One of the things I’ve found comforting in these sad days has been scanning and organising my Dad’s old slides and photographs. Spanning the late 1950s to the 2000s, these images are not only a rich and evocative source of family memory, but are powerfully suggestive of my Dad’s creative sensibility. This is particularly evident in the many photographs he took over the years of St Martin’s, Castleton.
St Martin’s can be seen from the yard and back windows of our old house on Heywood Road. Built upon a prominent hill in the centre of Castleton, it sits high above the canal, railway, factories and warehouses that dominated the de-industrialising landscape of my 1970s and ’80s youth. St Martins is an Anglican church: a building to which neither we as a family, nor my Dad in particular, had any sort of personal connection. I cannot remember ever having been inside St Martin’s, and yet its spire, façade and outline are as powerfully familiar to me as any Proustian childhood detail. As I was growing up, I knew that my Dad found St Martin’s interesting to look at, And so, as a consequence, I looked at it too.
In my Dad’s photographs, St Martin’s acts as an ever-present barometer of changeable weather, local moods, and shifting seasons. Captured in a shaft of sunlight, it gleams whitely against the blackened bricks of Whip and Bourne and a slate-grey sky, foreboding rain.
The view faces east-south-east, and, an early riser, Dad took many photographs of the sun rising behind St Martin’s. . .
. . .as well as others in which the church and its clock face appear in the weird westerly half-light as night falls.
If you didn’t know my Dad, you might think that what is depicted in the following image is a painted back yard and the summer flowers which someone (my mum) has planted in some purloined plastic industrial cones – but no – it is most definitely a photograph of St Martin’s.
Is the next image a still-life of old bottles, a peeping duck (which has definitely been positioned by my Dad), and the pleasingly rounded shapes of some squashes (which he had grown) together with some citrus fruits? Or is it another photograph of St Martin’s?
The following kitchen-sink image depicts one of my dad’s familiar domestic haunts (he being an utterly committed washer-upper and despiser of dishwashers, among many other modern appliances). This shot has been framed very specifically in order to allow St Martin’s – by now my dad’s omnipresent and somehow necessary totem – to mischievously appear.
Among my Dad’s many, many photographs of St Martin’s is one I can’t ever remember seeing, and which I found particularly moving, because of the evidence it provides of the countless joyful, playful hours Dad spent with me and my sister Helen when we were growing up. Having acquired some watercolours, we were clearly insistent on having a painting session with him, and Dad has later photographed the fruits of our artistic labours.
A very young Helen (on the left) has created a truly excellent Snoopy (one of many Peanuts characters of whom she was fond) while I (on the right) have attempted a derivative seaside sunset and an alien who suggests the extra-terrestrial phase I went through after mistakenly and ill-advisedly catching an afternoon TV showing of the original Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956). In the middle, Dad’s had a go at some abstract expressionism (he was particularly fond of Paul Klée) and – of course – has produced a beautiful watercolour image of St Martin’s.
It is important to point out that, for my dad, these images in no sense formed a series, and nor did he regard his careful and consistent documentation of this local landmark – in a way which also provides a powerful record of a changing world – as any sort of a project.
Much like his constant whistling, his lightning-fast punning repartee, his hilarious collages or his thrilling imitation of a gibbon, photographing St Martin’s was just something my dad did – one of countless expressions of his endlessly energetic, completely idiosyncratic, and always creative personality.
Thanks, Dad.
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