7167/19687
I think I may have written about it before, but I have a charcoal drawing of myself that my grandad Don did in 1975. He was a good artist, unlike his grandson, and as a kid I had to pose for him a few times. I hated doing this as it meant sitting still for what felt like hours, but may have been 15 minutes and I did not like to be in one place for too long. He has perfectly captured my petulant reluctance to be there in this picture and of course now I am glad they fought against the whirlwind that was the eight year old me and persisted. It’s a wonderful connection to my grandad and the past, but also when I look at it now I see the face of my son peaking through the cracks as well.
I had shown this picture to Phoebe a couple of days ago, as she is taking an interest in art and seems to have some natural talent at it - in this case the characteristic has skipped two generations. Her Aunty Jill recently bought her a light box so that she can trace other pictures and Phoebe asked if she could trace this drawing, which was a surprising choice, but maybe she recognises the importance of it in family history or feels a connection to an ancestor who also had that necessary connection between brain and hand that I am unable to master.
We photocopied the original, because there would be sellotape involved and we didn’t want an accident of any kind and then Phoebe got to work making her own copy. And suddenly that picture took on a new significance. I imagined what Don would think of this - 47 years on, his granddaughter working over the charcoal marks that he’d put down on paper, grasping a baton from someone who died many years before she was born, but whose blood flows diluted through her veins. As a dad I was just amazed that she was interested in a picture of me at all, but I was moved to see her retracing the lines that I had been reluctant to see put on paper in the first place.
As so much of the picture is about shading, it was a tricky one to trace, but Phoebe’s version has her own style and personality stamped over it. Plus it's sort of fitting that the new version is a ghostly shadow of the first. That little boy has pretty much faded away, but there's still a little bit of him there inside me. Quite a lot if we're being honest. I will display these two pictures side by side to remind me of my relationship with my grandad when I was a boy and my relationship with my daughter when she was a girl and this strong connection between two people who never met, but where nonetheless, the elder was able to pass on a skill to the younger and still lives inside her.
I have inherited my short, stocky stature and my fine shock of hair from Don and his Irish Hannan forebears (sadly for me he was not born in Ireland himself, or he would have also provided me with the priceless gift of an EU passport) and so get to say hello to him sometimes in the mirror (and slightly curse that I didn’t get some of the lanky genes that got passed down to some of my Herring cousins). He died about 35 years ago, but today he was in the room.
