Inspiration from the past

I’m very fond of this photograph. I had it pinned to the pinboard above my desk when I was writing The Restless Wave. It’s my paternal grandfather Bobby. In fact, ‘Bobby’ wasn’t his real name at all, although this is the name he always went by.
 
The story behind this is splendidly Victorian. My great-grandparents decided to name him after the family friend who was to be his godfather, in the hope that the said godfather would do well by his godson. It was only in the carriage on the way to the christening that the would-be godfather revealed that his nickname Bobby was not a diminutive of Robert, as the hapless parents had imagined, but a sort of nickname for, well, Brainard. By now it was too late to backtrack, so of course my great-grandparents  took a deep breath and said they would proceed as planned. So my poor grandfather was named Brainard, along with Edgar and Thomas. No surprise he stuck to Bobby. 
 
Bobby was born in 1901, so he’s a little older than my character Edward, who arrived in 1908. But they are more or less contemporaries, and the picture helped me think about Edward as I wrote his story.
 
I don’t know whether Bobby’s godfather ever came up with the goods, or remembered him in his will. Family history doesn’t relate. But as far as I know, his family circumstances were much happier than Edward’s. Nonetheless, I think there’s an air of vulnerability in his photograph.
 
Also in my possession is the Latin dictionary Bobby took to boarding school, with his name embossed on the cover in gold. I think of him setting off to school with his dictionary, a few days after the outbreak of the First World War. The War that killed his brother Aylmer, and no doubt a number of boys who’d been a few years ahead of Bobby at school. I wonder how it felt to go to university alongside survivors of the trenches, knowing that you’d missed the War by a whisker.
 
Edward was far too young to fight in the First World War, of course. But it still helped shape the man he became. I know books were precious to him. I like to think that a Latin dictionary engraved with his name, like Bobby’s, travelled with him, and perhaps ended up on the bookshelves of one of his granddaughters too.