Photo Challenge – Vintage

The photograph I have chosen for this week is one that I have already used for Monochrome Madness as the photographs that form the montage are all monochrome, though one is tinted. But that is allowed for Monochrome Madness if used sparingly.  This photograph is a montage of postcards of the boading school my mother went to when she was six plus a photograph of my mother.

The school: St Rose’s is now a school for children with disabilities but then it was a normal boarding school. The thought of my mother going to boarding school at six may make you pause but the reason for it was that as a (Roman) Catholic in a small Welsh mining village she was being picked on at school.

It may not have helped that her mother as a child had laid one of the foundation stones for the Congregational chapel but on her marriage to a man of Italian extraction had converted to catholicism. The inscription on the foundation stone she had laid has been defaced. Such ill feeling may seem strange in these ecumenical days but this was the early part of the last century.

The photograph of my mother in the centre is not of her when she was six obviously but one taken and tinted when at about the age of seventeen she was the village carnival queen.