My father was still married to my mother, so he was still having an affair with my stepmother, staying at her flat in South-East London during the week and often travelling down to Cornwall at weekends where she had bought her cottage. Then my mother died in 1981, and my father sold our family home pretty soon afterward and the money made from the sale went on extending the cottage, making the kitchen far bigger and above it extending the bathroom and building another room which my father (who had been working on ‘his book’ pretty much since I can remember) used for his writing. But it did not use up all the dosh.
A few years later, my stepmother’s sister, who was becoming more and more disabled bought the cottage at the end of the row (her’s was The Hollow, then there came Middle Cottage, then there was Rose Cottage, my stepmother’s where she still lives). Whoever owned The Hollow also owned Guy’s House (and, by the way, I have no idea why it was called Guy’s House and can only make the pretty obvious suggestion that at one point in its long life it was owned or at the very least occupied by a ‘Guy).
When I first saw it in the mid-1980s, Guy’s House was a tumbledown ruin, covered with ivy. When next I saw it, a few years, later (my father and I went through a period of estrangement, though I have to say it was his decision not mine, but it would be boring for you and futile all round if I went into details here) Guy’s House was transformed. It is not big, but downstairs a small bathroom with a shower had been installed as well as a small ‘wine cellar’, and upstairs, which my father used as his study were all his books in custom-made shelves along two of the walls.
When I say Guy’s House had a long life, I mean it. I have no idea quite how old it is, but it would well have been built in the 15ft century. At one end downstairs his a large granite fireplace with the usual bred ovens on either side. I should imagine that when it was occupied, and though it is small, it housed about 10/12 people because in those days privacy was not something ever expected. My father died in 1991, and since then Guy’s House has slowly been on the skids.
At first it was used as a convenient place for visitors to sleep. I’ve stayed there several times myself. But gradually over the years it became the repository of all the shite was wasn’t wanted or which was superfluous, some of it mine. When my stepmother’s sister died, her cottage was first let out as a holiday cottage, but then in 2007 my stepmother suffered her first stroke and the cottage was subsequently let out to drum up some money to pay for the care home in which she lived. Which is all fine and dandy, but why am I telling you? . . .
Well, last week, I took annual leave and set about clearing out as much of the shite as I could. And boy was there a lot of it. I was pretty ruthless, too. When you are cleaning out, there can be no room for sentiment. But among the things I found there were some a few of the pictures I took in the 1980s when I was still living in Cardiff. That was, of course, in the days before digital, and involved developing film, then printing the pictures and it was that, mucking around in the darkroom, which I liked as much as taking the pictures.
For one thing if you print your pictures, you can try and do all kinds of things with them (things you can these days do as a matter of course, such as cropping). I also used to dick around with a set of dyes, to colour up BW prints. Anyway, here are four of the prints I salvaged. The picture of the women’s legs was taken in Hamburg when I went to stay with my cousin in about 1988. The one of the incurably handsome dude in shades was taken by her and modesty prevents me from revealing that utterly cool man’s name.
The last two were taken in a nightclub or other, I forget with. I particularly liked using fast film with an ASA of 3200 to take pictures in natural light. Not only did it give nice effects, but you could take snaps of folk when they were not aware and, thus were not posing. And using flash well is also by no means easy.
And here is a link to other pictures of that era have previously post here. As for Guy’s House, when it is not occupied - my cousin, his wife and young son are staying there for a week - I shall take a few more pics to give you a better idea of what it is all about.
