Today I stumbled (literally) upon a photograph of my father. He was about 19 and is in his naval uniform. He’s deep in thought.
I say I stumbled “literally” because I did. I was in the midst of cleaning my 8-year-old’s bedroom, my back bent to retrieve VHS covers of movies both boys had abandoned long ago, and there it was, a photograph album. It’s probably sixty or seventy years old. Somehow it found its way under “The Barney Bonanza.”
I remembered immediately how I’d paged through this very album when I was a young child. At eight, the thick black pages and the glued black and white photographs of people long dead filled me with awe. I saw again my paternal grandmother and shots of weddings of men and women whom I have never known among those of my parents and my siblings taken before I was born.
Today was no different.
Once retrieved from the rubble of my son’s room, the album’s allure worked. It was not only the array of relatives, and the pictures of my mother holding me as an infant, but now, because the album had made its way through the aftermath of the Second World War, through multiple house-moves during my parents’ time, and then journeyed across the Atlantic into my home in the USA.
I am surprised when anything survives a day or two when subjected to this all-boy rough-house environment – but here it was, under Barney, waiting to stop me in my tracks so I could page through the photographs and look at my father in his late teens or early twenties.
He’s beautiful.
His face appears soft and smooth. He has gentle features. His look is one of interest and compassion.
HMS Dorsetshire
He’s Gunner E. W. G. Smith – my father who’d participated in the sinking of the Bismarck, my father who sold newspapers on street corners as a child, my father who hid under his bed when his angry stepfather ranted and threatened him with life in a children’s home. This was my father, who’d never known his own or anything about him. This was my father as a young man, who’d, in later years don a Father Christmas outfit any month of the year and sing with tears streaming down his face about “the little boy that Santa had forgot.”
This photograph is taken before he saw action. I know.
It’s taken before he lost a cadre of close friends in combat. It’s taken before his ship, the HMS Dorsetshire went down in the Indian Ocean and before he’d spent two nights and a full day in the water singing “Nearer My God To Thee” with hundreds of men, many of whom held little hope of being rescued.
I know this is a “before” picture. Men didn’t look this pure and fresh after months at sea, after years of longing for home and frequent and enduring glimpses into the heart of human darkness.
I am glad I cleaned Nathanael’s room today.
