QHP0006: Just Messing About

A grainy 1980s colour photo in a British Army barracks shows one young soldier lying on a lower bunk, laughing, while another leans over him, gently pinning his wrists.

It’s a small 6x4 gloss print, slightly bowed from years of being pressed against metal. Mid-80s by the look of the haircuts and the fluorescent strip light glare. Two-tier bunks crowd the frame, blankets in army-issue shades of “nearly clean”, boots lined up obediently along the lino. In the centre, the action - one gunner on his back on the lower bunk, laughing, and another leaning over him, pinning his wrists. It’s textbook barracks horseplay if you only read the pose. The grain is a little heavy, the edges slightly blurred, as though whoever held the camera was laughing too.

But then there are the details that don’t quite stay within the lines of “just mucking about”. The pinned lad isn’t straining. His shoulders are relaxed, mouth curved into something that’s almost shy. The one above him is caught mid-smirk, but his gaze has already slipped out of the performance and into the person beneath him. Whatever signal is flickering between these two, it’s on a frequency the rest of the room isn’t tuned to.

I find myself wondering which one hid the photograph in the back of a locker, and whether the other ever knew it existed. Was this a souvenir of a single, electric evening of “lads being lads” that nearly became something else, or one image out of many, kept because it looked the most innocent if anyone found it? Perhaps they did nothing more scandalous than share cigarettes after lights out and talk in low voices about the places they’d rather be. Or perhaps, years later, one of them opened a box in a spare room, saw this moment again, and finally recognised what his younger self had been trying so hard to laugh off.