Digging the Past
Personal Archives
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Appropriately enough I’ve been digging through some of my older blog posts. I’ve come across several that I liked, which were not strictly about media education and, I felt, deserved another airing…
This pair of linked posts below are about archives.
Blowing Dust off the Archives
Last year we called in on my mother’s sister Olive, and, amongst other gifts and far too much food, she handed over a collection of photographs — some taken on a Welsh beach (probably Llanbedrog) during a holiday our families shared c.1962. I called the Web album Olive’s Archive.
With our school archive project now underway, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about archives. The word has a slightly dusty, institutional, ring to it. You know — long rows of box files on grey metal shelves. But actually, lying inert inside those boxes can be jewels from the past that just need to be taken out, rubbed on your sleeve and used for them to return to full, vivid, breathing life. As Kazuo Ishiguro, for example, said of English Folk Music:
“If you don’t open that treasure box I think you are going to miss a certain dimension, a whole dimension of cultural life in this country so I urge you to do it”.
Back in the late 80s I was fortunate to be involved in conversations with the late educationalist Harold Rosen. One of the (many) stories he told was about his son, the poet and writer, Michael Rosen.
Michael, Harold said, often used to return home and disappear off to his room. Through closed doors could be heard gales of laughter — Michael was reading from his complete collection of old school exercise books again. Then I understood where his wonderful understanding of children’s lives was rooted; in the access to his own memory his exercise book archive provided .
Looking at the beach pictures again I remembered sitting on Llanbedrog beach on a rather grey day eating our picnic lunch. We had chicken soup in a flask. I remembered, too, the gritty sandwiches. Suddenly I remembered complaining about them and my Dad’s reply,
“It sounds like you need witches.”
Huh?
“Sandwiches with no sand.”.
A joke from nearly 50 years ago, floating up from an old photograph. A reminder too, that I have a genetic predisposition to tell bad jokes.
Looking back matters. It is much more than just nostalgia. It tells where we were, and the ways we became the people we are now.
Nowadays many of us are held in thrall by the biggest archive of them all — The Internet. Vast quantities of memorabilia are becoming available all the time.
Back in my student days I was inordinately fond of the American rock band Little Feat. Via a series of links, I came upon the following album in the Internet Archive. It was originally “released” as a bootleg LP called “Electrif Lycanthrope”. Only really cool, wealthy and lucky people owned it i.e. not me.
I was surprised by the powerful effect hearing this album had on me. Despite owning, or perhaps because I’ve owned, some of their albums on just about every musical format available since the 70s I am now listening to ghosts. Hearing this album the sheer joy their music brought me for several years returned, not as a ghost, but real and visceral. I just played it loud and danced very badly. You can too.
The Dust Thickens
My old friend Hugh read my last post and responded by sending me a couple of pictures he had been sent recently. They were taken at Keswick Hall College of Education in the hot summer of 1975. In the picture from left to right are Richard Hubbard, his then girlfriend (?), Chris Sugden, Yours Truly and Hugh Lupton. My response was a slightly horrified, “Children, just children”. In 1975 I was twenty years old — two years younger than my daughter is now. Richard’s response when I emailed the pictures on was, “What did we do with all that hair?”
I loved that hat, a proper Panama from Dunn’s. You could fold it and roll it up without any sign of the straw cracking. It formed the crowning glory of what, I recall, I termed my “tropical vicar” look. Some years after this sartorial phase, my mother recalled the evening when she and my sister had come to pick me up from the Mill House at Keswick, where Hugh and I were living at the time, to go out for a meal. As they sat waiting I came round the corner — a vision in a cream jacket, cream jeans, white tennis shoes and cravat, hair washed and flowing… and the hat. Aghast my mother exclaimed “What does he look like!” After a pause my sister responded… “Well at least he’s clean.”
I’m laughing now recalling the story and looking at the picture — though I rather doubt I would have done so at the time had I heard those comments. Which begs the question that old photos so often ask: if I could meet my younger self, what would we think of each other? When she was 10 my daughter, Kate wrote a letter to her 18-year-old self. She opened it at the given age, she found it extraordinarily dull — full of concerns and enthusiasms she no longer cared for.
If, as we are told, everything that goes on the internet is stored there somewhere, what a goldmine that will be for social historians. On the other hand it could just be extraordinarily dull…
