Looking for a photograph of My Mother
John Peter Askew
2006
My mother once told me that when they were courting my father would get her to pose for an eternity while he photographed her. Each time he would carefully measure the light falling on her face with his hand held meter.
I remember a photograph of my mother leaning up against a tree, her curly red hair falling to her waist. Her bright eyes full of expectation. Today we looked for the photograph together but couldn’t find it. My mother recalls how she and my father were out walking in Horsham Wood and she was wearing a pink checked skirt and a yellow jumper she had knitted from fine wool. My mother turns to me as she tells me that her hair then was quite short and that I’d mixed the photograph up with another where she is a child holding her sister’s hand. Here her hair, she says smiling, is nearly as long and as beautiful as I remember.
