My sister came to visit last summer and brought with her this photo booth picture she found among our mum’s things. Amazingly I had never seen it before so I was bowled over at having a forgotten moment from my childhood unexpectedly revealed.
We think it was taken around 1967 which makes me about five years old (bless), and fifty years later I find myself staring at it trying to imagine where we were and what that day was like. We were probably out shopping and the photo booth was a spur-of-the-moment bit of fun because I do remember us doing that on other occasions. We certainly look happy, especially my mum who is positively beaming — I like to think with pride over her lovely kids.
I treasure pictures like this because I don’t have many of them. We didn’t own a camera until my mum bought a Pocket Instamatic in the 1970s so I don’t have a lot of family photos from before then. I have school photos but those are really just a record of the changing length of my hair.
It occurred to me writing this that the really big hole in the photo album of my life is that I only have one photo of me with my dad when I was a little kid. I guess he didn’t have a camera either.
This is Dusty’s 1982 version of a great Elvis Costello song.
Download: Losing You (Just A Memory) – Dusty Springfield (mp3)
cryingallthewaytothechipshop.wordpress.com 
Thanks for sharing. Lovely photo of your mum … She looks a bit like Diana Rigg in it, and yes – she’s positively radiant.
My early childhood photos with my mum often seem dominated by her horn-rimmed specs…
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My mum wore specs but she took them off for photos
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That’s great Lee, lovely surprise and pic. We got into the habit of doing photobooth shots when our 2 kids were younger and I found the pictures again recently. We stopped when they got bigger (and the cost of it skyrocketed, £5 a photo and you don’t even get 4 different shots anymore).
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Another one where some of it could be me talking, we didn’t own a camera until I was about 9 or 10, although there are some pics of me when I was a toddler. But we also never took many pics, the cost of developing them put my mum off.
There are no pics of me and my dad until the last ten years since the early 70s when he and my mum were still together. I think the first one may have been of me him and my son. Last pic of me and my mum together was on my wedding day. She was gone 3 years later.
However there aren’t actually masses of pics of me and my kids, except the usual birthdays and family holidays like ‘olden days’ even with a phone in everybody’s hands. There are possibly 1000s of pics of my kids with my elbow or knee or back of my head in them though…
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What a wonderful photo! Thank you for sharing
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Your mum was a stunning beauty and, yes, she’s quite enjoying herself with the two of you.
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My sister in law seriously questioned her parents (and my wife) as to why there were no photos of her as a baby or toddler, she was convinced that she’d been adopted (also she was blonde while the other three had dark hair). It took her a while to accept the honest answer that her parents had been too poor after she was born to afford a camera.
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