Snapshot: My brother on his graduation day, 1970
This is the only graduation picture my father took of my brother Paul, on the Aberystwyth seafront in July 1970.
When Dad died last year, I inherited his collection of slides spanning the 60s and 70s. Most are of the annual family motoring holiday in Europe. I had seen them before, but this one was new to me. “17 – Paul graduated.”
I know Kodachrome was expensive those days, and you only got 36 shots on a roll. But this isn’t the last frame on the roll. It’s preceded by a scenic in Gloucestershire and succeeded by a shot in France. And Dad was a keen photographer – using an expensive rangefinder and deliberately choosing good film – not a reluctant family duty snapper. So, why just take this one shot?
It’s a strong, complex image. You know there is a story there. Whatever his subconscious reason for shooting just one frame, Dad just couldn’t help himself. The image has movement, ambiguous eye contact, beautiful colour, depth of field fall-off and even a slight wide-angle connection. Framing Paul centrally, awkwardly created tension. And Dad instinctively placed the eyeline on the horizon, the face at the sea/cliff juncture, caught exactly the three repeated sets of legs, and so on.
It’s also a very uncomfortable image. Our dad was empirical, serious, work-oriented, inflexible and never shy in showing disapproval. He was an engineer, never went to university and I think he hated the 60s. And Paul was the second-born son, destined always to live in the shadow of first-born, Peter, who went on to qualify as a successful commercial pilot. Paul’s path followed the arts, he embraced the 60s, and he studied for a degree in German. Only 20 years after the war ended, I wonder if perhaps it was “too soon”? Mum and Dad survived the war, but their memories were surely still fresh.
We visited Paul at his digs once in a tower block in Freiburg where he was spending his study year abroad. His German flatmate sitting in the corner in boxer shorts absently playing with a Luger – albeit quite innocently – probably didn’t help, and was certanly not mentioned in the meticulous journals my mum kept of the family holidays. “Paul bought us cream cakes” was her entry that day.
Jon Rolfe
Playlist: Joe was so right – ours was a long road
Up Where We Belong performed by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes
“Who knows what tomorrow brings …”
The first time I heard this song was in my then boyfriend’s room at university in 1999. It was the early days of our relationship and we had quickly discovered that we had a shared love for singing – no doubt to the dismay of other students in our hall of residence. We would play the song over and over on the CD player, learning the words off by heart and trying to perfect our duet. My boyfriend would take on the part of gritty Joe Cocker, while I’d join in as the sweet-voiced Jennifer Warnes. It was not the most fashionable song, but the melody was so uplifting and we knew the words very well by then.
After I finished at university, my boyfriend stayed on to complete his doctorate, while I began my first job 120 miles away in Cambridge. It was the start of what turned out to be a seven-year long-distance relationship. We were a couple, but the lives we were creating were becoming increasingly separate. We took it in turns to do the weekend drive to visit the other. Sundays and the inevitable journey back home would always come too soon. We spent hours on the phone each night talking until the early hours, neither of us wanting to put down the phone – reminiscing about the days when we were students and lived so close.
It wasn’t until 2009 that we finally brought our long-distance relationship to an end by moving in together into a little one-bed place in Brighton. The apartment was a stone’s throw from the pebbly beachfront on which my boyfriend would some years later propose to me. When we took to the dancefloor for our first dance on our wedding day in August 2015, it seemed fitting to have chosen the song that we knew best. As Cocker sang the lines: “the road is long, there are mountains in our way, but we climb them a step every day”, I felt my heart swell with pride. Our love had withstood so many tests and challenges to reach this point. And as my husband swirled me around the dancefloor, we sang along with as much gusto as we had in our student days all those years ago. Helena Tobin
We love to eat: Doufle – a double-layered trifle
Ingredients
Orange jelly
Jamaican ginger cake
Custard
Hundreds and thousands
Make up the jelly in the usual way. Cut the cake into cubes and add to the liquid jelly, give it a mix and put in the fridge once cool. Pour on custard once the jelly has chilled. Top with hundreds and thousands just before serving.
When my children were much younger and money was tight, I became very resourceful in using everything up and making meals with extra ingredients in some cases, and missing ingredients in others. Nothing went to waste and it was a great way to introduce my children to embracing a life that is creative, resourceful and with limited waste. I am proud to say both my offspring, now in their 20s, appreciate everything they have. When my youngest came back from university at the weekend, bringing a friend from her course, she said: “Will you make a doufle for afters?”
It brought back a flood of memories of picky eaters (one didn’t like cream, the other didn’t like fruit) so making a traditional trifle wasn’t going to please anyone, which was just as well, as I didn’t have fruit for the first layer or cream for the final layer. Necessity being the mother of invention, the doufle was born.
It’s like a trifle but instead of having three layers it has two. Made entirely of things you can have in your store cupboard without going off. One twist I remember fondly was raspberry jelly and some leftover lemon drizzle cake. Maria Kenny
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