Family photo recalls joy and grief in a National Trust garden

Five years ago, on my partner Claire’s birthday, I had a family photo taken on a wooden deck in a National Trust for Scotland garden six miles east of Edinburgh. We had just eaten a small, hasty birthday picnic of pastries and Nosecco and wandered through the walled garden to the wild meadow around a pond.

The deck, an ideal spot for pond-dipping and a hidden viewing platform for trainspotters, is where my autistic son then loved to jump in tandem with the ScotRail trains in the middle distance. Our friend Dawn, whose husband had recently died and who was becoming part of our family, took two photos; in the second almost all of us are looking at the lens and some of us even look happy.

I treasure the image because we have painfully few photos of us together: my son’s needs mean we mostly parent separately. I love Claire’s Judith Butler 'Gender Trouble' T-shirt, my red Saltwater sandals, my daughter’s slightly suspicious two-year-old face and Daphne, our greying rescue staffie, in her customary 'jug-tail' position.

The garden’s quiet — whole hours can pass without seeing another person, and there have been days when we saw more kingfishers than people — so there is no judgment and we can be the family we rarely appear to be elsewhere. Three months before the photo was taken my mother died of breast cancer alone in a London hospice, 500 impassable miles from my home in Leith, at the height of the pandemic.

Key Topics

Culture, Scotrail, Leith, Edinburgh, London, Breast Cancer