Picture my Uncle Charlie: a tall man, dapper in braces and high-waisted trousers. Picture his three flat caps: garden, house and best. Picture his glasses, the lenses thick as smog. Uncle Charlie couldn’t read or write; as a boy, I once tried to teach him but the childish books I used (I was a child, after all) embarrassed us both and the lessons ended when he stood up, spat into the fire and said ‘I’m going to the darkroom, lad. You can come if you want but leave the books out here.’
Charlie’s darkroom, fashioned out of the coal shed by the back door of his house, was his pride and joy. We would sit in there for hours, sometimes lit by a sunrise of a red light as he developed and printed photographs, his pit-shattered lungs rasping like waves on a shingle beach. The moment he liked best was the magical time when the prints began to appear in the tray of liquid. It was like cave paintings were emerging from the gloom, lit by the candles of nineteenth-century explorers. It’s true to say, though, that his black-and-white images often turned out to be more white than black, and that’s the way he liked it. It was as though the bleached images were the opposite of the coal face down Houghton Main, that their shiny emptiness acted as antidotes to that dusty darkness he spent so much of his time in.
Charlie and his wife, Auntie, came on holiday with us quite often in those days, and he would snap away happily on beaches, promenades, clifftops and smoky cafés, develop the photographs at home and then keep them in a Quality Street tin, which he kept in a cupboard in the kitchen. Because he couldn’t read or write he didn’t write the location of each photo on the back so the tin was a map of mysteries that none of us could unravel.
That didn’t seem to matter so much when they were in the tin but one Christmas he got a photograph album and Auntie (her name was Gladys but we called her Auntie unless we called her Tanty) persuaded him to stick his photos in and enlisted me to write some captions. We emptied the tin over the kitchen table and set to work.
Or we tried to. We held one up; it was a glossy and almost entirely bleached image, that, if you looked really closely, appeared to be a caravan perched on a cliff. I used a phrase I’d recently heard someone use on the TV and said, ‘It’s overexposed.’ Charlie’s response was a variation on his usual phrase, said in mock-threatening tones: ‘You’ll be overexposed in a minute!’ Auntie picked the print up and stared at it, then she wiped it on her floral pinny and looked at it again. ‘It’s that place near Llandudno,’ she said, with an air of finality. ‘I recognise that fence.’ ‘What fence, Mrs Woman?’ said Charlie. ‘I can’t see a fence, and nor can Clem Attlee here.’ He pointed at me; he often referred to me as Clem Attlee, or Stirling Moss, or Souse, or Jim’s Dad’s Hoss, none of which made any sense to me, but were probably, somehow, part of the reason I’ve always enjoyed working at the language face.
Auntie squinted. ‘There’s a fence. It was near Llandudno. Remember, we went to Llandudno and we went up that Great Home on the tram.’ Welsh readers are right to be appalled at Auntie’s pronunciation of Llandudno and her rendering of The Great Orme.
Here is an area of the coast that a book blurb would call ‘shrouded in mystery’ because none of us knew where it was. If a photograph is a representation of a moment in time then maybe it doesn’t matter that we don’t know where it is, maybe the fact that Uncle Charlie took the snap is enough. The three of us stand looking at the almost completely overexposed picture; the light through the window tries its best to turn us into people in a Renaissance painting but the flat cap and the pinny are too much for the comparison to hold for more than a few seconds.
The door opens and my mother and dad come in; they’ve just been to the shop and my dad is carrying a white loaf and my mother is carrying an Aero, which she hands to me.
Uncle Charlie doesn’t waste time. He points to the print and says ‘Where’s that?’ My dad holds it up and says ‘Watchet’. He passes it to my mother and says the word Watchet again because I know he loves saying the word. She gazes at it for a long time. Uncle Charlie says ‘Llandudno. Near Llandudno’ as though in some parallel universe Llandudno is near Llandudno. Auntie says ‘The Great Home’. My mother turns the print around, then turns it around again as though any way you look at the photo it is upside down.
Maybe we all have a coast of the mind that we keep in safekeeping for when we need it most; maybe the fact that we are seeing different parts of the coast and mining them from the same photograph is what makes the coast so special. It can be anywhere, for anybody. ‘Plymouth’ my mother says, with an air of finality.
Mrs Beck from next door comes in to give my auntie some People’s Friends that she’s finished with, and we try to rope her in to guessing the mystery resort but she says, with a voice steeped in Park Drives and crispy bacon, ‘I’m not starting that game’, which is a shame, because I recall that morning at 34 North Street as a moment of great joy, a brief time when it didn’t matter where the picture was taken, just that it was taken at all. That coast could have been any coast and it could have been every coast. The Great Home, as Auntie would have said.