had an idea. The monument itself looked like most of the others in and around that part of Normandy; a ten foot high carved local stone with the names of the dead listed in alphabetical order
This homage to the dead however, must have been given to someone with a little more imagination than the local stonemason. Beside the tall monument, large two-foot square blocks of stone had been placed in a pile, as if a builder’s truck had just dumped them there. Upon these blocks an American jeep had been placed, slightly leaning to one side, looking like it could have fallen from a plane passing overhead. Emma walked round the monument; the more she walked the more she smiled. Her photo opportunity had presented itself when a sweet little French girl came over to Emma and said hello. The girl, dressed in a short-sleeved flora dress, short white socks and sandals, climbed the blocks and sat in the jeep. She started pretending to drive, waving to Emma as she drove to her imaginary destination, calling ‘Au-revoir’. Taking out the camera Emma looked through the viewfinder and everything changed at that moment. Emma could see the smiling girl in the jeep, completely oblivious of the significance of the monument, then clicked. She moved around taking shots of the little girl from the side with the industrial death list travelling beside her. The girl stood up and pointed way into the distance while Emma clicked, prowling around like a silent predator sensing the next shot. The girl waved to imaginary friends and pretended to beep the horn, then, it was over. The girl jumped down and said goodbye to Emma with a little nod and smile, then walked back down the street to the nearby shops.
Elation, the high of the highs, a strange feeling of euphoria filled Emma she felt dizzy, a feeling I would experience much later but for a different calling. The camera felt right as she held it, ‘an extension of her’, was how she described that moment, it had all changed for Emma. Whatever happened at that moment, she had found her future-her future happiness, and vocation. She was desperate to take some more shots but seeing that she had only four more shots left, looked round for a suitable subject. Emma followed the little girl’s route back towards the shops. Just before the Patisseries and tobacconists, there stood a pretty square surrounded by low rough stone walls embedded with wild flowers. On a bench towards the back of the gardens, sat three old women dressed in widow black. Even from where Emma was standing she could see the their collective age must have been around 240. Coming closer Emma could see the deep lines that cut into their dark leather faces. Self-esteem now fully inflated, she smiled at the women, they could sense her confidence and with it, a new inner warmth and beauty. The now smiling women beckoned her over, saying sweet things to her. The women laughed and nudged each other, revealing tooth stubs and dark gums. They held her pale thin hand while stroking her cheek with the back of their rough hands saying ‘beautiful girl’.
Emma sat with them for a while, smiling at them and telling them her name and ‘English’. Softly she asked in pantry-mime, if she could take their photograph. They laughed a
gain, touching and patting their grey hair and straightening their worn black clothes, one pulling the black veil off her head, the woman in the middle putting hers on, covering the thin grey wire. Emma waited until they looked away for a moment, click. Closing in now, she filled the viewfinder with the women’s faces-click. Seeing her subjects’ hands resting on their laps, like fat swollen twigs –framed, and clicked, one shot left. The women sensing her unease, stopped smiling and asked her if she was alright. It was like falling in love, Emma told me later, overwhelming joy and sadness at the same time, as that fleeting magic would soon pass. She sat for a little longer, and then made signs that she had to go. One of the women shuffled about and pulled out a little piece of card and gave it to Emma. The women said goodbye, gently smoothing her hair and holding her hand, reluctant to let go. Each gave Emma a kiss on both cheeks, she could feel the course facial hair of the women, but was touched by the kindness. She walked back to the monument as if in a dream, numb and disconnected to the real world around her. Looking again at the jeep resting on the stone blocks, it all seemed so strange. Yet only half an hour ago she was frightened of using the camera-scared she would make a mess of things as she had with the rest of her artistic endeavours. She remembered the card and fished it from her pocket. Placing the little card on the monument next to some withered flowers; deep red roses with brown curling edges, thick thorns edging the long steams that lay dry and stark against the stone. Emma focused the camera to take in the flowers and her little present; a pale blue picture of the Virgin Mary.
‘I think we have the wrong photos’
I can remember Kenneth saying as he came into the kitchen. He had been to Sainsburys and picked up the pack of photos Emma had put in a week before. She had returned from France in a bright cheerful mood, and this of course worried us, what had she been up to?
‘The man at the shop said the photos were in special print and would cost more, but I got them anyway, Emma can pay the extra’.
Kenneth was like that, I was like that; mean, emotionally and financially. Kenneth would never get into debt, would save for everything and expected everyone one to do the same,
‘You must earn your way’ was a phrase he would often use.
To be honest, I felt the same way, respecting him for his monetary stoicism, but this time it seemed just a little hard on Emma. She got so little pocket money from us. We had her repay the money for the disposable camera she mislaid from her wages at her part-time Saturday job at John Lewis’s, where she worked in the net-curtain department.
After tea we asked if Emma would show us the prints, she looked at them briefly before putting them back in the packet, then handing them over to me with a vacant expression on her pale face. Seeing on her face what I thought was disappointment, I patted her hand and said something like;
‘It doesn’t Marker my dear, I’m no photographer either ’
She said nothing.
It shocked me that the images were so well laid out, seemed wrong somehow. I looked at each print carefully for a moment slightly stunned. Not that I had not seen such photographs before, we took the Sunday Times Magazine, and browsed the National Geographic when I have a check-up but this was quality
‘Are you sure you took these’?
Enquired Kenneth, unable to cope with the dawning reality that our Emma had something else to offer the world, other than being tall and quiet.
The little French girl perfectly framed, smiling broadly, the monument to the dead standing dark and foreboding in the background. The long thin white arm, pointing far into the distance, looking fragile in the cotton dress. The image had just the right amount of light to give an exquisite texture, of soft cotton dress against the coarse discoloured stone.
See, I have learnt all this artistic speak, but it was the images of the old women that shocked us most. The scar-like creases in their faces, smiling mouths revealing 80 years of dental neglect. The hands, so knotted and knarled like fallen wood. The women’s imbedded wedding rings, born from a forgotten time, almost hidden under arthritic joints. I sat bewildered as I worked through the images. I wanted, and had too, see the one image of the Virgin Mary again and again, yet was unsure why, but then again, I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. It as so beautiful, the relationship with the flowers resting beside it, a sort of revealed secret.
I will never ever forget or forgive myself, for saying dismissively;
‘Very nice dear, now put them away safely, you will need to take those into college on Monday.’
And that as it, not ‘wonderful dear, these are magnificent, truly stunning’-nothing. Too late now to tell her, far far too late.
Before the accident I wouldn’t have even thought why I didn’t say such things to her. Now I think of little else, I have the time to ponder why I could not open up and let my girl in, and my love out. Looking back now, I believe that I felt that if I should open the heavy wooden door protecting my emotions, I would be venerable, weak and defenceless.
I got up, carried the plates to the dishwasher, Kenneth said he as going to polish his shoes so he didn’t have to do it in the morning. But the worst part was that Emma accepted all this, knew we would not be demonstrative, could not let go of that grip that binds us. All the same I was unsettled, so much so that I could not concentrate on my gardening programme. Emma packed away the photographs, helped me clear the table and went to her room. I lay in bed that night inherently knowing nothing would ever be the same again, how could Emma take such photographs by pure instinct? It was also that night that the loud music started next door at Brenda Lovall ‘s house. I didn’t know then that there was help for those irritations in life, sometimes just a phone call to the right person could make it all disappear. It is really very easy because most people feel the same way about such things, and can keep a secret, but there can be a price. My pay-back would require me to be the ‘Lone Ranger’ for a day which I would find both scary and surprisingly stimulating.
