Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Previously I’d seen no value in photographs; their stillness, and their silencing effect on the past — separating sound from vision at the moment of the shutter’s click — bred in me mistrust. Yet there must have been instances in my childhood when I’d overcome my scruples, because once or twice I had taken down the family album. I recall an image of my mother in her watch shop, one of Father on the swing, several of my parents’ wedding, and one of a bagpiper with enormous cheeks. For several hours I had stared at the photographs. I was trying to imagine the sounds the camera had failed to capture. And as I tried — I was studying the inflated bagpipes and the player’s puffed-out cheeks — I found I was able to hear the piercing drone of that animal-like instrument; and when, later, I examined the clock-faces in Mother’s shop, I had heard, and even felt physically, the clamour of three o’clock. It was as if my eyes, in a process of miraculous traduction, were standing in for my powers of hearing. It was not unlike the process Riley’s pointer undertook when, sitting on the veranda below the swallow’s nest, some six feet above her big drooling jaws, she would savour with her eyes the chicklets’ tender flesh.

Of course, ‘First Snow in Port Suez’ interested me for its content — the snowy scene. This was not its only charm. After all, I could have asked Father to tell me of winter in Scotland, or chosen as my bedtime story ‘The Snow Queen’, one of my favourites, with its illustrations by Edmund Dulac. No, the winter scene was not the sole or even chief source of my passion for the postcard. My absorption seeded from a union of its content and its form. A curious reversal had taken place: the very qualities that had once troubled me about the photographic method — the stillness, the silence — now drew me to it.

I was nine years old; at the market I had experienced much; I had learned new words, and a new language; I had become enamoured of Iffe; my relationship with Ade had taken a new turn; and only recently I had acquired a proper name. Is it any wonder I sought the stillness of the postcard? At every spare moment I held it before me. Eventually, when I felt the image had been imprinted on my mind, as bright light lingers on the retina long after we have closed our eyes, I would bury my head in my blanket and listen to ‘First Snow in Port Suez’. What did I hear? At first very little. Curses from the bent woman. The faint crunching of the soldiers’ boots. Of course, somewhere in the Grand Hotel the fire was hissing and crackling, but I was unable to hear it. This attenuation of sounds disturbed me. I felt as if the whole scene, in whose noise I wanted to delight, existed in a flat and insubstantial realm; my only awareness of it was what I could glean directly from my sense of vision. Nevertheless I continued to look — and, over time, I began to sense a quality that was not present in the scenes in our album, a muffled or stifling presence, a kind of quiescence dropping from the sky. I looked harder, and I became aware of something truly surprising: unlike my family photographs, whose noise I could discern, on that street in Port Suez there was a near-absence of sound; and I understood that the delicious silence of the snow, its slow thrilling descent, was the very thing seeding this effect. It seemed to me that the photographer, in an effect he could not have foreseen, had managed not only to capture a rare occurrence of snow in an African city, but to represent the absence or mutedness of sound caused by the snowfall.

During the Christmas period of 1956 I went with Iffe to St Saviour’s Church on Ikoyi Island. Ade had been given a minor part in a production of The Snow Queen , a mission-school play of ill-timed entrances and stammered lines, with a zealous pianist and shrieks from children in the audience. Nevertheless, I was greatly stirred, and not only because of my fascination with ‘First Snow in Port Suez’.

I had admired drama at the market, and Iffe’s place in that drama. But here, in the church, before a white backdrop which seemed imperceptibly to float, I was witnessing drama on a formal stage for the first time, and I could not keep still. I gasped and laughed out loud; my feet rattled the pew. I received reproving glances from mothers in the audience, menacing looks which, had my excitement stemmed from pleasure alone, would have stopped my squirming. I was experiencing something far greater than pleasure, however. On that meagre platform where everything dull and ordinary appeared to shine I became acquainted for the first time with theatre’s power to transform. The set was crude, the acting clownish. But I wanted to believe in the reality of the performance, and my imagination supplied what the staging lacked. I could not deny that the grubby wisps decorating the set were merely scraps of cotton wool, and yet to my mind they were the embodiment of snow, wet, fluffy and cold; and from my vantage beside Iffe in the second row, the play took place not on a rough platform made out of packing crates, not under pallid lights in a hot city, but in a land of striking white vistas and strewn ice, peopled by noble citizens in horse-drawn sleighs, with snowflakes as big as hens!

Just as the elements of the set became greater than their commonplace forms, so the child-actors, some of whom I knew from the market — thin sun-baked children, dusty like me, and who, like me, had the most fantastic concept of snow — acquired a patina of dignity and grace. Inept with their lines, stiff, bored, with shiny noses, and sweating in winter coats; those same children (with whom days previously, by discarded crates by the juju stalls, I had mixed a brew of chickens’ feet, feathers, a dried lizard, spit, urine, sea water, sandal straps, stones and dust, bits of broken pottery, and some tobacco stolen from my father’s pouch) seemed to me perfectly at home in Lapland.

All except Ade. His face was painted white, his cheeks rouged, and he was pretty, almost feminine in sandals and a long loose patchwork dress — I think he played a robber girl. He was so changed! And yet because I knew him well, and had made a study of his voice, and even his way of running was familiar to me, I could not forget I was watching my friend. Ade or the robber girl? The confusion between the two might have broken the illusion of the theatre. It might have exposed the base nature of those grubby wisps, which I refused to acknowledge. But from my earliest days, like all children perhaps, I had a need or capability to believe in more than a single world. It was not so much that I saw beyond the painted face to the boy I knew as that I found myself willing to believe simultaneously in Ade and the robber girl, as if I was watching a kind of living emblem of the famous, double-ended caricature by W. E. Hill, which represents both a young and an old woman, the nose of the elder being the cheek of the younger. In one scene, when the robber girl stood still for a moment against a backdrop of white trees and briefly rested his eyes on me, I felt my heart lurch.

Towards the end of the play, as Gerda (absurdly played by Olu, the tallest of our friends, whose incipient moustache showed clearly under the spotlights) approached the Queen’s palace, a storm came at us, an effect involving an electric fan and bagfuls of feathers. There was a brief spurt of applause; shrieks from the children in the audience echoed around the hall. I remained silent. I had to take home some of that snow. It was my chance to step into ‘First Snow in Port Suez’, to become one of the children in the postcard. Leaping up on to my seat, I grabbed handfuls out of the air and stuffed them into my pockets. They were fluffy, wet and cold! I stood there with full pockets, ready to witness the finale. I was determined to believe in the illusion of winter. But seconds later the strange pretence was broken. A woman in the front row turned and gave me a look of such determined spite that I sat down and remained quiet for the rest of the play, which I could no longer believe in or follow. It was not so much a frown or glower as a kind of passionate demand — but for what? It appeared to take in the whole of the church, moving from the domed ceiling to the stage and on to the audience, and then it focused on me. Careful , that look said, the theatre is a siren that can speak truths without possessing a hero’s heart! You might convince yourself it is authentic, but you don’t fool me!