Non Digital

You had to "go" now. Daddy wanted the bathroom. "Otherwise," he says, "you will have to hold on, and wait." An impossible task for a three year old, but maybe worth the trouble if Daddy allowed you in.

Pitch black, dark. Every chink of light gone. even the half light let in by the frosted Bathroom window. A long, sagging line, stretched from one end of the enamel bath and Mother's pegs dotted it in an irregular dance. That was ready for later.

Sit, quietly, don't think of the monsters that scare in the dark or of the terrible things that can happen when the world is black.

Daddy pours liquid in a tray and I know he is doing something strange to the long long string of negatives and it all involves paper, shiny, glossy, of the "must not touch or I will smack your hand kind." There are a lot of things in this world you cannot touch. But the bottles are interesting. They have their own unique chemical smell.

Then oh, if only I could remember it now. There was a process that I have lost in the darkness but it ends in a wonderful line of dripping pictures. They must stay in the dark till they appear. We must not touch and I could not reach anyway.

Daddy is a magician. He takes a long line of film and makes it into pictures which in the morning are dry and wonderful mementos of holidays. Me, Mum, Dad, Sue by the chalet at Swale Ciiffe where I got lost and was found in a ditch by the sea.

But best of all was the Cartwheel. We found it walking together in a field on a cliff at Swale Cliffe where "I got lost and was found in a ditch by the sea." This is forever etched on my memory. I remember the time it was taken. Its appearance above the bath, then how the picture found its way to a frame and years later, just before Multiple Sclerosis stole my Father's ability to do much at all, how he painted the picture in oils using the photograph, and it is on the living wall still as a memory of better days.

And my magician of a Father now marvels because he just watched my sister from his bed in England painting on my Smartphone via Watsapp and has no idea that the picture he sees now has any relation to what he did back then.

What happened to my cameras? He says. "They are still in the wardrobe upstairs," I reply and then we remember who he was and how he was once the one who could take a simple cartwheel and make it alive.

picture courtesy of Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/camera-antique-vintage-old-2532088/