Frank and me

My Grandma died when I was nine, and in the years after her death I thought very little about the picture, except that I knew my Auntie Diane had it, and I wanted to have it at some point in the future. When I fell out with Diane in 2005, I became slightly more anxious to get hold of the pictures as I knew there was a chance I would never see them again; I was too stubborn to ask for them, and I was sure she would be too stubborn to part with them. I had quite a surprise the following spring when my mother telephoned to tell me that Diane had dropped both the pictures at her house; I did not think she had any inkling that I wanted them, and in light of the tension between us, it was quite a mysterious gesture.

The mystery was quickly solved, however, when I went to collect them. Obviously, I was most interested in the picture of Frank, but I was there to collect a pair; when I saw the picture of my Great Grandmother, Emily, I was pretty horrified. Diane had obviously decided it would be a good idea to reframe the pictures, and so she had heavy-handedly tried to remove Emily from the frame. These pictures are printed on a very particular type of card, and are designed specifically for the frame. In trying to remove the photograph of Emily, she had ripped a large chunk of the card clean off and scuffed the picture on her cheek. The frame was nowhere to be seen, either. She had clearly ruined the only picture she really wanted and so decided to cast them off to her younger sister. Selfishly, I only thought ‘Thank goodness she didn’t start with Frank’s picture’.

I studied Frank’s picture carefully in the days that followed. The frame was heavy-set, clumsy and a fairly ugly example of 1920s fashion; I can see why Diane would want to reframe them, though the way she went about it was mind-boggling. A rusty metal chain, designed to hang the picture on the wall drooped over the front of the frame across Frank’s hair and forehead, resting just above his deep, grey eyes which drew mine instantaneously. His eyes had been the feature that stuck fast in my mind from the rare glimpses of his face I saw when the picture belonged to my Grandma. He looked deep in thought and his eyes were filled with worry and loneliness; I do not know whether it was something I invented, or if it was really there, but he seemed to evoke a certain sadness, almost an inevitability that he would be forgotten, and I had the overwhelming notion that he was like me, I could empathise with the feeling I saw in him, that people could not understand why he was the way he was, and would be standoffish as a result. I always felt it sad that he was barely mentioned by my Grandma. It was not really her fault; he had died when she was less than two years old and she had absolutely no memory of him, so all she knew was what her mother had told her. Unfortunately, this was not very much either. I was a very inquisitive child, and although she died when I was nine, I had already developed an interest in the picture and asked her many questions. All she could really tell me, or all that I retained from this early age was that he was Irish, and born Francis Callaghan. He had moved to Canada with his sister and changed his name to her married name of Roby. She told me that he had then fought in World War One in the Canadian army, and in the early 1920s, he died as a result of being gassed in the war. She did not know where he was buried.

At the age of twenty-one, with the picture in my possession,  I began to think about what she had told me, how odd it was that she should never have been taken to see his grave by her mother, and odder still that she knew so little about him. Either she was not as curious a child as I was, or Emily had been unwilling to talk about him. I suppose it would be fair to say Emily probably did not know him that well either, since they were only married for four years when he passed away. The only first-hand account of Frank I ever heard was from my Grandma’s older sister, Margaret. It was around the time of my Grandma’s funeral I remember hearing her describe Frank’s funeral. I cannot think the memory was too clear to her, as she was only three when he died, but she told me she remembered asking her mother, as his coffin was being lowered into the ground “Lift me up, I want to see Daddy”. It may not seem like much, but it is the closest thing I have to a memory of him, and I do wish I had asked her more questions. She passed away around the turn of the millennium, and with her death the last memory of Frank died too.