The Family Silver

The Family Silver Michael Collins

The Family Silver

One Christmas Day, as the family slumped into their chairs after lunch, I unrolled a portable screen in front of the television, turned down the lights and set up a slide projector. As I fiddled with the focus, there was that familiar smell of burning dust on the projector’s hot bulb, and the smudge of bright colours on the screen sharpened, suddenly, into an astonishingly vivid photograph of our father sitting beside my sister in the long grass of a summer day in the early nineteen-sixties. My father had died many years previously, and it was a shock to see him again – and to see him so young. The bemused atmosphere in the room turned into a stunned silence. My father is leaning towards my sister, and the brightness of her white top alongside his paleyellow T-shirt, framed within the darker green of the grass and the deep gold of a cornfield behind them, gives a chiaroscuro effect to the Kodachrome.

The photograph’s colours are rich and warm, and the focus slightly soft.

My sister is putting something into her mouth and looks immersed in her own little world. My father is facing the camera, looking towards my mother, presumably, who was taking the picture. The grass around them has been flattened, and there is some paper beside my father, the remains of a picnic.

He is squinting in the summer light, his mouth drawn tight in con­centration.

His left hand is grasped around his shin to steady him as he sits upright. He was younger then than I am now, in his early forties, and his hair, combed back, is black and barely receding, unlike the grey-and-white comb-over we knew so well. I look at his left hand and his arm, and his watch, and remember what it was like to hold on to that arm, how I would turn his wrist to look at his watch. I stare at my father and, like a crescendo of sound

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