Old photos have always been an inspiration to me. Who were the people in the photo below? What are they doing there and what happened to them? Their clothes give the impression that the day is warm and the three of them are, at least, acquainted. The caption beneath the photo reads: Molly, Joan and Hans.
The caption to the photo below reads: Picnic by the Lautersee with Wolffe and Hans. A little research tells me that the lake is about 1000 metres above sea level and above Mittenwald. The girls at the picnic are Molly and Joan and the fact that they have WW2 German army tunics over their shoulders suggests that the altitude is cooling the air more than they anticipated.
So – who were Wolffe, Hans and Molly and Joan? Well, I must come clean here and admit that my question was a rhetorical one and that I know who these black-and-white people were.
One of the girls is my aunt. The other girl is the daughter of my grandfather’s gardener. Both girls were on a trip to Germany in August 1939. One person is not shown here. Perhaps, he was taking the photos. That man was my father and he was 19 on this trip. The captions in the photograph album tell us very little about these people or about their relationships.
In fact, one could read anything into them and, like many writers do, that is exactly what I have done. Reflections on these distant figures and what might have happened to them was the inspiration for my novel, Feeling the Distance. The ambiguous nature of the title is, of course, deliberate.
Thoughts and Words 