So have another picture of me as a wee one instead:
This is my dad and me before the elder Godwin (my surname at
birth) decamped to the arms of a woman half his age (a feat I emulated quite a
few years later.)
What’s interesting, however isn’t me and my dad; it’s the
rockery stones. They’re white; my mother painted them white, every last one of
them. Nobody would dream of having white rockery stones these days, would they?
They’re more concerned with luxuriating in the sight of their gardens adorned
with the shattered detritus of granite and limestone hillsides (commonly known
as quarries.) Natural is the trend now, not whitewashed.
In fact, it wasn’t common to see white-painted rockery
stones in those days either. I suspect it had more to do with my mother’s
nature and upbringing. She liked things clean and tidy, you see; she was a bit
of a slave to cleanliness and tidiness. But I think there was something else as
well.
She would have been around 33 when this picture was taken,
and had spent all her life living in grimy Victorian terraces buried in the
deeper social strata of a northern industrial city. And so her native
environment had always been adorned with a ubiquitous and permanent layer of
soot. Even the grander sandstone and limestone buildings in the city centre
were uniformly black when I was a kid, as befitted their central location in a
forest of pit heads, steelworks and belching bottle ovens.
I think that gives the major clue as to why she liked
painting stones white; I suspect they were a symbol of a new beginning. She had
to keep them white, too. She cleaned them, and when that wasn’t enough, she
painted them again.
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