Capital

January 1961 and our mother has taken us to London for our first taste of the metropolis. (The celebrated 'empty' plinth is clearly visible top left.)

It's taken for granted that one dresses up for London. Full school uniform for us and best coat, gloves and hat for our mother.

I'd looked forward to the visit keenly, picturing a city a-gleam with noble architecture. In reality, London had yet to emerge from post-War austerity - and the midwinter mists served to deepen the mood of melancholy neglect.

But we had a fab time, with treat after treat: lunch at a Lyon's Corner House, pigeon feeding, a climb up the tower of Westminster Cathedral, a visit to Madame Tussaud's and the London Planetarium.

Father's day

Patrick, my father, aged 50, cradles me, the third of his three sons, on a bright morning early in 1951.

The horizon, just over my head, is the English Channel, viewed from our home in Sidmouth, Devon.

Patrick spent most of the 1950s in declining health and he died on 5 November 1959, forty-two days before his 59th birthday.

To me he was always kind, loving, indulgent and funny.

And like all true storytellers, there was also something mysterious and unknowable about him.

And today, my life has lasted exactly as long as his.

Fast forward

The year is 1862 and Emma Rowe (born 1834) poses proudly with her firstborn Herbert John.The twentieth century begins and a grown-up, bearded Herbert John takes his wife, and sons Fred and Harry (right) to the photographer's studio in Stroud, Gloucestershire.It's 1912 and 24-year old Harry poses with his daughter Lesly Annie (and Jumbo the elephant) in Toronto, Canada.We're halfway through the last century: Lesly (holding baby moi) is a married woman with three sons. Harry stands beside her. Her firstborn (John) sits on the wall.The years fly past and John has a daughter - Harriet.And now it's 2009. Here's Harriet with her two boys J and C, Emma's great-great-great-great grandsons.

Abacus

Quite apart from the two redoubtable women, every item in this picture is familiar to me. I'd say this dates from 1961 or '62.

Here are two of my great aunts, both of them Jersey women. They lived with us in the early 1960s.

Marie-Louise (left) we knew as Auntie Marsie. She was born in 1882. Her sister Clementine-Louise (Auntie Ti-Ti) was born in 1874.

The only unusual aspect of the shot is the apparent absence of Marsie's cigarette.

There were times when it was a challenge to see across the room through the nicotine haze.

This has to be early afternoon, the traditional time for a rest after a busy morning of domestic chores.

Both were avid readers, fans of long-gone popular magazines such as Tit Bits, Reveille and John Bull.

They relished a racy read and, no surprise, my brothers and I devoured the mags as soon as the aunts were out of the room.

Loads of celebrity gossip. I remember reading a spicy series on the rise and rise of Soho strip-club supremo Paul Raymond. I would have been about ten.

Marsie, in particular, appreciated the occasional saucy frisson. According to family legend she once snapped her library book shut, muttering: 'This is disgusting!'

'Whatever's the matter?' queried my mother.

Marsie reopened the volume and whispered the offending passage in her best pas devant tones: 'The Chinese shopkeeper stood at the counter, his abacus before him. Idly, he fingered its little balls.'
And here they are as children.

Titi stands behind her little sister. But which one is Marie Louise? I think she's the youngest here. But the sister on the right has her gaze exactly as I recall it when she was an old lady.

The short hair would have been unusual in England at that time - but was the style for girls in French-influenced Jersey - so my mother told me.

There's a strong possibility that the third little girl is my grandmother, Gladys Marguerite (Daisy) who died in 1936 - so, sadly, I never knew her.

Century

Here we all are enjoying ourselves on the beach: my parents, their three sons, our two older cousins - and Stumpy the Welsh corgi.

Location? Definitely Devon, possibly Dawlish Warren.

The year? It has to be around 1956 or '57.

I'm guessing the younger members of the party have been in the sea, 'bathing' as my mother would have called it. But absolutely not before a minimum of one hour has elapsed from the end of our picnic lunch.

Two of us are keeping off the afternoon chill with our new zip-up jackets: they were called 'windcheaters'.

Dad, who clearly has not been in the water, is dressed up in tweed jacket, shirt, tie and pullover.

Our teenage cousins are in the height of Fifties chic - the choker of pop-together beads was the absolute dernier cri....

Meanwhile, check out the totally typical beachwear of the background figures.

Our mother, I feel, is looking a wee bit strained. Hardly surprising.

She would have organised the outing, prepared the picnic and driven all eight of us to the seaside, jammed into the bench-seat Ford Zephyr - and all at the age of approximately fifty, when many women are relaxing into the grandma role.

My father, already far from well, did not outlive the 1950s.

My mother, born in 1908, died ten years ago.

Tuesday 19 August would have been her one hundredth birthday.

Fortunes of war

One of many Red Cross 'letter forms' via which my mother kept up contact with family members in the German-occupied Channel Islands.

So glad to hear all well. Recovered from sad loss of our dear ones. We have adopted Ann. See Marsie daily. All love and thoughts.

Keeping exactly to her ration of twenty-five words, she sketches in as much as she can to reassure her aunt Clementine of the well-being of her niece (Ann) and sister (Marsie).

The 'sad loss' refers to the Exeter blitz of May 1942, during which my mother's home received a direct hit. Four members of the household were killed, including Clementine's sister Kath, as well as her niece and great-niece.

My mother and her first husband adopted Kath's daughter Ann.

For me, the enforced brevity of these messages, combined with the absence of specifics (see below), only serve to increase their poignancy.

Fraternal

It's April 1951 and I am being cuddled protectively by my brother John, while our brother Barrie concentrates on the lens of our mother's box Brownie.

Does the fact that my right arms is flailing somewhat indicate my feeling that this tender embrace (around my neck) has gone on long enough, thank you very much?

The picture below was snapped exactly twelve months later.

Three boys, three tricycles. Hurrah!

What has happened to the tricycle? Way back then, they were standard issue for small children.

We had endless fun on ours, in the narrow, paved garden of our house on Sidmouth's sea wall, and farther afield in the Byes, the park beside the River Sid.


My brothers, I'm told, were tiny trike terorists, careering down slopes, six wheels mashing anything unfortunate enough to be caught in their path.

Home front

My mother, daringly be-trousered, doing her bit on the 'home front' in the early 1940s.

She's in the garden of the home in Exeter, Devon, that she shared with her first husband.

Several family members moved in 'for the duration', evacuated from other parts of the country.

During the Exeter blitz of 1942, the house received a direct hit.

Four people were killed: my great-aunt Kath, my cousin's wife Olive and her daughter Faye - and a non-family member, a young evacuee.

A century away

A sunny back garden in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in the spring or early summer of 1908.

Well, that's how my late mother dated the reverse of the photograph.

My guess is that she's correct. A year earlier and I doubt my grandmother (on left) would have been in the picture. A year later and my mother, born August 1908, would surely have been included in the family group.

I'm wondering if Daisy's leaning-forward posture and the presence of the big cat on her lap indicate a modest wish to conceal her bump.

Her twenty-one-year-old husband Harry stands just behind her.

My great-uncle Fred is on right, with his father Herbert Henry Rowe in the middle. My great-grandmother sits on the right. I've no idea as to the identity of the other adult and the little girl.

I am intrigued by the abandoned book on left.

The image zings across the years, fresh and poignant in that clear Edwardian sunshine, the twentieth century still relatively untarnished.

Nancy Mitford's famous comment comes to mind: 'I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.'

Enemy action

My parents were married in August 1946 at the Catholic church in Sidmouth, Devon.

I have one of the cards given to them on that day. It's handmade, with the front presenting a delicately painted watercolour image of a pine tree set in a misty landscape. A bird perches on a lower branch with a string in its beak on which two wedding rings hang.

The greeting is 'Congratulation on your wedding from...'

Inside are the signatures of twenty-six German prisoners of war. My father was their supervisor on the road-improvement project on which they were working prior to repatriation.

I'm pleased that they must have liked and respected my father enough to make this gift for him and his bride.

I'd imagine that quite a few of them are still alive, well on in their eighties and nineties.

Mothering Sunday

Mothering Sunday (the fourth Sunday in Lent) provides a good enough excuse to display this picture of my mother, taken in 1927 when she was nineteen.

She's on the beach at Plemont in Jersey, clearly happy and relaxed. Her dress (she'd have said 'frock') is daringly short and the arm bangle must have been totally 'the thing' all that summer.

When she was alive I had difficulty (rather selfishly) in imagining her as a child or a young woman. Much easier now, and of course old pictures like these are a great help.And here she is, in 1912, with her beloved Jumbo.

I'm not the only one to be convinced that the photographer's original compositional plan did not include a toy elephant.

I detect a glint of triumph in that firm gaze: No Jumbo? No picture!

This was taken in Toronto.

My grandfather's emigration dream was short-lived: my grandmother's homesickness brought them back to England after less than a year in Canada.The gaze again - and the grip.

This was taken in Stroud, Gloucestershire (where she was born). I guess the year is 1909/10.

This year is her centenary.

Frozen moment....

Occasionally, when one is browsing through old photographs, time 'telescopes' and suddenly the distant past seems, well, not distant at all....

This picture shows a PE class at Topsham Barracks, Devon. Dated 28 January 1916.

My grandfather Harry Rowe is one of the two instructors - he's sitting cross-legged.

One wonders how many of them got through to the end of that year unscathed, let alone to Armistice Day 1918.

The lad third from right, back row, looks about sixteen. He should be at school.

Harry at Ethel’s Party

Ethel has invited sixteen little friends, eight boys and eight girls, to an outdoor party, perhaps to celebrate her birthday.

And here they all are in sailor suits and best pinafores sitting in a grassy meadow near Stroud in Gloucestershire. It is a summer day in the early 1890s. And if it is her birthday, my guess is that there will be six candles on the cake.

As befits her status, Ethel is in the centre of the group, gazing stolidly at the camera, obeying the instruction to sit very still – as have all the children apart from two girls (tsk!) whose blurred faces show that they fidgeted at the crucial moment.

From the neat-as-new-pins perfection of their get-ups, I imagine that the party proper has yet to begin. At least four of the boys seem primed to explode into mischief.

A dark-suited boy on the left of the picture stares directly into the lens, knees drawn up to his chest. He seems hesitant, a little shy. His body is turned away from the group, increasing a sense of separation from the knot of lads on the right. I wonder if he will have as much fun as them.

His name is Henry Herbert Rowe, but the children at the party call him Harry.

I called him Grandpa.

I have only one memory of him. I was six and, hesitant and shy, I backed away from the gentle, bald-headed stranger. He died a year later in 1957, aged seventy.

A birthday-party picture of me aged six shows a small boy, knees drawn up to chest, staring straight into the camera. Put the snapshot from the fifties beside the Victorian picture: Harry, Rory – peas in a pod.

He was happily married to my grandmother for twenty-eight years until her early death from cancer. They had one child. His second marriage was not happy.

Harry loved children and may have doubted that he would ever be a grandfather. His daughter did not marry until she was thirty-eight – and then produced three sons in as many years. How do I know he loved children? From his postcards.

Work as a commercial traveller for a West of England woollen mill took him on long journeys throughout England and Scotland, and from every destination he sent picture postcards to his grandsons. I have roughly one hundred of them: castles, steam trains, battleships, ocean liners, aeroplanes – chosen carefully to delight and intrigue small boys. And all addressed to us as individuals – it never occurred to him to send a single card to all three of us.

Here’s an example from 17 January 1954: The card shows the ocean liner RMS Bermuda steaming into New York harbour.

Dear Roderick, because you are the youngest I am sending you the biggest ship. I should like to have heard you singing at the pantomime! Love to you from Grandpa.

On my way to the class I stopped, as I often do, at the Arts Centre gift shop to top up my stock of postcards. I enjoy matching the card its recipient. I guess I send between two and three hundred a year.

And though I may not be the liveliest spark at the party, I try to remember to send my host a thank-you card.

I’m sure Harry sent one to Ethel.
This is from a series of short 'life story' pieces written as part of an evening-class course. More pieces are stored in the 'Short stories' list to the right.

The eye of the master maketh the horse fat

Mr Gnome rattled along the rails today to visit the historic port city of Bristol.

The HB improved the shining hour with some Christmas correspondence.

Mr G was privileged to be granted a behind-the-scenes glimpse of an up-and-coming local eatery - THE MAGIC ROLL.

It's located at 3 Queen's Row, a short step from the University. Do try. SO not a chain.

Mr G declares an interest. His HB is related to co-proprietor JPK.

A colourful expression emerged.

JPK noted the importance of a gently watchful management style in a business that employs many people with cash-handling responsibilities.

One doesn't have to mount a heavy surveillance operation. One simply has to be around, taking an interest and letting people know that you are aware.

Since he's been doing this, cash no longer goes astray - the tills balance.

He remarked: 'Old proverb: 'The eye of the master maketh the horse fat.'

Wise words from a wise man.

Mr G is feeling nostalgic

Mr G confesses to a moment of wistful reflection as he browses through his HB's old family photos.

This shot was taken in the early 1950s in Sidmouth, a seaside town in east Devon. A middle-aged man, a latecomer to parenthood, looks fondly at his three small boys.

He's pausing during the construction of what is to become their family home: a fine house perched on the sea wall, overlooking the pebble beach and the English Channel.

Click goes the camera, and on goes life.

The proud father died in 1959.

The boys are now aged 60, 59 and 57.

One of them is a grandfather.

The two older brothers have now outlived their father.