Snaps

There is a photograph of my mother, taken on the beach at Robin Hood's Bay in Yorkshire when she was nineteen, during a holiday with girlfriends from her training college, that suggests to me something of how happy she must have been in those days—the days she talks about often now, since she's over eighty, and lives alone. Although she's totally compos mentis, I think those girlfriends are closer to her than the people she sees in Tesco and the greengrocers', and her neighbour from whom she maintains a polite distance. The photograph is of a young woman with an Eton crop wearing a backless cotton sunsuit with a polka-dot halter neck that leaves her shoulders bare and divides into baggy shorts just above the knee. You can't see her face, because she's bent right over, hands on knees, head down, legs apart, braced for a person running in from the left of the frame to leapfrog over her. You can just see the hands and the feet of the person who's already in flight, preparing to land their hands on her back and jump—my mother is small, five-foot nothing (and shrinking, she'd say now), but what's so attractive about the photograph is how noticeably young and strong and smooth-skinned she is, and how physically active the photograph is as a whole. You know this person just out of the frame is going to catapult over my mother's sturdy frame in the next split second. On the back it says, 'Vicky was a bit early in taking this.'