IMAGININGS

So sure as this beard’s grey,
What will you adventure...?
William Shakespeare (The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene III)

IN 1978, I had a passport photograph taken in a shop in the Bermudiana Arcade in Hamilton, Bermuda. The proprietor sat me in front of a screen, took a photograph with a large camera on a tripod, and then took another picture after telling me not to move. My photographs would be ready in a week’s time.

I recall collecting four prints (and he gave me the two negatives), which would have to be trimmed down by somebody in the passport section of the British Embassy in Washington DC. The head, neck, and uppermost shoulders were the correct size, but the photographer had set his sights on my waist and everything above.

Happens I had a beard at the time. Not the first I had grown. I have had a moustache since I was in my late teens, and once I reached my twenties, I would grow a beard from time to time, depending on the weather. A cooler time of year would be more encouraging.

In 1978, when I was renewing my British passport whilst in Bermuda, I was anticipating a trip, my first, to the Rocky Mountains. I would have been 28 years old. My hair and beard were reddish brown, quite a bit darker than my hair was in a 1968 passport (taken in Gillingham, Kent). A passport in the late 1980s showed me with thinning, greying hair.

My current passport, issued here in Northumberland about two years ago, is that of a white-haired individual, with a white moustache. The same picture appears on my bus pass. When I was in the booth, having my photograph taken by a digital camera, my glasses seemed to reflect the light. I took them off, and so I am not exactly myself, as I always wear my glasses when I am out and about. I look squinty.

I spent a few years on the other side of a camera in the same shop in which I had posed for my passport picture back in 1978. It would have been the late 1990s. “Kit ‘n’ Caboodle” sold newspapers, cigarettes, junk food and soft drinks, and ghastly small toys at Christmas. One could have photocopies made. I never figured out how to work the enormous Xerox machine, and tried to be busy whenever a customer appeared wanting copies. As I recall, most of these customers were expatriate workers copying documents to submit to the Bermuda Government to enable them to retain their jobs another year or so. There were also a few poets who wanted no end of copies of their latest oeuvres. Expectant mothers would turn up wanting copies of their ultrasound scans, and would point out the important bits. The ultrasound foetus, one’s first passport picture.

At Kit ‘n’ Caboodle, I was mainly employed as their passport photographer. One would hold a Polaroid camera, and aim a beam of light at the client seated in front of a light-absorbing screen, and a tiny red dot of light could be seen on the client’s forehead. One learned where to aim the beam of light for the particular type of passport photograph. Different countries had different requirements. The United States passport needed one ear showing, so taken from slightly to one side (I forget which). The United States also requires passport photographs of even the smallest infants, with eyes wide open. This could take an hour and could reduce me to near-insanity. One had to stand leaning over the wee bairn, holding the camera out, but being extra-careful not to drop it (which could kill the kid!)

Our black customers nearly always hated their passport photographs, usually saying: “This is too dark. I look like a Jamaican.”

One woman with rather droopy breasts pushed them up from underneath and asked me to ensure they were in the finished picture. I explained that an acceptable passport photograph showed the top of the shoulders, neck and head. No breasts (neither pert, nor pendulous).

We also had an ID photograph service, creating personal identification cards that were, clearly, not legal. $18 would buy you a laminated card the size of a bus pass with your name, address and age alongside a photograph. The client would write the details onto the card. Nothing was witnessed. The client could create his own identity.

One day a young, light-skinned lad came into Kit ‘n’ Caboodle and asked for one of our ID cards. The boy looked, perhaps, 15 years of age. I dare say he wanted an ID to buy cigarettes and liquor, requiring him to be 21. This kid’s picture added nothing to his smooth face. Before I could glue the photograph onto the card on which the boy had written his inaccurate details, and then laminate it, he grabbed the photo, whipped out a black felt-tip pen, and scribbled a beard and moustache on the immature face. “You can laminate it now.”

The boy had it in his mind that if he presented a photograph of himself with a beard, even if he did not actually have one on his face, he would still be able to buy his smokes and Black Seal rum. He did not seem to have a notion that his hastily drawn beard was clearly just that, scribbled onto a picture. Oscar Wilde wrote: “Naïveté is like the bloom of a delicate, exotic flower. You touch it but once and it is destroyed forever.” One did not have the heart to spoil the boy’s day. I gave him two dollars change from his twenty-dollar note.

I have two personal activities that are, I dare say, hobbies. I research genealogy, which involves many, many hours following up leads back many centuries. I have around two thousand individuals in my “family tree”, all considerably detailed. Each relative has documented evidence attached to his or her file: addresses, dates, connections, photographs.

I also have a Nikon digital camera, and I spend time taking dozens of pictures that I tinker with on my computer, and that usually are deleted as the one or two satisfying snapshots stand out. If a picture is too dark, I can change the lighting with a few clicks. Nothing Jamaican about my photography.

Documental

MY NEW PASSPORT was delivered by courier less than four days after I posted the application for a new one, and my almost-outdated passport, in our village Post Office-cum-Bookstore, to a processing centre in Peterborough.

Peterborough is some distance away, a few hours by fast train, an hour by air. I suppose, perhaps six hours in a van. I don't know how my application and the cheque for £72 got there, or how the British Passport - which has above United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on the front cover two words which I despise: European Union - got back to me so very quickly.

When the courier, who was driving a white van, knocked at my door and handed the envelope to me I thought there must be some problem with my application. However, it was just a case of efficient service. Amazing what £72 can buy in January 2009 when a pound is worth but a groat.

I not only received my new passport, but one of the two photographs I had sent to Peterborough (as requested on the forms) was returned to me, along with a couple of pamphlets on travel and currency matters. As the only foreign currency I expect to encounter is that in Scotland, I popped the pamphlets in my file, along with my old passport.

Ten years ago, my passport photograph featured a white-haired gentleman that I still hardly recognise. Said old codger had, and has, a white moustache (a feature since he was about seventeen when The Beatles grew theirs in imitation of his - Sgt Pepper and all that Summer of Love business). I didn't wear my bifocals in the latest picture as the fellow showing me how to use the digital photo-booth in the village thought glasses might give off a reflection. So, steel-grey eyes under white brows. Damn, I'd look pretty tough except for the wattles.

Facially, I've not changed so much. I looked this bad a decade ago. And I remember getting that passport picture taken in 1999. I had it done in a little shop in Bermuda called Kit 'n Caboodle. What I didn't know on that day I had it done was that a couple of years later I would be the passport photographer in that shop. I spent two years in hell in Kit 'n' Caboodle taking passport photographs, making photocopies and selling newspapers and fags. Ugh!

I don't have much of a history, or paper trail, compared to some. Blogging is increasing the chances of someone noticing my effort to make a mark on the world. That's the sort of mark that many might treat much like shit on their shoes: They want to be rid of it before it marks something else and they are held to blame.

My new passport doesn't say much about me, not even if one could read the computer chip embedded in it. A quick visual inspection shows the same old face, my full name, my citizenship and place of birth. That's about it. And when the passport expires, which might not be when I do. If I were travelling, I suppose the chip would have some family and residential details when scanned. So would my right eye, if examined appropriately. I had that photo-scanned at an airport a few years ago; it must be in computer databases. I believe the patterns on a retina are unique. I had to remove my glasses to have that scan done, of course; otherwise there would be unique fingerprints in the computer databases too.

The only other documents I have that identify me quite legally are my birth certificate, which is filed somewhere safe in the flat (can't think just where, it's that safe) and my bus pass, which has the same picture as my passport, it happens. The photo-booth spat out four photos for £5.

I'm identified on records such as my utility bills, bank statements and cards, club memberships, medical records and Cailean's medical records, but not legally, I'm guessing. I couldn't claim an inheritance by showing Cailean's castration bill, or my Visa card. And no end of these blogs will enable me to travel overseas through a customs and immigration checkpoint. Google up Ross Eldridge won't win the Lottery.

I have a few hobbies: The latest and most consuming is genealogy. I work many hours each week on my Family Tree, and I have over 700 names that I'm fairly familiar with. Eldridge is the least of me. I am King, Witney, Crow, Moon, Proctor, Clough, Heys, Stockdale, Lancaster, Driver, Lee and Geldard, and more. Those are blood lines that flow in mine. If you prick me, am I not Hustwit and Sherwood and Conqueste as well? It's a fascinating thing to look into all this.

The folks, my folks, in my Family Tree, are faintly represented in the world: Census and BMD reports. The Mormons have many, many church and registrar records available for Family History buffs. The Mormons do their research to dig up names (not bodies) to have proxy baptisms for the dead. Kind of creepy if you are a Jew exterminated at Auschwitz to have a Utah housewife being dunked for you. One can find old telephone books, wills and legal documents, photographs and correspondence.

I've been looking at my grand-uncle James Arthur Lancaster's military papers, in particular his medical records. James Arthur, my grandfather William Lancaster's older brother, was 21 when he volunteered to fight in the First World War, and had his medical on 5 May, 1915. The medical was certified and he was signed on that same day by a Justice of the Peace, H.H. Heys, who may have been related if James Arthur had lived long enough to see his brother marry into the Heys family.

On 5 May, 1915, James Arthur Lancaster was 5' 5 ¼" tall, weighed 128 lbs, had a fully expanded chest of 35 ½" (the expansion being 3") and he was 21 years and 4 months old. He was right-handed. He was, up until that moment (and had been from the age of eleven) a weaver in the Queen Street Mill. He was a member of the Church of England.

In May of 1918, James Arthur Lancaster was hospitalised near the battlefield, twice for diarrhoea, and was also treated for scabies. I've looked up scabies: They are mites that burrow in between one's fingers and toes, in armpits and groins, in the cleft in the buttocks. They are easily passed by direct person-to-person contact, or from surfaces, and are still commonly found. Well, one hopes James Arthur got his from a hooker, but it was probably a dirty towel. (Same thing, you might say.)

2 September, 1918, poor young James was killed in action, all of 24 years old. That was not recorded on a new certificate, just scribbled onto an old form. I guess paper was scarce with all the trees going to prop up the trenches.

I found out more about my grand-uncle's proportions, in some ways, than you could easily find out about me. I'll confess here that I'm taller and heavier than he was, and wear a 42" jacket if you want to send me one. I'm partial to tweeds and corduroys.

Should one go looking for one's kindred dead? Mormons are told they must, for they cannot be saved without them. My excuse is just as selfish: I'm looking for myself.

My next passport, due in 2019, might feature in its embedded device a family tree back to Adam, every document of any importance that ever featured me, the contents of this blog, and several photograph albums.

Of course, I might be dead in 2019 as the average age of members of my family hardly extends to 70, and I sneezed several times this afternoon. No telling what I'll look like next go around. I might be in an urn. Some great-nephew of mine might be wondering what to do with my dust.