I only have a couple of items from my father, he was not a rich man, nor did he accumulate much in the way of stuff in his later life. Which is fine as I really didn’t want much from him.
He and I, as the sad story goes, did not see eye to eye. He rejected me when I was very young and I him when I was old enough and neither was able to bridge the gap until the very end. I won’t lie to you and say if we had more time things would have been different, they would not have been, but after my father passed away I did make the connections between us and as clichéd as it sounds, I made my peace with him.
All it took actually was a very old cigarette card collection for me to put aside a lot of hurt feelings and anger and realise who my father was. He was a very proud man, to the point of arrogance but he was also a very frustrated man, frustrated I imagine with his life and what had not come to pass.
I don’t even remember how the cigarette card collection came into my possession, I assume Mum dropped off a couple of Dad’s things although I don’t know where the rest of that stuff would be. But I had never seen that collection before or if I had I must have been way too young to remember or to register it in my head.
As I mentioned the card set is really old, it was given to my father in 1934, the book at least was anyway. The cards within it no doubt are not as old, as he would have collected them over the following years. But it was this collection that first showed my Dad in a different light, he was once a boy, he once collected stuff and he once cared for something that wasn’t cynical or grown up.
I’m certain he saw my obsession with popular culture when I was young to be a frivolous endeavour, I’m sure he would have liked to seen me become something a lot earlier in my life. I’m sure had I though he would have been jealous and even more resentful of me, or maybe not, of course this I’ll never be able to test.
But we were alike at one point in our lives, at one point he own a collection of little pieces of cardboard that he treasured enough to look after for a very long time. There are some cards that were a couple of cards that were added a lot later in life, which to me proves that he found this collection to be important. So it’s this collection that helped me find that connecting point, allowed me to at least imagine why.
It is because of that, that this simple little collection of roughly cut out pictures is so much more important to me than anything else he could have left me.
I’ll upload them all to Flickr and put some more information about each of the pages in the next couple of weeks.
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