The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q Read Online Free PDF

several combinations of those four, occasionally with Mum in between, looking slightly lost. Towards the end, the new babies, the Terrible Twins, joined the group.
    The photos stopped abruptly near the middle of the album, the last photo followed by blank pages. Gran picked up and opened yet another album. Here were still more photos, quite different to the first batch. Here, there were all boys. The photos were all black and white or sepia; totally vintage. I loved vintage. I took the album onto my own knees, and slowly turned the pages.
    The photo on the last page showed a group of children, ranging in age from about a year to early teens. ‘The Quint brothers,’ Gran explained. It wasn’t obvious that the boys were siblings, as each was entirely different; some had fair skin and light hair, others were as dark as the Williamson girls. The toddler wore a frilly dress not unlike the one my mother wore in the family photos, so I thought it was a girl, but Gran pointed to this child first and said, ‘Freddy Quint.’ She pointed to the tallest, fair-skinned, boy. ‘Humphrey. Me husband.’
    So this was my grandfather. Mum had never shown me photos of her family back home. I assumed she had none. I peered closely at the boy who would grow up to be my Grandad. All the boys wore sailor suits, Humphrey included, though he must have been about fourteen, far too old for sailor suits, even then, surely. The boys at the front wore knee-length socks and highly polished shoes or boots. Not one of them smiled. If not for the fact that some were as dark-skinned as Grandma, it could have been any group of English boys from that time, not mixed-blood boys from a distant tropical colony.
    One by one, Gran named the rest of the eight Quint boys: ‘Fine, fine, boys, but wild. Dead and gone. ‘Cept one. Freddy now, the youngest, he was the wildest. Humphrey the studious one, my husband. Them Quint boys ...’ She sighed. ‘We lived round the corner from them, in Waterloo Street, me and me sister. You could see their house from my room upstairs. Handsome boys, all of them. Every man jack gone off to war. Look.’
    She turned the page to show me a photo of the several young men dressed as soldiers, all lined up and smiling into the camera. There were more photos, of young men in uniform. Again, she named them.
    ‘Humphrey, William, Gordon, Charles, Leopold, Rudolph, Percy and Frederick. All a-them run off to fight Hitler. Except Humphrey. Charley, he get killed in Singapore. Freddy, now…’
    But instead of telling me about Freddy, she flipped the page. There was a portrait of the man at the other end of the row, presumably the eldest Quint brother.
    ‘Humphrey. Me dear husband. Dead and gone.’
    On the last page was a photo of a thin-faced white man with a walrus moustache, staring straight into the camera with pale eyes that, had the photo been in colour, would most certainly be blue.
    ‘Maximilian von Quindt,’ said Gran. ‘Quindt with a d. The first of the British Guiana Quints. A German; a zoologist who came to study turtles. He marry a black woman and drop the von and the d. All the rest come down from he.’
    In spite of the obligation to remain youthfully bored by her old-lady ramblings, I was intrigued. I took the album onto my lap and leaned in, turned back the pages, peered into those faces, those eyes. Who were all these people long dead? They were the ones who went before me; if not for them there would have been no me. They had been living, breathing, moving human beings, filled with life and love, moved by emotions and passions, just as aware of their own lives as I was of mine, and unaware that one day in the distant future a young girl carrying their genes named Inky would be looking at their images and wondering about them; just as one day, perhaps, a hundred years from now, some descendent of mine would look at my image and wonder about me. The ephemeral, fragile nature of life on earth struck me like a