A friend of mine and her sister have just had the onerous chore of clearing out their mother’s flat after her death. With virtually every item in the flat evoking memories of their mother and their own growing up years, it was a heart-breaking task, one that underlined the finality of their loss.

Furniture, paintings, carpets, clothes and bric-a-brac posed no problems. Members of the extended family were asked to take anything they wanted, and the remainder was either sold or given away to various charities. The real difficulty arose when it came to the disposal of photographs.

There is not one of us who does not accumulate snaps. The more organised amongst us will put them into albums, and carefully date and label them. The more haphazard of us will stow them away in a box. Either way, these pictures are rarely looked at again, once the initial excitement of seeing them is over.

I remember the occasion when my husband and I decided to organise the hundreds of snaps we had taken of our children when they were babies and put them into albums. Nothing is dearer to us than our children, yet, to our utter shock and embarrassment, we couldn’t distinguish one child from the other! The only means of telling them apart was by identifying the clothes they were wearing! Apart from a couple of dozen pictures we wished to keep, all the rest had lost meaning for us. But could we get rid of them? Never! They merely went back into the suitcase where they had lived for years and years, and where they continue to be.

What does one do with old photographs? Tear them up and throw them away? Put them on a bonfire and reduce them to ashes? This is something that none of us seem able to do. Somehow, it seems sacrilegious to get rid of photographs. Apart from emotional twinges of guilt, one feels as though one is destroying history. Indeed, many of these old photographs do document social history, providing a graphic account of different times and mores.

One solution is to pass the pictures on to someone else in the family — a solution an aunt resorted to many years ago when she sent me a whole pile of photographs with a note saying that since I was so family minded, she knew that I would appreciate them! I put them all into a trunk, and stored the trunk in the garage. Though I had taken the precaution of sprinkling them profusely with insecticide, when some years later I opened the trunk, I found that all the pictures had been destroyed. My friend and her sister have taken another route. Having selected the few pictures they want, they have passed the rest on to the old family retainer, to do with them as she wishes!