Last updated 19:37, Thursday, 10 April 2008

It’s a mystery – and everyone loves a mystery. We know how an albatross on a Pacific coral atoll happened to swallow a Tesco bag. We even know why a man once played golf on the moon. But we’ve no idea how photos from Wigton ended up in Italy.

Old, faded pictures, they were. In an old, faded album, as all treasured memories should be. They showed the smiling, characterful faces of Cumbrian men, women and children during the 1930s. And for reasons none can explain they surfaced on a market stall in Borgosesia in northern Italy... 30 miles or so from Turin.

We know now that the album’s owner was the late Jimmy Hodgson, keen amateur photographer, toffee maker and petrol pump attendant from Wigton. But Jimmy never served in Italy during the war and had no special reason to want to introduce the good folks of Borgosesia to the charms of his own home town.

How his Cumbrian pictures manoeuvred a route of some 1,000 miles, to pitch up in a sunny little Italian market remains a mystery worthy of Midsomer. Perhaps it always will be. Perhaps it always should be.

Nothing ignites romanticism quite so instantly as a faded old photograph. And mystery will forever inspire the determinedly hopeless romantic.

Sepia tones and ochre tints of age add immeasurable depth to imagination of what might have been important to people probably long gone now. Who did they love? Who loved them? What had happened later in that day – hours after a shutter click captured a single moment in unknown, full-blown lives?

Jimmy’s photos will fire all those emotions and imaginings. More so, once lost, now found, they will enflame passions so beloved of romantics – when they return to Wigton

The homecoming is in itself a near-miraculous twist of mysterious fate. That they should have been discovered by someone anxious to send them back to their rightful resting place is much more than fortunate. It’s amazing.

A lesser person might have been carried away by their enchantment, invested in a set of frames and used those images of Wigton folks at rest and play to accessorise a stylish, minimalist, Milanese designer’s living room.

It happens. More often than most of us care to consider, it happens. Treasured records of people and places captured in history aren’t always what they seem.

Accepting an invitation for drinks at the home of an old acquaintance known for her decor obsessions, I was immediately impressed by a collection of old photos, arranged strikingly in gilded frames artistically ordered on wall-hanging chunky chains.

“What a wonderful way to display old family photographs,” I remarked. “Is that your grandma paddling in the sea at Whitby – or is it Scarborough?”

“Haven’t a clue where or who any of them are... picked them up at a jumble sale,” she said, moving me on to admire a sideboard collection of empty perfume bottles.

The laughing lady with her skirts hitched up above chubby knees was very likely somebody’s grandma. And what a thing to do to your granny – dump her in the jumble.

Suddenly those pictures radiated a whole new mood; a weighty one, drenched in loss and neglect. Memories should be worth much more than jumble and entrapment in a stranger’s DIY arrangement of Ikea photo frames. We need to protect our memories. No way should any grandma deserve the dumping jumble thing.

Jimmy’s stirring snapshots will suffer no such ignominy. They’ll be displayed proudly in Wigton Library – a testament to continuity, connection with the past and respect for locality. In sepia tones.

Ladies in cloche hats and long coats, smiling with their menfolk in sharp suits, on a day out – for a picnic, perhaps. A little boy on his tricycle, squinting against the sun with his slender mum on the cobbles of their street. A man in a homburg, binocular case strapped across his chest, his little girl and dog on a shingle beach. Two stern men on a sofa, captured in conversation of matters seriously masculine – like the runners in the 2.45 at Carlisle, maybe.

All will be appreciated with the affection and fascination they warrant, in the place they belong – the town that inspired them.

We have to assume Jimmy Hodgson would have been pleased to know his pictures strayed so far from home in a mysterious adventure, then found their way back again in an even bigger one. It’s nice to think he’d have been proud to know his photos were finally going to be seen and loved in his home town.

But as for the rest of us; well, wherever old Jimmy is now, hopeless romantics will want to believe he smiles as he catches us elaborating on the possibilities in the lives he immortalised... and thank him for the memories.