Photobiography
1956 Betty and Friend
What is wrong with this picture?
According to my childhood inculcation, those lessons taught explicitly by my parents, implicitly by the community church, and tacitly supported by most of the town in which we lived, pretty much everything.
I was told smoking is bad, (yet almost everyone on my mom’s side were heavy smokers so ignore the hypocrisy). In hindsight, it’s one of the few admonitions from childhood I’m glad I followed. But it’s about the only one.
I was reminded frequently that motorcycles are too dangerous and to never take a ride on one. Later my parents soften, they said I could ride, but only after turning 18 and have decided on self-banishment by moving out on my own.
But almost always, constantly actually, I was lectured about girls, to resist the temptations of my male desire, to fear fast girl corruption, ‘sins of the flesh’, for its purpose is to lead one astray, and any temptation of fast girl sin must be stifled for my own good. Banishment from family and probable perpetual poverty in this life, and hell in the next, awaited me if I ever knocked up a fast girl.
And the idea of a fast girl, let’s call her Eve, it’s nature to lure a man away from God’s path, like Adam from Eden. The girl in this photograph owns a fast motorcycle too, the devil’s vehicle of choice. Motorcycles are Fun. Fast girl plus motorcycle are not only Temptation, they are guaranteed Damnation. Fast women like Eve are Sin. Sin and Fun (spelt with a capital F) are synonyms and nothing good would come from Fun. Ever.
[Quickly, there were other Sins. In no particular order: Big no to dancing. Dancing is a metaphorical expression of, shall we say, particular horizontal gyrations. When I was a little kid I wanted to tap like Jimmy Cagney but I learned at five: No to tap dancing so don’t even ask for lessons. Of course fast girls are good dancers because Dance is an allegory for Man’s fall from Grace, our loss of innocence, humanity’s introduction to pain and suffering, and Man’s lifelong struggle against Fun.
Hard liquor. Out of the question, but beer was always on hand for the adults at family gatherings. But since beer tasted vile, it was an easy pass.
I don’t know why, but Pool Halls apparently were dens of iniquity and since they must be places of Fun they were also forbidden. This was especially problematic in High School because every high school in Calgary had a pool hall within walking distance. In grade 11 and 12 PE we went to the pool hall, not the local one, but a fancy one with snooker tables. I saw no Sin (much to my disappointment) although one class while riding there with my PE teacher Mr. R., a woman crossing at a traffic light flashed us her tits.
Despite all this Sin and Temptation in high school, especially all of the Eves, I obeyed my parents because I was the Good and Faithful son, the smart kid who wanted their validation, and I was the studious child because I was working towards university. If I worked hard enough, society promised me a happy life, possibly even better than my parents, and if God’s Grace broke my way, possibly a job with the federal civil service, a career with a great pension.]
I happen to know the people in this photo. When I first saw it a couple of years ago, I saw Betty and the “real” Betty I knew was indeed a Rebel. In her, I glimpsed what I wanted, and still want: an alternative universe, to be an unconventional person, living an unconventional life comfortable with the disapproval of Good folk, to be unapologetically masculine, and to live honestly, to go where I want, when I want, and with who I want.
The year is 1956. Although I wished they were parked outside a pool hall, it’s actually the Coca Cola bottling plant where Betty worked. And the girl on the back, with the blond hair and cigarette, she has Eve written all over her face and body. She owns the motorcycle so you know she’s a fast girl. But Betty attracted fast girls. I admire Betty.
My dad knew Betty as a child, was her best friend in grade school, and it was through Betty that my father met my mother. My Father still says Betty was the best ball player he had ever seen. Betty was my mom’s maid of honour at the wedding. As kids, we would go to Betty and Lois’s house to watch the Grey Cup.
For all the moralizing from the fire and brimstone preaching, I never once heard my parents say a bad thing about Betty, or her lifestyle, or of her partner Lois. They loved Betty.
Betty lived life on her terms. So whenever I see this photo, and I pull it out fairly often to be inspired, I glimpse a version of me where I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, and my freedom, my one and only love, is the open road, my chariot a fast bike. And, of course, I only ride with fast girls, which is damn fine Fun.
This essay pays homage to Annie Ernaux and her book Exteriors about her observations and anecdotes about her neighbours and other ordinary folk. The excerpt from Paul Watkins book review gives a sense of how Ernaux uses Photography and the idea of camera to aid her written observations.
Peter Watkins | Book review | 21 Mar 2024
Ernaux has spoken of photography as acting as a catalyst for her writing, but it’s ordinary, as opposed to extraordinary, photographs of people that are meaningful to her. She uses photographs as an aide de memoire, and has suggested that: ‘The photograph is nothing other than stopped time. But the photograph does not save. Because it is mute. I believe on the contrary that photography increases the pain of passing time. Writing saves, and cinema.’ In her book The Years (2008), the opening passages come to us like abrupt flashes of memory; fragmentary, and incomplete, but bright and image-like. These lines reveal perhaps most clearly, both her directness and the umbilical bond between photography, memory and language, as well as the existential fear of forgetting and being forgotten: ‘All the images will disappear. […] Everything will be erased in a second. […] We will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.’