Three Dimensions
This week I went to The Grange to deliver Mike his film.
We had tea first, in the gardens at the back of the house, and — as is always the way with Mike — I began to hear more. He went off on a soliloquy that wandered from the history of the upstairs apartment, to the gardening at the church, all the way to a Victorian resident of Rottingdean, an ornithologist, who once made an excited pilgrimage to Brighton to see a rare bird. He shot it.
Sitting with Mike is like sitting in front of an enormous colour-by-numbers picture of Rottingdean. Each time we meet, he helps me colour new bits in — and with each new meeting, I'm starting to see the whole village in colour.
Then we went inside and put Trunky Thomas, the Last Smuggler on the television, the proposal being that the film sits there permanently: an audio-visual complement to the Grange Museum, which is itself a testament to the work Mike has done over the years. We got it playing, after a fashion.
And then came a moment I felt lucky to witness. Mike stood back, and paused.
My own understanding of the village's history began with flat photographs: two dimensions, weathered sepia, and, new to it, you have to work to really interpret them. Everything Mike does is a form of reanimation. He takes the bare text and the old images and raises them the way a barn is raised — flat frames hauled upright until, suddenly, there is a structure with three dimensions — into stories you can walk through and walk around. Give him a photograph and he will lovingly build it into a miniature.
The film is the extension of that: breathing life into these stories for a new generation, so that they may live on. It's exactly what Mike has been doing with the village for me. This time, for once, it was his own work coming to life, and he was the one watching.
He let the film play out. As it played, visitors to the museum paused to watch it with him, and afterwards asked whether he was the same man on the screen. Mike was his usual modest self. But the feedback was immediate: the film adds something else to the work that surrounds it. The documents, the photographs, the displays — years of Mike's work — and this, in some respects, is a culmination of sorts.
As we left, we could hear Mike's voice behind us, playing on a loop — telling and re-telling the village's fascinating stories for each new listener.
Just like the real Mike.
