"Me and my sister's teenage years, mid-80s to early 90s, she'd cover with: Zoe was delinquent, couldn't get a word of sense out of her. Or: 1986? That was the year Stacey was awful. Going through photo albums to make a montage for her funeral, all her pictures from that era were testament to our ill-behaviour: me, sniffing a geranium, sarcastically; Stace, outside a cafe in an indeterminable European city where you can almost lip-read her stroppy piss off to camera in the still moment."
"Gwen was politically engaged you'd come downstairs on a Wednesday morning to find a handwritten letter starting, Dear Perez de Cuellar, I cannot deplore enough your silence on the matter of the Western Sahara and heavily involved in progressive politics: our kitchen was full of posters that would have to catch on fire before they'd ever get taken down. There was one fighting pit closures, for example, right next to one about having no planet B, and mum went heavy on the spoof public information"
Gwen described her daughters' teenage years in broad, judgmental phrases, calling Zoe delinquent and declaring 1986 the year Stacey was awful. Photo albums for her funeral showed mischievous snapshots: Zoe sniffing a geranium sarcastically and Stacey flipping off a camera outside a European café. Gwen was politically engaged; handwritten letters to figures like Perez de Cuellar and a kitchen plastered with protest posters demonstrated her commitment. Posters ranged from pit-closure campaigns to climate warnings and spoof public-information leaflets mocking government advice and Conservative politics. Protests were attended but rarely photographed, so local news coverage sometimes provided the only evidence of participation.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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