We were staying for a week in a cottage in North Wales with a couple of friends. They had brought some guide books and maps, one of them an old Ordnance Survey Outdoor Leisure map, the series with the yellow cover with a photo of local scenery. This one, for Snowdonia, showed Harlech Castle, with the levels of Morfa Harlech in the background. In the foreground were three people. A boy of eleven or twelve, wearing shorts and a red shirt, holding the collar of a collie. A younger boy in jeans looking rather anxiously, it appeared, towards the woman holding his hand, who sat facing him and away from us.
The boy holding the dog looked exactly like my brother. The woman’s cotton dress and cardigan I seemed to remember my mum wearing. And I could swear the younger boy was me.
I was baffled. I had no recollection of this at all. But there was a conviction in my head, running through my memory like the line of a footpath across a map, picking up snippets of images and impressions. I began to put them together, as though assembling a landscape panorama from dozens of snapshots.
We were on holiday. I don’t know where we stayed. My sister wanted to do something, or buy something – that was it, it was her birthday – and my dad had taken her. We three wandered up this footpath and found a spot with a nice view where we could sit and wait for the others. After a while, we realised there was a photographer, with his tripod, standing on a rise behind us. My mum asked if he wanted us to move, and he said he would like to have us in the picture, if we didn’t mind, as he thought we might add some foreground colour. What clinched it was that he asked if one of us would like to hold his dog. My brother jumped at that. You can see how pleased he looked. I was probably asking my mum why I wasn’t allowed to hold the dog, or who the strange man was.
I could remember nothing else about the holiday in Wales, but found myself quite clear about this small part of it. We went up the hill and had the photo taken; my sister and dad turned up not much later, and we all walked back down into Harlech. I had an idea that we may have had an ice-cream. After that, nothing.
Back home, over the following weeks, I began to dwell on the map, and that photo. I searched online, and soon had an image of the map cover filling my screen. The castle, Morfa Harlech, the trees and the rocks, all in place. But that’s all there was. No figures in the foreground. No brother, no mother, no dog, and no me. The sky had turned darker, and we had all disappeared.
I called a cartography dealer and told him what I was after. He had a choice of OS Outdoor Leisure 18 maps, which he was happy to describe over the phone. There was one dated 1985, which sounded like the one I’d seen in Wales. Then there was a later, 1990, edition, very similar but lacking the figures in the foreground: the one I had found online. I supposed that when the map had been revised, an OS editor had noticed that the photo had been taken more than twenty years earlier, with the clothing clearly old fashioned, and had substituted something less dating. But it made me feel quite put out. What were they thinking of, ghosting us like that? I placed an order for the proper, authentic, 1985 original.
I phoned my mum and told her I had something to show her. When I visited her the following week, I reminded her of our holiday in Wales, and the story of our encounter with the photographer in Harlech. I told her how amazed I was to discover we had had a family photo published on the front of an Ordnance Survey map, and none of us had ever seen it or known about it, until now.
I showed her the map.
“Oh yes. It’s a good one of you, and your brother. I always used to think how it suited him, the red. But they haven’t quite got your hair right. And the trouble is, we never went to Harlech, did we? We didn’t go to Wales until we had a car, when you would have been about five years older than you are here. You were much taller by then. And the cardigan… I don’t know. I’m quite sure I never wore it with that dress.”
She gave the picture one last look, and placed the map gently on an occasional table.
“Well, I am sorry. Disappointing, I know. I hope it hasn’t been a wasted journey.”