Free Sandlands by Rosy Thornton Page B

The camera is on the move again, scanning the circle of faces, all angled towards the unseen crooner. A new section of the side wall appears and, hanging on it, one more photograph.
    It is taken in the bar again but this time the subject is a woman. Her clothing is dark and nondescript, bleaching to white where the picture is over-exposed or perhaps has faded with the light from the nearby window, and her face, tilted away from the camera, is cast half into shadow. I feel the stir of recognition nonetheless. It’s that deeply cleft, almost heart-shaped chin, unusual in a woman. I’m sure I’ve seen it, or an echo of it, very recently. Just this afternoon, in fact. That’s it: a woman with the same chin sat in the corner seat – the one with the high wooden back which in this clip is empty behind the cloth-capped singer – and sang ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ in a soft but sure contralto. Looking more closely at the photo before the camera swings away again, I can see that the woman in it is seated at the same corner place that her counterpart occupied today. Family tradition, maybe? This afternoon’s singer might be, what, daughter or granddaughter, great-granddaughter even, of the woman in the photo?
    The film was made in 1954 but the photograph would be older, might date from almost any time in the century prior to that. It is difficult to place the age of either one of them. Both in their forties or fifties, at a guess, but that’s all it is. For one thing, women’s dress always distorts their ages in old photographs; I’ve seen pictures from the 1950s where two-piece suits identical to their mothers’ make matrons out of girls of seventeen. Not that there’s anything distinctively of their time about these women’s clothes. In fact, now that I try to focus my mind back, I can remember almost nothing about what the singer wore today beyond an impression of something plain with long sleeves, and black or at any rate dark in colour. Her hair, too, as I recall it, gave little away, being that type of pale English dusty fawn from which the pigment seems to leach away gradually with the years, instead of any positive change to grey. The monochrome image in front of me on the laptop screen offers even fewer clues.
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    Abruptly, I click to freeze the film and select instead the clip from 1979. The bar of the Ship now springs to life in colour before me – or, rather, that peculiar version of colour which seems to be unique to video footage of the 1970s, strangely lacking in bold primaries and dominated by the in-between shades, as if the world back then was mainly orange, mauve and turquoise. Music flares, the soundtrack kicking in a fraction after the picture. An instrumental piece, a Morris tune I think I recognise, cranked out at a spirited lick by two melodeons in unison, with a third adding creaking harmonies.
    On the ledge along the back wall the objects are much as before, although their order has switched here and there, and perhaps a few more bottles have accumulated. The striped and moustachioed football team is still in its place to the left of the piano but the man with his collie in the cornfield has now shifted along, the space between taken up by an old Bell’s whisky jeroboam half filled up with crown bottle caps. Around the room the cigarettes are now king size, filter-tipped, and the gathered locals also seem to be somehow larger, broader. Coastal Suffolk might not jump to every whim of fashion but the trouser legs, the skirts and sleeves and collars are all perceptibly wider, and in several cases floral. I even spot a cheesecloth blouse, draping a pleasingly ample female bosom.
    The melodeon players reach their final chord more or less together and, after a splash of applause and some coughing, at length one voice emerges through the throb of conversation, low and singing unaccompanied. For a moment, my breathing stops.
    For to see poor Tom