Conclusion: “I Like Living with the Past”

Abstract

Today, just before I started writing this chapter, I looked at a photograph of my grandmother and my uncle on holiday in the 1940s: she wearing a new holiday best frock, he in his schoolboy shorts and tweed jacket, both smiling. The outfit and hairstyle worn by my grandmother could easily (and willingly) be worn now by any one of the female participants. My uncle’s outfit would not now be worn by a modern little boy (unless he was going to a 1940s event maybe!). In the background the street is different, but recognisable. Perhaps as towns, places, clothes, language, technology, and social mores all become less recognisable, we look back more often to try to keep a connection, to stop the clocks, to keep the faith. If I was able to step into the world of the photograph there would feasibly be much I wouldn’t understand, such as slang of the time, how to speak or act, even body language. My position as an educated professional woman from a working-class background would be an unusual one – in fact, I would more likely be working in the same steelwork factory as my grandmother. However, there would be much that would be familiar, and things would probably seem quite difficult without the technology that we now take for granted. The ghosts in things become the only connection we can keep to a world which is becoming ever smaller, more and more like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I didn’t expect this book to turn out to be about hauntings, and freighted with emotion, as it is – and I return to hauntings, below. I thought it would be about leisure and gender, shopping and storage and it is. But I did know that research participants will always show the researcher things they hadn’t considered or expected, and take the research in unplanned directions.