Sean Rocha

123rd Officer Cadet Training Regiment, Royal Artillery, 1942

In Palma de Mallorca, I chanced upon an antique bookstore with an antique owner, possibly English and certainly incapacitated by a back injury. He was difficult to find in the musty, three-floor warren of jumbled inventory; finding him again, to ask about prices, seemed like a miracle. No matter the object he began, “Well, it’s difficult to put a value on something like this” as if it were a prized family heirloom and not, as was the case, something he’d examined it as if he’d bought his stock a century ago and was unfamiliar with its components.

When I found this medium-sized group portrait (above) labelled “B 6/8 Troop, 123rd Officer Cadet Training Regiment, Royal Artillery, January 1942” I was briefly startled by the line of their caps which suggested, at first glance, that they’d all had head injuries, identically wrapped, and were in recovery. But they were not: just officer cadets in the R.A., though January 1942 marked an especially inauspicious time to have gone through training. In another crate, I found an accordion folder full of small snapshots that appeared to belong to a British family that had been in Bengal in the 1920s or 30s, no one of which was especially interesting but had some collective appeal. The owner found this, too, difficult to value, though when he did settle on a price I discovered that he valued it rather too highly. Still, I consented because it seemed plausible he’d see no other revenue that day, or week, a sense confirmed when he said, “Young people today have no nostalgia.”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2019 at 7:54 am. It is filed under Found Object and tagged with military, photography, Royal Artillery, United Kingdom, WWII. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.