Quiet period

Hi Folk….sorry if you have been looking on the blog, only to find last entry was on the 4th. (I know, the blog is as addictive as a good book – hard to put down) The club is on summer schedule and meets alternate weeks. Our web site lists the yearly calendar of events.  As a consolation how about I tell you a little bed time story, it’s late and been a long day and this story has photography at its heart –  it has pictures too.  It centres around Seymour, a professional photographer.  Seymour lives back in the 1950’s, no, not in his head but that’s when these stories take place!  Stay awake!  Here is Seymour, back in the decade we were told we ‘never had it so good’.  And he wasn’t doing too badly either.

Seymour was ‘called up’ in 1941 and went into the RAF.  He trained in Air Reconnaissance, fitting cameras into aircraft and developing the films.  When he was demobbed in 1946, he decided to do what he was good at – photography.  I have covered a lot of his adventures in civvy street but little during the war.  This is one of those and the story starts at the beginning of the famous winter of 1947/8.  Seymour is walking back home from work, to his digs, a room in a big old / cold house with the use of the cellar for his darkroom.  His landlady is Mrs Pruitt, who hopefully will have his dinner ready.  The weather was cold and his thoughts ran back to when he was in North Africa in 1942.  It was warm in that desert.

Seymour feeling the cold

Mrs Pruitt thinking she should start Seymour’s dinner.

Up in his room, waiting for his dinner to be cooked, cold Seymour fishes out a photograph he took back in the desert in 1942 and ponders it.  He had been told to volunteer for a special mission; top secret so I can’t tell you.  It meant going behind enemy lines and using a special new film that could shoot in almost total darkness but then had to be developed within 24 hours.  They wanted him to do this task.  “Me!” he said.  “Don’t worry”, they said.  He would be taken to the destination by an elite squad who would protect him.  Traveling during the nights they could navigate the dessert terrain like the ancient mariners could navigate the oceans by the stars.

We are Lost!

What followed was a most amazing adventure!  Right! Off to bed, nighty night. Don’t let the Scarab beetles bite………