The smallest boy in this photograph is my father. Mum says it makes her smile because my grandmother has her hands on his shoulders: just keep still for the camera! She can hear her saying the words. Stand there for just a moment! Don’t waste the film.
We all do it with our wriggly children, don’t we? We want to get that nice family shot. We’re lucky; most of us now have digital cameras. The possibilities of capturing that moment, many of them, in different lenses and colours are endless. Back then, it wasn’t as easy.
There was the little boy who grew up to be father; a man whose habits I didn’t always approve of, didn’t always understand, yet still loved.
In the movie Finding Neverland the other night – the one you all highly recommended – there is a line close to the end from an elderly widow who’d just lost her husband that said something like, “He still was a boy up until the end, on the inside.”
I hope, I pray, I wish, that his life was the same.
