The Photograph

How old was I then - maybe seven or eight in grainy black and white. I can remember I was standing outside my grandfathers two story terrace house in Sydney. Must have been around nineteen fifty three, school holidays. I didn't like the smell of his place with its old, moss coated brick walls, the claustrophobic backyard and the lack of sunlight. Everything seemed dark and damp. I can picture my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table with his stooped shoulders, wheezing away, rolling his daily quota of cigarettes, glasses set low on his nose, sunken eyes peering at me below an unkempt hedge of eyebrows. I slept on a rickety camp stretcher in his bedroom beneath musty sheets and would wake during the night whenever he got up to pee in his pot. It was always good to get home to a big backyard, a wide open sky, trees to climb and nights undisturbed by the sound of my dear grandfather peeing into a pot.