Who Are You?

I am obsessed with memories. I’m very sentimental and look back at my life with wonder, especially when I pore over old photos, taking in every detail. My mother’s dress, the vastness of our garden which I would never be able to match my whole adult life, our neighbour John who is still alive in his 90s. I am an only child with no children. Who will look at the photos my parents, friends and relatives took when I am gone? Will my life end up in a box on the tarmac at a car boot sale?

Looking through boxes of photos in antique markets and junk shops, I decided to attempt to give new life to the photos of others. To honour the moment the shutter opened and shut on the lives of people I will never know but for these fragments. These wonderful moments when life stopped and people posed, giving us the opportunity to step into the lives of others and use our imagination to create our own narratives stimulated by what we see. They will be interspersed with photos of my life which will have detailed captions. I have added any detail I have discovered on the back of the found photos but unfortunately it’s often very little.

Most importantly, I would love to reunite the photos with their families. This could be a million-to-one dream, but amazing things can happen. The clues are there – not just in the faces – but in the details, the landscapes, the buildings and even the pets.

I will add new photographs regularly. I hope you enjoy looking through them as much as I do.

Same place only the other side of peir (sic) you see it was cool Frances with coat on in the Middle of August

Philes Beatress 1st left Neighbour (sic)

My grandmother Elsie (centre) at her wedding to John E Evans (left) in 1941 in Oxford. Her sister Bertha is on the right. I'm not sure who the men at the back are but could be her brother Jack on the left and perhaps Bertha's husband on the right. Elsie and John had no children, but Elsie had already had two children in the 1920s who had been adopted, my mother Jennifer and her half brother Peter. Elsie kept this a secret from everyone until Peter and Jenny found her in the late 70s.

Bertha & friend Peg. Not sure of the date but looks post-war. They spent many of their early years together in London. Bertha was my great aunt, but because my mother was adopted, we knew nothing of her until my mother located her birth mother, Elsie, in the late 70s. Elsie and Bertha grew up in Garsington, Oxford, where Bertha sometimes worked at Garsington Manor, home of Bloomsbury Group doyenne Ottoline Morrell. I think Elsie helped her out sometimes.

Mum, me and Rollo in the Brook garden, around 1961

Me with Big Teddy at the Brook around 1963. I still have him.

Dad and I in the Cuttinglye Road garden around 1959.

This looks as if it was torn in half and taped together again.

Jenny Ripley, on holiday in Puerto Pollensa, Majorca. August 1972

1948 Mrs Tricket Kieth Barry Brian Douglas Michael Brooks

Deborah Ripley, Crawley Down, Sussex 1970. Taken by my mother

Same place only the other side of the peir (sic) You see it was cold. Frances with coat on in the Middle of August

T. P. Arminter
N. Van Bost Feb 1958 — T. P. Arminter N. Van Bost Feb 1958

We are Deborah and Jenny Ripley, neighbour John Farmer and his father-in-law Percy Towse in the Ripley family garden, Crawley Down, Sussex 1969-70