Description: The syncopated double narrative interweaves Frederick’s history with the present narrative of his great-great granddaughter, the narrator of the film. They live parallel lives in a London of the 19th Century and one of the 1980s. We begin in an attic, as the young woman sifts through her grandmother’s space which she remarks is ‘the only evidence of a life’s work’.

She mentions how she loves old things, how she had a stall at one point to get rid of her stuff when she was evicted and split up with her partner, Arbor. She finds a trunk with Frederick’s letters. At a desk, she begins to read them, before venturing into the City to explore the old locales of his youth with a polaroid camera in hand, wandering around London Bridge, Tower Bridge, Cheapside, St. Pauls and all the spots where he first worked delivering shipping mercantile paper to his next, short career working in his cousin’s pianoforte shop, spending lunchtimes at Embankment watching the ships go by. The film reveals a paper boat which the protagonist makes which she sends off in the river.

The narratives switch between the young woman’s own voiceover: her break-up, having her daughter taken away from her, against Freddy’s: he worked as a sailor, got married and divorced, losing two children early on, before taking his two surviving daughters to America, away from their mother. We see footage of the young woman visiting her child at her new home, remarking how time changes when you have a child. Then, we see a flashback of her relationship with Arby – working at their stall, taking care of their child at home, before officers come in to take their child away. We also see images of old family photographs, presumably Freddy’s.

Then, the young woman’s grandmother joins her in the attic, commenting on how Freddy is only telling one side of the story – as a vegetarian atheist, supposedly open-minded individual – and grandma interjects with her own, describing how her mother ran away from Freddy in America to live with her mother in England. The final shot ends on a black-and-white staged photo of a woman burning her own diaries.