YOU’D barely begun the tale of derring do and guile before the impatient, irritated voice cut through: ‘Did you get the collect?’
‘No, but nobody has…it is...’
‘Go back,’ said the voice before the phone was hung up leaving you stranded in some urine-soaked, window-less phone box in the back of beyond.
Outside the photographer leaned against the car, fag in mouth, waiting to phone his desk. ‘Did you tell him about the guy who threw us out?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Nope. Didn’t get a chance. We’ve to go back..’
‘I’m bloody not,’ he said, swaggering towards the box. ‘No fxxxxxx way.’
My turn to lean against the car pulling out my own fag, staring at his back, the shoulders twitching, then slumping despondently as he turned to come out.
‘Right, ‘ he muttered, ‘But just the one hit, eh?’ As if we had any choice in the matter. We got it or we were doomed to live out of the car until we did – no matter how long.
The collect was the picture of the victim, victims, whoever we were writing about. It was the difference between the front page and turn, or a half page mid-paper.
The difference between returning to the office and a hero’s welcome or shivering in the litter-strewn car eating crisps, chain smoking, phoning forlornly every few hours until maybe the night news editor took pity and brought you back.
This, of course, was in the olden days before the mobile phone, the selfie and its apps to self-love with their easy access to reporters whose computers do the leg work for them.
No sweating charm-filled persuasion on a door-step for them. No knocking door after door for information – no risk of attack from dogs doing their master’s bidding, no water, or worse, flung down from a first-floor tenement window. Oh, happy days.
I understood why we had to get the collect but it didn’t assuage my resentment. For no words matter as much as the collect.
It’s not for prurience that newspapers do montages of plane crash victims, of fishermen lined against the boat they drowned in, or show school photographs of a child whose fate it is best not to dwell on if demons are to be kept at bay.
No, it is to personalise the story; to, literally, put a face on it; to reduce awful, awful facts to a manageable human scale where empathy comes easier when seeing the child who could be ours; the man who could be our husband; the couple who could be our grandparents.
And in many cases as a testament to the fact that this person lived and loved way beyond the manner of the death. That this person had a value, a meaning for someone beyond these soon to be forgotten stories.
How often did I come from a house clutching a black and white snapshot, carefully picked from the mere handful houses contained then? ‘I want them to know who he/she really was,’ would be the tear-stained whisper from a breaking heart.
‘But you’ll make sure you send it back, won’t you? It’s all I’ve got.’
Now that the pictures of Covid-19 victims are slowly coming out, we can at last reduce the stories of the thousands dead and truly understand the horror. Statistics, figures such as these, overload our brains and we turn from the scale of it all.
But now, there are the nurses, the doctors, the carers and the cleaners, who smile on forever in their vivid colour pictures. Here the young men and women who we thought would escape this plague as it passed over; and the beloved old who deserved a kinder death than this.
And there are the witnesses giving meaning to the faces we search in case something, anything, marks them out for this pestilence.
On social media, family, and those close to the dead, write of ordinary lives with extraordinary back stories in many cases.
No life is a mere journey from A to B, they teach us. Each life is a rich, glorious expression of itself from the mundane to the multi-faceted. Every person is loved, or has been, at least once, and such memories comfort and salute.
And then when a familiar, known to all face such as Boris Johnson is struck down, the picture is complete and we finally understand that no-one, no-one is safe.
That is when we take this seriously and follow the orders some of us have been disregarding. Finally, finally, the magnitude touches us. It only does so when we can individualise it; reduce it to a clarity we’ve looked away from these past weeks, months.
Often when I came away from those houses where death had visited too soon, I made promises, I hope, I kept.
‘Yes, I will tell the story. Yes, it will be a tribute. No, I won’t fail you and I will bring back your photograph.’
I didn’t always succeed in doing what they’d hoped for. Nobody could. But I always returned the photograph where it no doubt gradually faded alongside the never quite adequate cutting. But it once was. It once was.
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