It’s back to base, as one sign which I’ve seen on the glass façades of Gatwick airport recites. That base is, presumably, London: and that sign wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t addressed to Londoners returning home after one of their escapades, more likely than not from abroad. The question is, then, is it addressed to me as well?
I have indeed, just come back from a short trip back home. Last Saturday was my dad’s birthday, and having received some travel allowance for the company’s summer party, I decided to take the chance and make him a surprise. Rather than taking the train back to London from Brussels, I booked a flight to Italy instead: I showed up at the door without notice.
I was received by mom, who seeing me, at once burst into tears:
What a great surprise you’ve made us! What a great surprise…!
Dad wasn’t there. He had gone to get groceries and was still out, which meant that I had arrived at the perfect time for lunch. We set the table, and mom told me to wait on the sofa, so that dad could see me as he entered the house. When he arrived, he opened the door and headed directly for the kitchen to leave the grocery bags: he hadn’t noticed me. So I said, surprise! He gasped and turned around in astonishment: seeing me, he immediately understood and was moved as well.
Excited by my unexpected return home, dad decided to open a bottle of white wine, which I presume would have otherwise been left for dinner, when they were originally planning to celebrate. We had a summer lunch of ham and cantaloupe with finger crackers. We were blessed with an extremely sweet and juicy cantaloupe, and some very greasy ham. It felt like I hadn’t had this kind of summer lunch in ages. I savoured my bites one after the other, alternating them with sips of prosecco.
We spent the rest of the weekend converting our old family videotapes into digital films, using a little device I had bought, and which was my actual birthday gift for dad. In 1995, my parents received a Sony camera from their friends as a wedding gift: they used it until it broke, around ten years later. The tapes they recorded in those ten years document holidays, hangouts with friends, family gatherings and, most crucially for me, the earliest years of my life. As those tapes tend to deteriorate with time, and 30 years had already passed since the moment they were filmed, me and dad often spoke of finding a way to convert them into digital format before they would become unusable. Et voilà, a perfect gift idea.
Since every tape required to be played in its entirety in order to be converted, and having gathered in total nothing short of 20 tapes -each lasting some 60 to 90 minutes- the whole process took quite some time. In fact it occupied us on and off until the day I was supposed to fly back to London (later, my dad would find two additional damaged tapes, which he converted by himself). As one tape got digitalised, we would then play it on TV while letting the next one being processed in the background: this way, when one tape was over we always had another one ready to watch.
Needless to say, the first tapes my parents wanted to watch were those that saw little me as the main character. These were filmed between 1997 and 1999, so between the time I was one and three years old. Among these clips, some pivotal moments of my life had been captured. For example, my first Christmas, of which I would otherwise have no memory. Or again, my first birthday, in which I look very confused about the whole endeavour, and instead of blowing off the candle, I try to catch the flame with my fingers (only to be stopped apprehensively by my mom and aunt). Apart from these crucial moments, the content of most of these clips consisted of hours and hours of me engaging in the most infantile activities: being washed or spoon-fed by my parents, rather than rolling on the bed or playing with some toys on the ground. If anything, these movies made me realise that while I had seen photos of me at that age before, I had never actually had the chance to watch myself being a baby. There is something incredibly humbling and touching in the realisation that all of us, at some point in our early lives, have been a small mumbling bag of meat. Seeing yourself being that little bag of meat is almost an alienating experience, and somewhere deep inside, you cannot but wonder, was that really me? I was also shocked to see myself engaging in some naughty behaviour, like smashing a toy on the head of another fellow child, or hitting a small keyboard with my fists because I couldn’t get around on how to make it work. This early, naughty version of myself was something completely unknown to me, and for how typical those actions can be for a child of that age, seeing myself misbehaving like that crushed the presumption, which for some reason I had always held, of having been a well-behaved kid for all of my childhood.
After hours and hours of videos of me being a child, I insisted on moving onto watching some of the clips filmed before the time I was born, since these were the oldest in the collection and also the ones that interested me the most. I wanted to see how my parents looked and how they acted before they gave birth to me. The oldest of these clips dated from November 1995, just after my parents’ wedding, and showed their honeymoon in Prague. At that time my mom would have been 31, and my dad 32 years old: essentially my current age. It was impressive, and somewhat shocking, to see how young and carefree they acted back then. There is in their eyes, in their voice even, a certain lightness which disappears in the clips dating from after I was born. Of course, you can tell that they are still the same two funny people, and their humour hasn’t changed: but a veil of maturity, of wisdom almost, has taken place in their gaze. A similar metamorphosis can be witnessed for my parents’ friends as well. In fact, my mom and dad were among the first couples of their friends group to have a baby. The other babies were all born between 1996 and 1998, and so the transformation of their parents was captured as part of these clips. The change in their look is particularly easy to notice, because my dad was obsessed with filming long shots. And so for almost every member of the group, there are equally long shots dating from both before and after the birth of their first child. What appears almost as a group of punks in 1995, going out for all kinds of group activities (like a pizza dinner at the lake, a new year’s party in some restaurant, etc.), transforms rapidly, in a matter of just a few years, in a group of organised, responsible and apprehensive adults (all at the service of their respective infants!). They are still, of course, the same group of friends: but the shift is evident. They have suddenly grown a step older.
There were, then, some clips that were less amusing and more painful to watch, mostly because of the heavy feeling of nostalgia they carried with them. These were, needless to say, all clips depicting family members which are now deceased, and most notably my four grandparents. In one of these, dating from the summer of 1996, my parents are visiting my paternal uncle, his partner and one of their friends in a cottage house with a splendid view on the Tuscan countryside. Before, I had heard much of this house being recounted in my parents’ memories, and so finally seeing it with my eyes was, once again, something of a strange, alienating experience, almost like peeking into someone else’s memories. In that tape, I am just a few months old. There is a shot which is particularly moving, where my parents are packing up to leave and drive back to Milan. You can see their old Ford Fiesta filled to the top with luggage and nursery equipment, all organised and catered for the new big thing that has happened in their life. JP, my uncle’s partner, then cracks a joke: he takes a huge plant from the garden, together with its pot, and acts as if he wants to gift it to my parents: This one is for you! They all burst out laughing, because there is no way it will fit in the car. We also laughed while watching the clip, and then my mom started to cry. My dad looked almost hypnotised: you could tell that the memory of that moment was still clear in his mind, though it hadn’t been evoked so vividly in almost thirty years. He couldn’t refrain from whispering,
They’re all dead now…
In a different clip, shot during autumn of the same year, my parents are preparing dinner at my maternal grandparents’ house. I believe this film was particularly hard to watch for my mom, because that house, in which she grew up, was recently sold off to cover for some of her family’s debts (I believe my mom feels some sense of guilt about this, since my grandpa had made her promise that they would not sell the house after his death). I was particularly impressed to see my grandma well and healthy, since as far back as my memory goes, I can only recall her being ill. In the tapes we have digitalised, she comes across as a surprisingly witty woman, and her voice is strikingly similar to that of my great aunt (her younger sister). In one shot, my grandma is stirring the pot while my dad stands next to her to learn her recipe. My grandpa is also standing near my grandma, waiting to see if she needs any help, while my mom is the one doing the filming. The TV is surprisingly off, and a strange, dreamlike silence fills the room. Ecstatic, I can almost smell the steam coming from the sauce pot in that cosy autumn evening…
-End of the third post in the Memories of my family series.