The way we were

Been thinking a bit about history and the past today.  No particular reason, although it got a bit focussed when I started to go through some boxes that are part of my Mum's legacy - nothing valuable or exciting, but lots of old and not so old photos.  Some of the people are with us now, some of them are long gone, some I don't even recognise and some I must scan and label just in case I am the only person left alive who would recognise them.  There are photos of my Grandfather, who was really my step-grandfather, he died in 1963 and I barely remember him - my Great Grandmother who died not long after that.  The only known picture of my real maternal Grandfather, who abandoned his wife and children in 1930.  Great Uncle Jack and Great Auntie Minnie - looking as though they had stepped out of an Ealing Comedy film.

But some of the people are there in many guises, through the years.  There are pictures of me as a baby, as a schoolkid, as a young woman, the changes over the years are startling when viewed one behind the other and a bit disturbing when I go and look in the mirror.

80 years old &still ready to party!

Generations apart

There are pictures of Mum too.  I've seen pictures of her as a child, and of course from my childhood - again, the years pass and the image changes, but the smile remains the same.  She was a gorgeous young thing, she was a gorgeous old thing too, but we see the person who is with us, rather than the person they were before.  She changes in my memory, it depends on what I am remembering - our holiday in Switzerland, when we bought rail passes and bummed around the country like gap-year students - in those memories she's sixty-something.  When I remember coming home poorly from a school trip, she's forty-something.  I don't have too many detailed memories of the early years, so I don't have any memories of her before her mid-thirties.  In my head I know she was once 25 but I don't remember that.  Pictures of her six months after I was born, with my Dad's writing on the back, telling us where they were, make me feel somehow close to both of them,

I got to thinking about the people we see around us, and the history that they have, that we don't know about.  The nurses who looked after Mum as she was dying were lovely, but all they knew was a frail lady of eighty who needed oxygen just to keep going.  They didn't know anything about the young WAAF of 1946, the stunner of the 1950s or the mother of the sixties and seventies, although they would probably have recognized the Gran of the eighties and nineties, and the Nanny of the twenty-first century.

There are nursing homes full of people that we only see as frail folk who need care.  We don't see the young brides, full of joy as they set out on life's journey, the new fathers proudly holding their children, the strong dynamic people they were before.  It's so easy to see only what you can see on front of you, not the person you have to look hard to see behind the wrinkles and grey hair.
It's also far to easy to forget that, fate willing, one day those faces will be us - you and me, dear reader, whatever the song said we hope we don't die before we get old... so there will be a time when the youngsters look at us and see creaky old bodies in need of care, whereas we'll be looking out with the eyes of the bright young things we once were...

This didn't start out as a political statement, but while I am thinking about it... all you powerful people, of all party colours, who are making cuts in care budgets right now - remember that the attitude you're demonstrating now is what you're teaching to the people who will one day be looking after you.  If you make it "all right" to neglect our parents and grandparents now, you're making it "all right" for the next generation of politicians to neglect theirs.  And that's you.  One day it will be you, looking out from the eighty-something eyes with the twenty-something mind, and you'll be on the receiving end of what you're creating now. You will reap just what you sow... 
As Mum used to say - Think on!