I was told little about her early life and knew too much of her decline. In the final months I was not even sure it was mum talking – she had been known throughout her life as Peg, sometimes Peggy but when she moved into a nursing home all the staff referred to her as Marian – her first and until then, unused Christian name, except the family always thought it was Marion with an ‘o’ and I think she did too; her birth certificate confirms the nurses were right. So the sign on her door said Marian; I don’t think I ever really knew who it was on the other side.
Old photographs never lose their capacity to surprise, particulalry when they appear out of the blue. I have digitised and reprinted a large number of old photos belonging to my maternal grandfather but I had never seen this one before. In later years my mother developed a habit of creating random albums, haphazard collections with no obvious consistency of place, subject or time; this one was tucked in between my sister’s wedding and her grandchildren playing in the garden. Perhaps this is no bad thing, each page has the capacity to astonish, there being no clues as to what might appear next; poor mum’s mind developed a similar trend towards her end.
The car is a 1920s Ford Model A and the small girl is my mother. They are probably all Taylors, my maternal grandmother’s side of the family. The man on the far left is her grandfather, William and the bowler-hatted gent is Uncle Charlie, thought by mum to be several shillings short of a pound. The lady is her grandmother Emily Susan but the young man in the flat cap is unknown to me, lost with my late mother’s memory.
The picture was probably taken at the family home near Bransbury which was demolished in the fifties when the Andover to Sutton Scotney road was widened.