And the last thing.
The photograph.
It is from 1969 and it is the two of us outside a place that is a carpet shop now, and I am laughing and he is not looking at the camera.
And I had never seen it, which is what I said above, and that is true.
And on the back of it, in pencil, in his hand, there is a date.
***June 1969.***
And under that, in different pencil, pressed harder, written much later by a much older hand:
***She came back on her own.***
And I have thought about those four words for a year.
Because it is not a lovely sentence. If you say it out loud it is almost cold.
And then in the June I understood what it is, which is that it is not about me at all.
He wrote that to himself.
An old man, at some point after the August of 2024, sitting in a house on Carrow Hill with a photograph in his hand, writing down the one fact he needed in order to be allowed to do what he then did.
