When you are only just a picture away from a long time ago .......

You know you are old when a picture like this is not some funny old “gent” in silly trousers with a car that belongs in a museum, but a familiar friend and the man is your dad.

For our kids and grandchildren, the scene is not just old but ancient.

For me on the other hand, I have seen it lots of times, and it connects me with Dad before I knew him and before he became just Dad, the teller of silly jokes, the craftsman who could turn out the most wonderful Christmas toys made of wood and the man of mystery who in the summer was gone for months driving posh people on coaching holidays across the Continent.

So, this is that other dad, sometime in the late 1920s into the following decade when he was single with that glint in his eye, heaps of charm and a smile that instantly made you at ease with him.

Added to which there were the cars, and I mean cars, because across several pictures he is beside the wheel of some very sporty numbers along with cheaper but no less magic automobiles.

I have no idea how he came across them, whether they were bought, hired or borrowed, but he and they were companions along with a variety of other “companions” who always look happy in his presence.

I never thought to ask who these young women were, and I doubt Dad would have said, offering instead an enigmatic smile followed by a clearing of the throat and a change of subject.

Nor with the passage of ninety or so years are we ever going to know.

If there were tender letters of affection exchanged with these friends none have survived and now there is no one left to ask.

Not that I think I would ask, after all even your dad deserves a little privacy, as do we all.

But I do like the way that three very old pictures of cars that belong in a museum span the near century and are a direct line of continuity to me sitting in our house and a different historical landscape.

They are a cut down version of how we sometimes connect to the past. 

I remember asking one of my uncles about his memories of the General Strike of 1926, when he was living in Gateshead.  I was expecting accounts of workers at meetings, and of strike breakers driving lorries and railway trains, but instead I got the memory of just how clear the skyline was, freed from the smoke thrown up by hundreds of factory chimneys.

In the same way I was fascinated by two accounts of women from the 1940s.

In the first, a woman in her 80s recalled a conversation with an even more elderly woman who worked as a servant in the court of King George III, while another woman talked about her great grandmother’s reaction on hearing the news of the execution of the French Queen in 1793.

What I like is that in just two people’s memories we are back at the end of the 18th century, and that makes me wish I could have eavesdropped on the conversation between the philosopher Bertrand Russel and one of his relatives who had discussed the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832 with Lord John Russell who had campaigned for Parliamentary reform.

Or I could just have asked Dad where he got the cars.

Location; unknown

Pictures; Dad, a friend and three cars, undated from the Simpson collection