The fascination
with cameras started very early and was less about photography and a lot more
about taking apart and never knowing how to put it together again. It was more
about 'how does it work' in a world full of working and not working things. Of
people who came and went and sometimes went and never came back again. In a
world of mystery where every moment carried the scope of all eternity. Where
delight and disappointment were sparring allies. Where the only real sense, was a sense of wonder.
'I WAS set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three;
and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village
began.
The June
grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never
been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each
blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a
wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that that
chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.
I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up
from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snowclouds of
elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of
their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming,
as though the sky were tearing apart.
For the
first time in my life I was out of the sight of humans. For the first time in
my life I was alone in a world whose behaviour I could neither predict nor
fathom: a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that
sprang about without warning. I was lost and I did not expect to be found
again. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face,
like a bully.'
From Cider with Rosie
- Laurie Lee (1914-1997)...
