You off on the hippy trail? his brother had said, before he went travelling. That was what some of their friends were suddenly doing, taking off in buses or camper vans, overland to India, coming back with long hair and chillums and ill-cured Afghan coats.

No. Not exactly.

That was when he first put a word to what he meant to be. A photographer. Though he didn’t say it to Richard but only to himself.

He remembered what it had meant when got his first camera. It was on his twelfth birthday. He had been asking for one all year. His birthday was in June, just before the end of the summer term, and all of the holiday that followed he took the camera about with him, photographing everything in sight. That was when it started. He took pictures of his mother, but she got cross when he took the pictures as she hated being photographed when she wasn’t prepared, so he took some of Richard, and dozens of Billy. Billy was great for pictures. Billy at work, with a spade or a barrow, with his cap and his whiskers and his old lined face looking like a countryman from any past time since photography was invented. It was great that he had the pictures, because Billy died that next winter. The best he took that September just before they were due to go back to school. He went with Billy and Richard when they went shooting. He took his camera along instead of a gun, photographed the two of them as they walked and aimed and shot, photographed the dog waiting, the dead pheasants close up with their red-rimmed eyes and fabulous feathers.

Richard liked those pictures but all the same he thought it was only a hobby. Like cricket, or shooting. It wasn’t something to do with your life.

Richard had begun to take the farm in hand the year he went to university. He worked with him over that first summer’s harvest, but he didn’t go back to university at the end of it. He took the money Richard paid him and bought the newest Pentax. He knew what to buy. He knew something about photography by then.

Great camera, Richard said. What did it cost you?

It cost him a lot. His travelling would have to be cheap because he had spent so much on the camera. He would have to earn along the way. The camera had to be a good one because it was to be his eye on the world. It would be the means to give what he saw physical presence. The evidence of his seeing – or of his being, if you followed the thought through. That, his grand notion. He was going to go travelling and take pictures. He would be what he did and not what he was. What he did would make him who he was or who he would become. He would become whoever he was at any moment, with a pack on his back and a camera around his neck. Seeing the world, whatever he saw. Would he then be what he saw? Or would he always be what he had seen? (Or when he came home would he be just the same?)