Willow Pattern Requiem

After leaving the village of my childhood I would not see my grandmother again. 

I’m not sure of Elizabeth’s precise birthdate, but I always thought of her as a Victorian. My father was born in 1922, so Elizabeth, or ‘Bess’ as she was known to family and friends,  would have been born in the late Victorian or early Edwardian era. 

Her house on Queen Street certainly felt Victorian in its appearance and décor. The long corridors and dimly lit rooms furnished with heavy drapes, painted vases, and lace antimacassars, embodied the previous century to a child in the 1960s. 

I particularly remember a glass vitrine which decorated the cast iron fireplace in a bedroom at the back of the house. The miniature scene within the dome represented a magical world that was beyond my reach, but one that I longed to step into, as if I were ‘Alice through the looking glass’. This window into another world is how I came to understand the feeling I experience when a photograph captivates me.

I didn’t inherit anything from Elizabeth in terms of possessions or family heirlooms. I only have memories and one or two photographs.

After my father died in the mid 1980s, I left the village of my childhood and feelings of guilt about his death and ‘coming out’ to my homosexual nature meant that I never returned to visit her  in the years leading up to her death. I was told that she would ask after me regularly, but then as time went by, and it became clear to her that I wouldn’t be returning, she didn’t ask anymore. 

As I get older, I am more reminded of the woman who loved me unconditionally as a child. As a young man I didn’t believe that I would receive unconditional love as a queer adult. 

Whether that is true or due in part to the sense of shame one feels it’s impossible to know for sure, we can’t travel back in time to test the water. If one conceals a fundamental aspect of oneself, it’s follows that one will feel like an imposter or an outsider.

These memories instil a sense of guilt for my own lack of empathy towards people who cared for me in my formative years.