Nanny Brown’s Scrapbook: photography by Jackie Norman
Passion 
If you really feel that you wish to paint, have you bought art books and also sketch books and palettes of paint? Have you bought attractive notebooks for writing (with sensuous textures and beguiling covers)? Pens? Pencils? If you have a hankering after a sport, have you done more than bought the ‘right’ gear? Do you have the need to challenge yourself or to create something? And how far do you develop something you wish to do? I’m frequently amazed by what my friends can do or what they know.
My passion is cycling and OK, I have the ‘go faster’ brightly coloured Lycra and a dayglo yellow Goretex jacket etc., and I pore over routes I would like to do. Even after we recently did Lands End to John O’Groats, which we refer to as The Big One (1,065 miles), the desire doesn’t go away – and yes, this post does actually feed into Grace Brown and her Scrapbook in due course . . . 
In addition to the exhilaration of riding a bike, I am increasingly drawn to noticing the shape of the land. This is quite different from ‘the countryside’ with its concept of beauty or splendour. It is about the unfolding of the shape of the land, the continuum of change of the colour of the earth, the style and material of buildings, and the use of the land, present and past. Perhaps this is an older person thing! Cycling is the perfect way to experience this. In 50-60 miles per day or even 30, by the power of your legs you can see the landscape change before your eyes. However it’s not for everybody. Most of our friends shudder and would rather curl up with a book or go to an opera.
Photography is an equal passion for me. It began, as these things often do, when I was given a Brownie 127 camera (made 1952-1959). I must have already been expressing an interest. Looking at a few of the photos I took then, and yes I’ve kept them, I see that I concentrated on my family, the sea, the moors, ICI flare stacks at night, and stormy weather. Being brought up in Redcar, North Riding of Yorkshire, that was what caught my eye. Five decades down the line I got a degree in Photography and have had the fun of being commissioned to photograph people in places like the House of Commons, Westminster Cathedral, Bisham Abbey, the ICA, and more recently to log the absorbing scrapbook of Grace Brown. You see – I got there.
When I am puzzled by how limited Grace Brown’s apparent activities and interests are, am I assuming that everyone has curiosity? Grace worked as Nanny with families in Yorkshire, in Leeds (which was the deep South to me). She too would have been exposed to an industrial landscape of mills, factories and back-to-back houses; one very different to genteel Oxford where she worked later, and I wonder what she thought of it and the people. Leeds was bombed and was a major manufacturer during the war. No particular references or ‘compare and contrast’ images appear in her scrapbook, but she must have known even if she wasn’t living there any more. On the other hand, here am I not referring at all to the economic situation, so perhaps it is the elephant in the room syndrome and too large to talk about, and other activities serve as a distraction.
In photographing her Scrapbook I felt sympathy for her perceived limitations but also that I would have loved to have asked her ‘What was it like?’ We overlapped in time, the 1950’s, dammit! A very scary thought.
Jackie