I don’t remember, as a child, there being photographs of people on any walls or mantlepieces at home. Nor were there family photograph albums, or at least, none that I knew about.
But what there was was a number of thin albums of Victorian and Edwardian photographs of classes at the local primary school, and these became my earliest photographic memory and fascination. I was three or four years old, and I can still list the four things that struck me about these albums because I would dwell on them for years.
First: some of the children in these classes had no shoes, and the older the picture, the more children were unshod. Second: the teachers were mostly unhappy looking women. There was the odd uncrossable-looking man, and one or two young women who looked capable of fondness towards their charges, but even at my early age dissatisfaction was recognisable and spoke louder than happiness. Third: my great aunt was supposedly in these pictures, but try as I might, I could never pick out the infant face that had once belonged to my very dear but now very elderly relative.
And, finally, I was struck by how sharp and new the buildings behind each class group were. My sister had begun attending the school in the pictures, eighty years old now, and I knew it as a dilapidated place of worn edges, broken windows and tarmac. I don’t know where these albums ended up – I dare say thrown out, many years ago – but they were my first genuine cultural influence and the period in which they were taken remains urgently important to me fifty years later.