Wedding Photograph © 08 Fraser Harrison

Dated 1913 and signed by the photographer in a fancy pencil flourish,
it shows my mother’s parents in their wedding finery. Neither smiles.
Back row: the bride’s three handsome brothers and the best man; moustaches, butterfly
collars, buttonholes.
Front row: bride and groom flanked by her parents and his mother (smarter, more
expensively dressed).
Her four sisters, in their bridesmaid’s dresses, clutch their bouquets, not one a
beauty.
The mood is solemn, ceremonious. Marriage was no laughing matter among these
Cheshire farming folk.

I used to show the photograph to visitors, pointing to the youngest bridesmaid,
a little girl of nine or ten, stout-looking in her home-made dress, a basket of flowers in
her plump hand, quaintly smiling.
This was my great-aunt Getrude, whom I remember from my childhood as an old maid,
bed-bound, her smile sometimes falling out.
Then I’d show them the oak settle I’d inherited from her,
a fine piece with its maker’s name, Starkey and Neal of Altringham, stenciled on
its back,
above which, indulging in a spot of home curating, I’d hung the wedding picture in a
period oak frame.

But my mother, eighty-one this year, marbles intact, corrected me: the girl is not
Gertrude.
She is Connie, my mother’s aunt on the other side of the family,
the one who put her head in a gas oven,
the one nobody spoke about afterwards.