Benandjerrygirl's Blog

Katie-Ellen played viola for the Midlands BBC orchestra, fitting in teaching tutorials at a local prep school as and when her schedule allowed. Beautiful with oatmeal skin and a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, on days when Katie-Ellen wasn’t in BBC-black she wore vibrant purple or teal silky skirts which clung as she walked at a fair lick along the corridors.

Felix was a brass player, trumpet, sax, bugle – he could play them all. He was in great demand at the school as, unlike with a string instrument, progress was initially quick and parents didn’t need to put in ear buds to avoid the sound of cat screams that early viola playing often resembled.

The first time Felix saw Katie-Ellen he felt as if a fanfare had gone off in his head. She was bright, brilliant, edgy. He wanted to buzz her lips, blare on her neck, brr brr brr on her…His reverie was interrupted by her wafting past on the way to her next pupil. She turned to look at him over her shoulder slightly biting her lip as she left the staff room.

A brass and string ensemble played for their wedding first dance ending in a trumpet tantara. His stomach lurched every time he looked at her but, her smile when aimed at him dazzled and made him want to form his lips in embouchure on every aperture, to flutter tongue her to growling. She would be his last, best trumpet.

The whirr and snap of the slide projector was a frequent feature in our front room, growing up.

Dad would take photos of vivid and bizarre things which caught his eye when he was out and about or it was holiday time.

Over time, the collection of slides grew with a visit to the zoo here, a vacation in a Madeiran or Maltese lagoon there… until the boxes in the lobby closet were so numerous that Mum had to hide the vacuum cleaner and the clothes horse behind the sofa because the glory hole was full.

Grown up, each Christmas when I went home dad would set up the projector for an “all our yesterdays” extravaganza and if I sometimes stifled a yawn, he never seemed to notice. My children eagerly asked to see “mum growing up” every time they visited and Mum and I would natter away in the kitchen, glad of the chance for a hushed catch up.

When Dad died, Mum insisted that I keep the slides because she wouldn’t ever watch them again. “Maybe the children will want to look again sometime.” but of course the surly teens were more interested in YouTube and I wasn’t quite cool enough to be studied anymore, after all I knew nothing.

The slides sat in my loft until long after mum passed and I only remembered them when I was having a clear out while deciding whether the children going to university was enough of a shove for me to bite the bullet and downsize to the seaside cottage my husband and I had been talking about for a long time.

It seemed criminal to throw the slides out so we arranged to digitise them to clear physical space then I sorted through the slides to find the best of each age and event to actually keep. Every place we visited was represented, every emotion on show. Dad had been better at capturing images than I had understood at the time – an amateur hobbyist with an occasional eye for the fascinating.

I made sheer curtains with individual pockets small enough to hold a slide. These nets, when drawn on a sunny day act like floaty stained glass imitating a skewed version my past on the walls of the family room. A fluttering breeze and I am slipping and sliding back into the past, Daddy’s wee treasure once more.

Annie had always collected things she found on the sand since she had been a little girl and the family had stayed in Bournemouth for a few weeks one October. A cottage apparently made of seashells on the road to Southborne had sparked an interest which had never left.

She had moved on from razor shells and seaweed to sand polished bits of glass and pottery and smaller pebbles to spend hours making framed pictures to give to friends for special occasions.

For Margery she made a framed picture that from the distance looked like two women sitting on a bench looking out to sea. The bench was a longish flat rock and the women’s bottoms were gaily coloured rounded cup fragments. Glass pieces made for pretty convincing blouses and she had the figures wearing headscarves of shells. Margery was overjoyed, especially as the figure she took to be her had the smaller bottom.

For lesser friends Annie filled picture frames with rounded glass of various hues to match whatever they had chosen for the smallest room in the house. Generally the hues ranged from lightest to darkest as eyes scanned from left to right. The glass spoke of the power of the swelling tides and repurposing what others saw as meaningless detritus.

Her final frame was for Jamie. It took her months to search for just the right pieces to create a glass rainbow for her warrior friend. They had once protested together, a long time ago and Annie was sure that of all her friends Jamie would get the allusion to their shared youth.

A few months later she found the same work, undoubtedly hers, in a charity shop collecting for children to eat at school in Africa.

It was a lesson Annie took to heart. From that moment on her gifts were donations directly to the charities, under the names of her erstwhile friends. They nodded approvingly even when later, Annie’s will was read out leaving everything – apart from a substantial bequest to Margery – to a Sightsavers charity. None so blind, after all.