Recreating a Photographic Record of our Childhood Home

Over the years, Dad had reorganised and 'rationalised' photo albums, so that those which survived after his death were often like collections formed from other albums, with their precise details missing. Not every album had suffered this fate, and in ones which had been re-used some pages remained intact, with their labels. But for a lot of others, we simply had an idea of a period where it might have occurred.

Of course, at the time Mum and Dad presumably thought of our lives as the eternal present and not something that one of us would one day try to recreate as a historical record for publication. After Mum's death in 2014, Dad first focused on getting a collection of poetry published, as a full retrospective of his writing in that genre, then worked with me [in my capacity as a publisher] on a book of early memoirs and travel articles. This was published by me, a month or so after his death in 2022, so long had it taken to organise, type up and match the pictures to. But once it was done, it had inspired me to do something to honour our family's legacy, which I had promised my Dad I would do.

Thus was born "Childhood Home", initially thought of as one volume, though it eventually grew to be four. I took the decision early on to present it as a landscape-oriented book, so as to better show off the photographs of the house, almost all of which were in that orientation.

Initially we thought of it as a "tour" of the house, through the near 20 years when we had lived there, from new-build in 1976, to its sale in 1995. The main and obvious changes would be the construction of the extensions, and landscaping to the garden, together with some carpeting changes inside, and Dad's passion for making doors into sliding doors over the years.

The first challenge was to find every photograph of the house as it was originally constructed, with a concrete path encircling the house-with-garage, and a curtain wall on the side facing the road. We found a slew of photographs from our visiting the house during its construction, which back in the mid 1970s was as easy as parking outside and walking round the unfinished building, probably on a Sunday, and one or two showing occupancy before the extensions were built, one of which was from the Silver Jubilee, celebrated down the street in a neighbour's double garage due to the rain.

Similar construction photographs were found for the first extension in 1978, and my sister's school News book from her Reception class showed that it was in June of that year that it was being finished off. Over the Summer we got the cats, with the newly-constructed utility room their base, even if the whole house was their home. Photographs showing the outside of the house with JUST this extension were extremely rare, and the only useful one turned out to be the only one with our cat Tiddles before he was stolen, which must have occurred some time in 1979. That left our other cat Tandy, and she would live to relative old age in 1994, dying aged 16.

My sister's birthday in 1976 and my birthday in 1977 were both still fully documented with notes under the photographs in an album, and by using the clothes my sister was wearing in those occasions, it was possible to give relative date matches to some other photographs. This would become one of our main tools in identifying other time-frames, and photos which had got separated but should belong together.

The next major change to the house was the construction of an extended bedroom over the utility room, and a porch onto the hallway, in the late Summer and early Autumn of 1981. My sister remembered she moved into the newly-expanded bedroom on her 9th birthday, and a photograph exists of her standing in Chinese costume in front of her collection of fans which dates to around this time (she mentions the Chinese costume at Brownie camp in June 1982 in the church magazine, and it was being reused there). A photograph of me with her best friend's brother in the newly-carpeted hall/porch extension proved to be at the time of her 9th birthday, as it was possible to clothes-match my sister at her party to the visit of this family, presumably on the same day but at separate times. An additional photograph of Tandy our cat can also be matched to around this time by the carpet in this hall extension, which was initially just a re-use of spare pieces to extend the existing hall carpet into the new porch extension.

With this structure, the Childhood Home book now became book 1, "The First Decade" which would go up to the mid 1980s, and encompass the construction of the final extension, that of the lounge out over the patio, and in so doing creating an additional cupboard area attached to the garage, this being in 1983 - which was a surprise to us! We had construction photographs, of the builders posing, but had no way to date it other than our memory that it was, we thought, 1984, but in September 1983 our Dad hosted a big 50th Birthday Party, and there is the lounge extension, and my sister's own 11th birthday party photograph later in that year shows the girls all up against a wall that would only make sense after the construction of the extension as before that the lounge "unit" had been up against that wall.

We were then stuck with trying to do a "tour" of the house for these ten years, when there were no known photographs of parts of it within those years - my bedroom being one, the bathroom and shower room being others. There were photos of the kitchen, but most were hard to date, except we could say they were "some time" within this ten year period, so could be included. The dining room hosted birthday parties and Christmas dinners, and at New Year 1984 me, my sister and friends playing board games, so was pretty well-covered allowing us to show some evolution in the placing of the furniture.

The bathroom was only ever really photographed once, for the sales brochure of the house in 1995, but it had never been wholly changed, only added to over the 20 or so years. The original blue bath, sink, and toilet remained, and the shelf above the sink, and the mirrors there, were certainly extant by the mid 1980s. So, we decided to use the photograph for illustrative purposes, even though some aspects, such as the window double-glazing and the stool and other decorative items were from later.

Clothes-matching allowed us to recombine some photographs labelled as Christmas 1981 in the lounge, with some undated photographs showing a Christmas dinner in the dining room, and to recreate a set of photographs from scattered individual ones that showed us all with our Grandma outside the lounge extension, with different people being absent from the photos as they took turns taking them.

I remembered that our first VCR was top-loading and that we rented it from the time of my 11th birthday as we also rented a film to show everyone at my party. Thus, the photographs of Tandy on top of it, can be dated to 1981-1982.

In the end a photograph from slightly outside the date range was used to illustrate my bedroom. Dating from probably 1987 it showed the redevelopment of a few years' previously when the white wall furniture had been installed, and did not yet include the posters and postcards that would proliferate after I went to university in 1988. Thus it was used as an "acceptable match" to 1985 or 1986, even if not quite from that time.

As for the other books, we split them off as Book 2 - The Near Environs, Book 3 - The Later Years, and Book 4 - The Last Few Years, the latter an add-on to make use of our Mum's diaries we found in a box after Dad died, and which allowed us to precisely date events in the 1992-1994 range, and thus include the events of the house chronologically in what would be a sort of appendix to the series.