This, my first installment, is coming to you from a small hotel in San Francisco. I came for Christmas because I was missing my son and I’ve been here for five days now. I’m an innocent abroad. I’ve never been to the US before. The hotel is on Broadway at North Beach, comfortably nestled between succulent strip joints, on a street lit by lavish neon, and in a neighbourhood served by the abundance of Chinatown. Daytime the streets are typically busy - shoppers, traders, travelers, hustlers and many homeless people, but at the winter sunset around 5pm, emergency sirens begin their eerie, feminine wail, cuing the sense of menace I detect out there in the urban wilds. My 22 year old son and his sweetly chilled friends reassure me that Frisco is a friendly town.

The young people here seem quite proud of the heritage of the Beat Generation - Kerouac, Ginsberg, Howl; Haight Ashbury, the San Francisco sound of the 60s etc. And those that were there at the time enjoy the awe that the young indulge them with. Remnants of the original ‘happening scenes’ are still around, such as the City Lights book store which is across the road from me.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art yesterday I saw a collection of photographs. They were enlargements of family portraits. the type of photos kept in shoeboxes or in wallets. Small photos of loved ones made special by always being with you. As it turns out, this is how the creators came to make this collection. They asked people who entered the gallery if they could photograph the photos they kept in their wallet. They enlarged them, retaining the original photographic quality, as well as the characteristic crease and wear marks of an old, much loved photo - a husband and wife formally posed, a smiling young woman on her 21st. The gallery space pays homage to the tradition of family photography. The familiarity of the photos is charming, but on this large scale, the mystique of the past is intense and confronting. Personal history is an emotional thing.

In 06 and 07 I looked at the personal photos, many of them miniature Box Brownie snaps, of Australian women who’d married British servicemen during World War II, and migrated to the UK on the Royal Navy aircraft carrier, HMS Victorious. To see the photo of a young woman and look into her face as an eighty year old is quite profound, especially when she’s told you her life story. I traveled in Australia to meet and talk to them about the heady atmosphere of romantic war time love. Their shared history is an unusual story hidden beneath the popular chronicles of the Second World War. Their childhoods were abruptly severed by the pragmatism of war time governance, and the liberating war time culture. They went to the UK believing in romance and, somewhat naively, not expecting the harsh conditions in 1946, post war Britain, and the hostility of the British towards them. It was supposed to be a motherland who cared for her loyal subjects.

I was drawn to this story because I thought it illuminated the uniqueness of war time culture, as well as revealing so much of the backdrop to the lives of our mothers and grandmothers. Mystery still shrouds that generation of women, who are drifting quietly towards the end of their lives. Housewives and mothers - seen and not heard. But the proof is in those miniature photos you’ll find in a shoebox.