Unfolding my maternal grandmother Olive May Bertholini’s hankies, I also unfold her story of war and, perhaps, of love. Hidden within these squares of delicate cotton and silk, and striped gents hankies, are memories and clues to what she and others went through. Some hankies are torn and fragile, their white lacework hanging in threads. Some are curiously stained with blood, and one stain matches the shape of the bullet pulled from the leg of her sweetheart who became grandfather Alf, wounded twice during the First World War. 

Why did she keep these soiled shreds of cloth? Those bearing scars remain unwashed, as though whatever happened must be remembered. Olive May even ironed the hankies before folding and placing neatly, side-by-side with others embroidered with forget-me-nots and butterflies in a wooden box covered in flowered cloth.

Olive May died when I was five, when I was too young to hear and record her eye-witness accounts of surviving the First World War Zeppelin raids on our city of Hull, and how she hid from the Luftwaffe air raids during the Second World War, when Hull became the second most bombed city outside of London. Stories of men and women who served or volunteered are well-documented. Yet, from my mother, Maureen, I heard only scraps of how the women in my ordinary, working-class family coped in overcrowded houses, working at the factory, surviving on rations, and how soot found its way into the sugarbowl when the house shook from the bombs. Maureen was a child at home with Olive May while Alf went to fight again, finally being evacuated from Dunkirk at the age of 43. 

My mother is gone too, and the wartime experiences of the women in my family I am only now uncovering. This is because for almost 20 years as a photographer, journalist and visual researcher, I have been busy illuminating largely unseen stories of women survivors of war and conflict elsewhere in the world, and co-facilitating women’s visual self-representation. My commitment and collaborations have been with survivors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Holocaust and women who fled as refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. 

Over the years these incredible women have courageously shared with me their complex stories, reflections, insights and perspectives, as important eye-witnesses and documentarians not as bystanders. Through them, I understand more of the impact and destruction that war and indiscriminate bombing has on civilians, especially women and girls. How it is often the women who pick up the torn, stained and spoiled pieces to adapt and rebuild. I see that war is too often told through the heroics of the few, rather than the many unseen and overlooked voices of the masses. 

So begins a creative, personal response through a few visual traces kept for a reason, by a woman I remember only through the warmth of her arms around me. Yet it takes me several months to photograph my grandmother’s hankies in a way that does justice to their importance as documents to her past. How do I express the visceral emotions I feel on realising the fear, pain, hardships, hope and resilience of women in my own family? 

First, I photograph her hankies as objects, as museum artefacts. But these keepsakes once had a shape, an energy, and a purpose. In wartime a hankie waved farewell, wiped away a tear, or was brought back from the front as a souvenir or token of affection to loved ones. Escape maps were printed onto hankies carried by soldiers heading to the front. When times were hard, a hankie was a new item a woman could afford to brighten her outfit. Washed hankies were pegged onto clothes lines to dry. Today, many young lives are still hung out to dry in the senselessness of war. 

So, I try to convey what happened in the past, because it is also happening in the present. By unfolding each hankie I engage with each one as an individual story. Every stitch, tear and stain are of value to our collective remembrance and heritage. Even Olive May’s ironing marks, the sharp creases that must not be smoothed out by me, must remain. For here is evidence of invisible frontlines in a broader, incomplete and ongoing story of the impact of war on civilians, especially women, their children and grandchildren.

Dr Lee Karen Stow is an established documentary photographer, writer and visual researcher working with and alongside women survivors of war, conflict and forced displacement. Her photographic work has been exhibited internationally. ‘Unfolding Hankies’ is the introduction to her new multi-part visual narrative into the wartime experiences of civilian, working-class women in her birthplace of Hull. Read Lee's second article, Where Were You?

www.leekarenstow.com 
www.freedomwomencollective.com