Lens-Artists Challenge # 336: Only One Picture

Lens-Artists Challenge # 336: Only One Picture

Back in 2022 my Mum's condition started deteriorating. She was always an independent woman, driving well into her eighties and living alone in the house she shared with her late husband (Dad) for over a decade after his passing.

After the peak of the Pandemic, when governments worldwide loosened restrictions, she moved to a little flat in Pershore, Worcestershire, closer to my sister who was able to keep an eye on her. Mum had been resistant to the move, but she had had a few falls and my sister was spending more time at Mum's house in Earls Croome than at her own home.

Mum actually started to thrive in the little flat and very quickly realised what a good decision it actually had been. It was supervised accommodation with regular activities and she made lots of new friends. When we would call for our frequent chats she would tell us of the trips she had been on and the regular whist drives and other activities at the centre.

Then, in 2022 she started to have a few more falls, and made several visits to the hospital. Even then she was an independent soul and would regularly wander around the ward talking to the other patients, often in defiance of the nurses. But some of the things she started to do were out of character. Like the time she just left the hospital and started to walk home. She was fine, she insisted, and just wanted to get home.

Such activities started to take a toll on both my sisters, and of course I was worried, too. Living in Portugal it was difficult to support Mum and my sisters, so in October  2022 I decided to take a quick trip home, and spent a few days in Pershore with Mum. We had a lovely time, and Mum's flat was like a little time capsule of her life. The furniture had travelled with her and there was the wooden dining table that had been bought for their wedding when Mum and Dad moved into their first house in the late 1950s, just before I was born.

Then there was the cabinet that had been with them since their move to Earls Croome in the 1990s, and upon which had sat the Sony Bravia TV that Mum was so pleased to have (and for which my brother-in-law had spent hours setting up the blu-ray player and Freeview box that somehow Mum always seemed to mess up, prompting another visit). And of course there were the two comfy reclining chairs that Mum and Dad would sit upon of an evening, watching the TV.

So when Mum sat me down in one of the chairs and said, 'I have something for you,' I wondered what was coming. She moved to the cupboard, opened one of the doors and pulled something out, it looked like a little grey box. She handed the box to me, and the memories came flooding back. It was her little Kodak Brownie camera.

Mum had mentioned this to me before, that it still contained a film and she didn't really know what to do with it. I turned the camera over in my hands. It was originally my grandfather's camera, bought new back in the early twentieth century when he was a teenager. But apparently he wasn't a photographer and it was left in a cupboard for a couple of decades.

In the 1940s or 50s, he gave the camera to mum, when she was a teenager, and it went with her everywhere (I later found a bundle of negatives taken with this camera, on day trips out, to weddings, and even one of my father, when they were dating). Eventually, after they had married, they invested in a Kodak Instamatic camera and the Brownie was relegated to a cupboard again.

As a kid I remember finding the camera and being able to play with it. The Brownie was getting a bit battered by then, and when I started becoming interested in photography, in my teens, Mum gave me the camera. The back was becoming loose, and I started to tape it up with black electrical tape to keep it light tight.

Sometime around the mid 1970s I went to sixth form college, and then away to Polytechnic, so the Brownie went back in a cupboard. And there it remained, for a few more decades, although it travelled with Mum and Dad through their moves, and eventually with Mum to her little flat in Pershore. 

The next day of my trip to the UK was a lovely autumn day, with blue skies filled with wispy clouds. In the afternoon, after a lovely fish'n'chip lunch (with curry sauce, we always loved that), I took a walk down the street with the Kodak Brownie to Pershore Abbey, where I finished off the two or three frames of the roll of film that had been in the camera since the late 1970s.

We had to cut my trip short because of a rail strike, but the Kodak Brownie came back to Portugal with me. This time it remained on a shelf alongside the other cameras in my collection. In the meantime,  Mum's condition got worse, and she spent more time in hospital. Sadly, a few weeks shy of her nineteenth birthday, Mum passed.

All the while, the Box Brownie was a reminder of Mum and her life. I removed the film from the camera, which wasn't easy considering that it had been taped up some forty years before and the wind-on knob was a little bent, so it was not too easy to open. I'm not able to process film at home, so I took the film — a roll of Tri-X film — to the lab in Aveiro for development.

They were happy to process it and a week or so later the photographs dropped into my inbox. Most of them were nearly unrecognisable. There was a shadow of the view from my bedroom window at our house in Hanley Swan, and a view of my bedroom and telescope. But one image that did come out was a lovely view of Pershore Abbey, from my walk down the road on my last ever visit to see Mum.

This was posted for the Lens-Artists Challenge. It was the turn of Leya from

To See a World in a Grain of Sand … to host the Challenge and she asked us to choose 'ONE picture (https://lagottocattleya.com/2025/02/15/lens-artists-challenge-336-only-one-picture/). One that you find important, meaningful to you, maybe sending a message – and then explain why you picked just that picture.'

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