It took me a while to find the stereoscope at the back of my parents’ attic. It had belonged to my great uncle Billy, who wasn’t really an uncle at all, but a distant cousin of my grandfather’s. By all accounts, he was a cheerful, cheeky Geordie, known to all as “Bonnie Uncle Billy”. After a short time at the front during World War One, he’d been sent home with a minor hand injury that made it impossible for him to use a bayonet or pull the ring out of a grenade. He spent the rest of his life collecting pieces of coal from the beach near his home in Sunderland and swimming in the icy waters off the coast.
Uncle Billy claimed to have won the stereoscope, together with the monochrome photographs of the Great War that went with it, in a game of cards. It had been his prize possession, although there was one particular image he would never show. When he got older, he hadn’t been able to find this photograph amongst the others and so he’d hidden the whole collection away. When, shortly before his death, he had given the stereoscope to my father and not his own son or grandsons, everyone had been surprised.
Although it was hardly a valuable antique, like the elegant Victorian models you can find on eBay, it was a vintage gadget of great interest. The simplicity of the technology made it beautiful. By inserting a double photograph of the same scene taken from slightly different angles into the holder, looking through the viewer and sliding the holder to the point where the two images merged, the scene suddenly became three-dimensional. Soldiers cowered in elongated trenches, shells exploded, throwing debris in all directions and the walls of bombed-out buildings appeared close enough to touch.
I could remember gasping the first time my father brought the collection down from the attic to show me when I was a child and I wondered if my own children, who were used to watching 3D movies, would gasp in the same way. And yet the way these hundred-year-old archive images became shockingly solid and real was truly amazing. My elder daughter, Amy, was doing a project on the First World War for school. She at least should be interested.
That evening after dinner we sat around the table and I proudly revealed my treasure. Winking at my husband, I inserted one of the double photographs into the holder and handed the stereoscope to Amy. I was thrilled when she actually gasped. At her “Wow!”, Chloe, the little one, jumped off her seat and demanded to be shown.
“Wait!” said Amy crossly, fending Chloe off with an elbow. “Can I use this for my school project, mum?”
“Of course. That’s why I went to look for it! Give your sister a turn. There’s plenty of time.”
Chloe snatched the viewer from Amy’s hands and moved out of arm’s length to have a look.
“When you’ve finished, give it to daddy and then it’s Amy’s turn again,” I said brightly.
“It’s brilliant,” said Amy. “Where did you get it?”
“It was your grandad’s and he got it from his uncle Billy.”
“Is that the mad one who used to swim in the North Sea when there was ice on it?”
“That’s right. He was a character.”
“Was he in the First World War?”
“For a short time. He was injured and got sent home.”
I felt a tap on my elbow. It was Chloe. “Why is the man shooting himself, Mummy?”
“Who, darling?”
“The soldier.”
“He’s shooting at the enemy, stupid!” said Amy.
But Chloe was adamant. “He’s shooting himself!”
I took the stereoscope from her hands and peered through the viewer, adjusting the holder until the image appeared in startling clarity. Soldiers were leaning against the damp wall of a trench, their bayonets abandoned beside them, their boots caked in mud. Some were smoking, all looked exhausted. All except one man, who, under the shadow of his helmet, wore an expression of intense concentration. In his left hand he held a service revolver and, with some difficulty he seemed to be aiming it at the fingers of his right hand.
The image was in faded black and white, but was there something familiar about the soldier’s face? Was this the image uncle Billy had never wanted to show, the reason he hadn’t kept his precious stereoscope in his own family?
