Thursday, February 28, 2019

Photograph Albums

Both Richard and I had photo albums given to us when we went to school in England. This one is Richard's - on the cover he is "Haylett mi", the small Haylett, and he had this at our prep school, Glengorse, because his school number, 62, is under his name.

The photos were taken on a box Brownie, almost certainly the Flash III, and later on a Kodak Brownie 127. I had the latter with me at Glengorse for a time.

Each page displays a muddle of photographs, usually very poorly aligned. These ones are dated between 1951 and 1956, when we had the second house in Cliff Avenue in Mombasa. Tinker the cat, Susie the dachshund, and Clario the chicken are shown in the first four pictures being fed on the covered way which ran from the back of the main building to the kitchen block. There is also a picture of an Arab dhow passing in front of a headland, two pictures of our neighbour, David, with the cook's son, Barasa, in our front drive, and pictures of Kilindini docks and anchorage.

Another page shows Tinker and Clario sharing lunch, a turtle caught by fishermen, my parents in the front drive, and baobabs and the Likoni ferry. Several pictures are missing. They probably just fell out but my mother did have a habit of editing our albums' contents.

The haphazard layout of the albums suggest that it was Richard and I who put the pictures in using the very fiddly corner mounts. This would also explain why there is nothing written in the albums. I suppose we knew that we would recognise everything and everyone so there wasn't much point. What we never thought was that they would still be looked at over sixty years later.

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