A Family Is a Timeline: Weddings, White Hair, and the Roads of Normandy

On the passage of time: through a family, through a landscape, and through the photographs we leave behind.

On the 8th of August I watched Maureen marry Maciej. There is something peculiar about a family wedding when you have been around long enough to have seen several generations grow up. Maureen is one of Jean-Claude’s three daughters, and the last of them to marry. Looking around the room, I realised that some of the people I had known as children were now arriving with children of their own. The children had become parents. The parents had become grandparents. And somewhere along the way, without anyone asking my permission, I had become one of the older generation.

The day itself was kind to us. Twenty-seven degrees, a little wind, and none of the sort of heat that makes a man question the wisdom of wearing a suit. It was, in many ways, a perfectly ordinary wedding. And yet I found myself thinking about time.

The family timeline

I’ve come to think of a family as a timeline, with each person a plot line running along it. Some of those lines are long and nearly complete. Others have only just begun.

A wedding is one of the rare occasions when all those lines come together in the same place. For a few hours you can see the whole family story laid out in front of you: the very old, the very young, and everyone in between.

The older generation has, inevitably, grown older. And now it shows. My own generation has gradually acquired white hair. The men, particularly, seem to have gone from looking reasonably respectable to looking as though they have suddenly been promoted to senior management. Behind us comes the next generation, now in their thirties and early forties, and behind them the children who have barely begun their own stories.

The strange thing about getting older is that you don’t necessarily feel particularly different. You still wake up as yourself. You still have the same memories, the same opinions, the same songs in your head. Then you see someone you haven’t seen for ten years. And there they are, suddenly grown up. That is when time becomes visible.

The older I get, the more conscious I become that the amount of time ahead is smaller than the amount behind. I watch the younger members of the family going through stages I remember going through myself, and I realise that the wheel doesn’t stop. We move with it. Sometimes, these days, that means moving with a stick and looking remarkably smart in a Panama hat. There are worse ways to grow old.

At the end of a family gathering, there is usually a moment when everyone begins saying goodbye. People hug, shake hands, find their coats and start looking for their keys. Then come the questions: “When will we do this again?” And, somewhere underneath that question, another one that nobody quite says aloud: Who will still be here when we do?

And then there is the question that is said aloud, though its meaning changes with the occasion: “Who’s next?” At weddings it is asked by the older generation of the younger. At funerals it is asked by the younger generation of the older. Same question; different queue.

Jokes apart, some of the people whose lives are part of my own family timeline will not see its later chapters. Some have already left it. I’ll say a prayer for those who didn’t make it to this wedding.

But the timeline continues. New people join it. Children grow up. Weddings become anniversaries. Anniversaries become memories. The faces change, while the family somehow remains recognisable.

That is the odd thing about time. It takes everything from us eventually, but it also keeps adding to the story.

Another timeline

A family isn’t the only thing with a timeline. Give yourself a little time alone and the mind starts looking for older ones.

We were staying in Normandy, and it is difficult to look at the roads and villages around you without thinking about what happened here in 1944. The road signs have perfectly ordinary names on them: Sainte-Mère-Église, Carentan, Saint-Lô. But these are not merely places on a map. They are points on another timeline.

Men came here from Britain, Canada, Poland, the Free French forces, the United States and many other Allied countries. They came across the Channel and into a war that would determine the future of Europe.

Many of them were extraordinarily young. That is the part that becomes harder to comprehend as you get older. The men who landed here were around the age of the people I now watch starting their own families. Some were younger than my own children.

They had plans. Families. Parents waiting for them. Girls they intended to marry. Children they hoped to see grow up. They were plot lines too. Thousands of those lines ended here.

The rest of us inherited the future they helped create.

That thought changes the way I look at the countryside. A field becomes something that existed before us and will continue after us.

And the signs pointing towards Sainte-Mère-Église or Carentan aren’t simply directions. They are reminders.

Following the road

Virginie has given me permission to go out and do some photography while we’re here. There is one rule: I’m not allowed more than 100 kilometres from our base in Coutances. That still leaves an enormous amount of history to explore.

So I shall take the X100F and follow the roads. I don’t particularly want to photograph Normandy as a tourist ticking places off a list. I want to see what happens when you slow down enough to notice the things between the famous places: the memorials, the churches, the fields, the little villages, and the names on the road signs. Perhaps the occasional café, because history is considerably easier to contemplate with a cup of tea.

Perhaps I’ll photograph some of the places where these two timelines, family and history, seem to meet.

Because that is what struck me at the wedding. We talk about history as though it belongs to other people. We talk about generations, wars, marriages and deaths as separate things. But they aren’t. They are one long story.

The young men who came to Normandy in 1944 were part of families. They had parents and brothers and sisters. Some had wives and children. Their deaths altered those families forever. And the freedom that followed became the background to everything that came afterwards: the ordinary things, the children growing up, people falling in love, people getting married, families gathering in a room on a warm August afternoon, and a man in a Panama hat taking photographs.

What remains

This is one of the reasons I photograph. A photograph is a small piece of resistance against time. It doesn’t stop anything. It doesn’t bring anyone back. It doesn’t preserve a moment perfectly. But it says: This happened. These people were here. We stood together on this particular day.

The wedding photographs will eventually become part of the family’s archive. Someone will look at them years from now and try to work out who everyone was. Perhaps they will recognise themselves. Perhaps they will wonder about the people they never met.

And perhaps, one day, someone will look at a photograph I made here in Normandy and ask why I stopped at that particular roadside memorial, or why I thought that particular church was worth photographing.

They won’t know what I was thinking. They won’t know that I had just come from a wedding. They won’t know that I had been thinking about white hair and walking sticks, children becoming parents, and the people who never got the chance to grow old.

They will simply have the photograph: a small piece of a much longer timeline.

So I’ll take the X100F, follow the road signs, and see what I find. There are stories everywhere around here. Some are written on memorials. Some are carried in families. Some are written on faces. And some, if we’re fortunate, make it onto film.

Postscript

I was allowed no more than 100 km. I drove 200. There will, naturally, be a Normandy series of articles: some from 2019, and some from this summer of 2026. And let me assure you, dear reader, I wasn’t shouted at, and I am still here to tell the tale.