Mr Goff 1992
Mr Goff 1992
In February 1991 I visited a family friend in an old people's home in Somerton, Somerset. Mr. Goff, like most of us at that time, was watching the Gulf War 'live' on television. The TV pictures seemed to act as an aide memoire and he began to recall his experiences as a young man during the First World War in this same terrain, then called Mesopotamia.
I returned later that year to photograph him and record his reminiscences on videotape. A few weeks later I made my third and final visit. He had died during the previous night and lay in his small room, strangely still in the half-light.
As in Stanley Spencer's Sandham Memorial Chapel, Mr. Goff's narrative concerned the domestic daily lives of young working class boys far from home. They seemed like a group of castaways in the silent terrain; until that is, the day on which they marched over a low ridge and were cut down by Turkish machine gun fire.