More From the Past

Mother's Day gets me to thinking about Sophie, naturally. I've often wondered what it was like for her family when she married my father and moved to England with him.

At the time she left, her whole family was in Corner Brook: her parents, with whom she lived, and her siblings Daisy, Neta and Charles and their families.

Aunt Neta and Nanny.


Nanny has written on the back of this photo: "To Sophie from Daisy this was taken on Signal Hill St. John's"



Uncle Charles, Aunt Pearl, Robert, and Elaine.

She also left behind an wild assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins, none of whom I could keep straight once we moved back to Newfoundland. Here is a photo of Nanny with her brother Bob's wife, Auntie. Her name was Annie, but everyone (even Uncle Bob) called her Auntie. Everyone except me. Believing it rude to call an adult by her first name, I insisted on calling her Aunt Auntie.

I am amazed to see Nanny wearing pants. The caption she's written on the back is incongruous and hints of a larger story lost: "of course you no these two she never thought i would be able to wear her dress."

Photos such as these were the way my mother and her family kept in touch with each other. Tucked up in an envelope with letters, they are the 1950s-1960s equivalent of the blog. How often did Mom, my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles ever talk to each other in the years she lived in England? Transatlantic phone calls would have cost a fortune, even if both parties had telephones (which I'm not sure they did).

So it was letters and photos back and forth, some to and from Dad's family too. Some of the pictures have survived; none of the letters have except a postcard or two. But the captions on the back of the photos, most often in Nanny Osmond's punctuation-free phonetic writing, tell you a lot.

"And this is our lover Elaine."


This is an earlier picture of our lover Elaine, along with our lover Deb, and a very proud-looking Granddad. Or Pop, as they knew him. I guess Uncle Cec didn't much like getting his picture taken!


This one broke my heart when I read Nanny's caption: "Dad Elaine and your cat we thinks a lot about that cat."

I think I come by my love of animals honestly. Mom carried this photo of her little dog Butch with her to England.

And Butch later appeared, along with one of Aunt Neta's boys, in this photo:


"i was out taking in my foundation garment and dad took my picture."

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that Granddad quite enjoyed catching Nanny by surprise. Here she is with a box of (apparently contraband) Purity Lemon Creams.


Mom also sent photos back the other way. We had a dog named Butch too, who features prominently in this photo in Wales:

"Elizabeth is eating here. That's what she does when she's not changing her clothes."

The caption of the back of this photo of Brian with the neighbour's dog puzzled me for a long time: "That's the coal shed in the background." Why on earth would she choose to highlght that? Then I realized that a coal shed --particularly a brick one with a window-- was probably an unusual thing in Newfoundland.


Mom came back to Newfoundland for a couple of years while Dad was posted to Cyprus. Brian was a baby and she was pregnant with Elizabeth. She sent this photo to Dad, saying "I think this one is cute." He sure was. But now he's over 50 and what little hair he has left is pure silver. What happened?


I am sure that Mom and Nanny never thought twice after scribbling a caption on the back of a photo and putting it in the mail. But these cracked photos, with their hard-to-read writing, are in fact a part of their legacy. You catch a whiff of their senses of humour, which were superb. You see how they loved each other. You get some idea that in moving away, my mother was living a very different life than what she would have imagined growing up.

And you see that these pictures of everyday family life in the kitchen and backyard of Premier Drive, of a beloved brother and sister-in-law camping at Bonne Bay Pond, kept her connected to who she was and where she --and we-- came from.