Snapshot: Mother in the centre of things again
When my mother, Shirley, died aged 86, we knew that she had kept a detailed page-a-day diary from the age of 16 until the day before her last journey to hospital. What we didn’t know, until we started clearing her flat in north London, was that she had carefully and meticulously kept and archived all the important (and many not so important) documents and records of her life and the times in which she lived: letters, postcards, photos, journals, newspaper articles, travel guides, maps, etc.
As well as that, she had regularly, particularly towards the end of her life, revisited her diaries, adding what she called her “rememberings” of people, places and events, such as growing up in Deptford near the London docks, the blitz, and being evacuated to a farm in Devon.
During and after the second world war, she worked in the British film industry, first as a secretary, then in continuity. In her letters, journals and diaries she wrote detailed, acerbic and often very funny descriptions and reflections on the various goings on.
This photograph is one of several we have of the various productions she worked on, along with her production diaries and notes. This one is of the whole crew and the actor Phyllis Calvert (with the scarf) who made Broken Journey – a film about survivors of an air crash in the Alps – shot at Pinewood studios and on location by Gainsborough Pictures in 1948. My mother is right in the centre, as she was throughout her life.
Paul Kleiman
Playlist: Car-journey anthem brought us together
“Oh life, it’s bigger / It’s bigger than you / And you are not me”
Everyone has one song that takes them back to a certain time and place. Losing My Religion by REM is what my family would listen to on the way to Cornwall in the summer, watching the greens of the hills roll past, looking for a glimpse of the sea so we could all shout: “I can see the sea”.
We all sang along, completely out of tune, and nothing brought us together more as a family than those car journeys on the highway to a week of heavy rain and leaking tents – music and I-spy were our only comforts.
Years later, I would occasionally hear my dad strumming out Losing My Religion on his guitar while he waited for us to go on our weekly trips to the supermarket.
I have now left home, so I sit in my university room listening to REM to help me to remember that my family is still together – maybe not in this city or, for some of us, in this world, but it is still together.
This song will always remind me of how my appreciation for music began all those years ago on those trips to Cornwall, and what a big part it has played in my life. Without loving the music, I wouldn’t have treasured my mum dancing to Arctic Monkeys when she thought no one was watching or my dad’s low hums to Editors as he sat and read his newspaper.
Although my mum isn’t here to dance any more, the music will always hold that memory for me to relive when I want. It provides a direct link to those holiday memories for all of us, to the happiness we felt at the exact time we first heard the song together. Those car journeys to Cornwall and hearing my dad playing his guitar are, for me, tied up in Losing My Religion, something I appreciate very much.
Helen Brisland
We love to eat: Grandma Maisie’s pink salad
Ingredients
2 medium grated carrots
170g grated cheddar cheese
1 chopped onion (or 4 spring onions)
2 cloves chopped garlic
Half to three-quarters of a 300g tin of sweetcorn (juice discarded)
Quarter of a 650g jar pickled beetroot, chopped into 1cm squares
4-6 tbsp of vinegar from beetroot jar – to taste
2 tbsp olive oil
Combine the ingredients according to taste – we like it garlicky and vinegary. This salad has been a family staple, and favourite, since the 1970s when my mum, Maisie, made it regularly. I think she made up the recipe.
She called it Greek salad and in the 1970s in Yorkshire, where a Vesta curry was excitingly foreign and a salad was usually a bit of sliced tomato and a few lettuce leaves, it seemed wonderfully exotic to me and my sister, Anne.
Greek salad would accompany homemade cheese pie, boiled potatoes, and sometimes appeared with half-boiled eggs on top, or even with grapes in it. Mum always wanted to go to Greece and this salad was her way of bringing a little bit of Greece into her life. She eventually got to go there in the 1980s when Dad, who, as a Royal Marine, fought and was captured there during the second world war, took her to Crete for a veterans’ reunion. It lived up to everything she had dreamed of. My kids renamed it pink salad and it is now one of our family favourites.
Gill Clayton
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