Sixty Years

Here's a photograph of the Communist, which I took in April this year, on my mother's birthday.

He looks very old and frail these days, but still has plenty of spirit. Today he visited the eye clinic at the hospital: I went with him. The consultant explained, very well and very clearly, that he has a detached retina in his left eye. They're referring him to the surgeon but it may not be possible to operate and he may never get his sight back in that eye.

Of course, he was upset: but as they took him into the ambulance to take him back to the nursing home, he said, as cheerfully as he could, "One leg gone, one eye gone! What next, eh?"

He'll be eighty-five in September.

Here's my mother in one of my favourite photographs of her, taken by Silverback in May this year.

She was eighty-four in April, and is physically astonishingly fit, and mentally pretty good too - - though rather deaf.

And here they are six decades ago, in 1948 or thereabouts. My mother would have been about twenty-four, the Communist about twenty-five.

The Communist's changed quite a bit. He had hair in those far-off days before I was born: I have never known him with hair. He grew a beard in the early seventies, and has kept it ever since. He's been through a lot recently, and it shows.

My mother, on the other hand, hasn't changed much at all. A few wrinkles, a few grey hairs but I think she's instantly recognisable.

Sixty years between the photograph of them together, and the photographs of them now. It's a long time.