Worlds Gone By

‘Wow, you all looked so glamorous back then!’ my daughter said to me the other day, with more than a touch of envy. We were browsing through a selection of old photo albums from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and happened to stop at one particularly fetching snapshot: the one I ended up selecting for this post.

But glamorous? Seriously? I certainly didn’t think so, back in the day, and I’m sure others in the photo didn’t, either. We were just young then, enjoying a social event, having one or two cigarettes too many (oops), wearing whatever we happened be wearing. (I was particularly partial to the quaint Laura Ashley fashion.) And, above all, we had no idea that the scene we were enjoying at that exact, precious, encapsulated moment in time, would one day be relegated to a museum-like archive and labelled ‘vintage’ by future generations who did not yet exist. In fact – hmmm, as I now look at those pictures through my daughter’s eyes, I have to say, perhaps she does have a point about the glamour? (No vanity intended!)

Her words could have echoed my very own sentiments from a few decades earlier; words I often used to say to my own mother. I too used to love looking at old photos, taken in that distant world she had lived in before I was born. A world that was so very different from the one I’d been brought up in, a whole generation later. But despite her youthful photos being from the 1950s and 60s and therefore in black and white, everything seemed so much more colourful, somehow. So much more glamorous – ah, there it is again! – that word that so well describes the past we never knew. So much more cinematic. Theatrical. I don’t know … deeper?

Back in my own youth, whenever I used to gaze at those 1950s family photos, it was as though I was being transported to that other world – that land before I was born – in a real, physical sense. All those get-togethers that my mother and her friends would frequent, all those outings, parties and youthful bashes … ahh, I could almost hear the soundtrack of their chic café haunts and dance halls; the tap-tapping of shining heels upon polished floors as they all swished and twirled and jived away to Dean Martin and Nat King Cole and Elvis Presley, thinking themselves so cool, so trendy, so chic.

And now, as my daughter gazes at the photo of her younger mum (moi – but the cigarettes have gone now, I’m happy to say) having a good time at some social do, way back in the late 1980s, she views the celluloid image with the very same mixture of intrigue and longing that I myself used to feel. It’s as though we’re both being allowed a kind of time-travel peep through the keyhole of a door that has no key. Relegated to the ‘Vintage’ drawer. A world gone by.

But that’s not such a bad thing, is it? All worlds go by, within the individual worlds that we inhabit. All our younger years go by. All our lives go by. Everything goes by. Thank goodness for those vintage photos, I say!

And now I find myself wondering this. In another twenty or thirty years’ time, when my children are my age, and their own children are looking through old photos of when their parents were young, will they feel the same way? When these future grandchildren start to browse through old family pictures on Facebook and Instagram and wherever else, will their eyes and hearts glow under that same blend of longing, curiosity and nostalgia for that world of the 2020s that they never knew? That world gone by?

So many worlds, all destined to go by.