When she was a child, my mother was acting up. My grandmother pointed to a little girl sitting passively across the room: “Why can’t you be like her?”
My mother retorted: “Nobody is paying attention to her.”
She was probably a little older than the toddler uncomfortably propped on the chair in the photograph at the top of this post. Yes, that is my mother, flanked by her brother and sister, Malcolm and Madge. I find myself looking for early evidence of the communication failures that would occur throughout their lives. I detect an uncomfortable truce.
The family lived modestly in a Greenock (Scotland) tenement with a shared toilet down the hall. A professional photographer will have made a hole in the family’s budget, and I’m wondering if the clothes were borrowed.
Look closer at the floor beneath Madge’s feet. There, for posterity, is a puddle. Yes, my mum had an accident.
I wonder if the cloth placed strategically under my mother was there to prevent damage to the chair, or if it is simply an attempt to prop her up. She does not look happy, possibly anticipating disciplinary action from her strict parents. I can imagine my grandparents, just off-camera, looking less than happy.
I think about the photographer who couldn’t fetch a mop. Was the goal to get this over with as soon as possible? I guess the show had to go on.