(no subject)
I am still in limbo as I have not received the edits due back in September, but I am not chasing them at the moment.
Since my return from my father's funeral in England in the summer, I have been thinking a great deal about how easy it is for us to lose our histories. It became clear as we prepared for the funeral that we all had pieces of our parents' history but not necessarily the same ones. My oldest brother didn't know that "I'll be seeing you," sung by Frank Sinatra was our parents' "song." Nor did he know the story of how they met, whereas I did. I think I was in the lucky position of being the last child at home, eight and ten years younger than my two brothers, and that meant my parents often told me things about their young lives. I'll admit to being an insatiably curious child who probably asked too many questions.
So, the last few weeks I have been looking at things that I had already written about my family and one bit of gold was finding an account I wrote of my father's flight from France in 1940. I think I should probably call it a collaboration as he answered endless questions over the phone and by e-mail and quite liked the finished piece. There are other stories he told me that I will write down and I will gently try to nudge my brothers into doing the same and we can leave these for our own children, along with stories of our own childhoods.
While doing this, however, I was disturbed by how little I knew about my mother's early life and family. She was a war bride from South Africa and, once she left there in 1945, never once went back or saw her siblings again. One nephew, or perhaps, the child of a cousin, visited us in Germany in 1963, when I was nine, but this was the only visit. My mother's siblings were twenty, fifteen and ten years older than she was. Contact by letter seems to have been sporadic, but talking to one of my brothers today, he remembers receiving parcels containing South African newspapers and strips of biltong, but thinks these stopped in the early fifties. Quite how or why contact was lost, I don't know, but from the mid sixties onwards there were no more letters. My mother struggled first with Depression that gradually slid into Alzheimer's Disease and our opportunity to ask her was lost.
I think that my disquiet at not knowing things was brought to a head by reading Martin Booth's memoir, Gweilo (Golden Boy in America), a book he wrote at the request of his children when he was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour in 2002 as they wanted him to expand on the stories he had told them of his boyhood in Hong Kong in the early fifties. His book ends too suddenly - as he and his mother reluctantly leave Hong Kong, he mentions that they returned four years later, but of course, the book detaiing that time was never nor will it ever be written. My husband who is a few years older than Booth and who was a teenager in Hong Kong at the time described in the book read it, too, entranced by his own adolescence being brought back to life for him and realising that he witnessed several of the events described by Booth. We have both decided to start writing descriptions of our own childhoods to leave for our son, so that he knows where he came from and can, perhaps, share that with his children in due time.
My mother's incomplete story has to be finished first and with the help of my sister-in-law I have started to dig around and to see what I can find out. She sent me copies of my mother's birth certificate and of my parents' marriage certificate, both poignant as all such documents from the past are, the little details so telling, such as the designation of the bride and groom as European on a certificate issued in Pretoria, South Africa in 1942. As I was looking at them, I remembered that I had been given a packet containing some old letters and cards. I hadn't looked at them at the time - I think it was in the middle of a family visit - but had just stored them in my filing cabinet. When I got them out yesterday, I realised that here was a way in. As well as my mother's school leaving certificate, my ration book dated the year of my birth in 1954, and some clothing coupons from 1946, there were two letters from South Africa both written in 1964. Although both have addresses on them, I doubt that there is any point writing to to them forty six years later, although GoogleEarth did show me a small, neat bungalow at one of them. One is from my mother's older sister who would be one hundred and four if she were still living, but the other was from a niece and in it, she listed her children and their ages, four of them all a few years younger than I am, three boys and one girl. I googled the names of the boys adding South Africa to try and winnow the hits down, and I think I have found my second cousin and an e-mail address.
With a certain amount of trepidation, I wrote to him, explaining who I was and why I was trying to contact his family. Now, I have to wait and see if he is indeed the right one and if he replies. So, we might be able to fill in some gaps in our lost history. Keep your fingers crossed.
Since my return from my father's funeral in England in the summer, I have been thinking a great deal about how easy it is for us to lose our histories. It became clear as we prepared for the funeral that we all had pieces of our parents' history but not necessarily the same ones. My oldest brother didn't know that "I'll be seeing you," sung by Frank Sinatra was our parents' "song." Nor did he know the story of how they met, whereas I did. I think I was in the lucky position of being the last child at home, eight and ten years younger than my two brothers, and that meant my parents often told me things about their young lives. I'll admit to being an insatiably curious child who probably asked too many questions.
So, the last few weeks I have been looking at things that I had already written about my family and one bit of gold was finding an account I wrote of my father's flight from France in 1940. I think I should probably call it a collaboration as he answered endless questions over the phone and by e-mail and quite liked the finished piece. There are other stories he told me that I will write down and I will gently try to nudge my brothers into doing the same and we can leave these for our own children, along with stories of our own childhoods.
While doing this, however, I was disturbed by how little I knew about my mother's early life and family. She was a war bride from South Africa and, once she left there in 1945, never once went back or saw her siblings again. One nephew, or perhaps, the child of a cousin, visited us in Germany in 1963, when I was nine, but this was the only visit. My mother's siblings were twenty, fifteen and ten years older than she was. Contact by letter seems to have been sporadic, but talking to one of my brothers today, he remembers receiving parcels containing South African newspapers and strips of biltong, but thinks these stopped in the early fifties. Quite how or why contact was lost, I don't know, but from the mid sixties onwards there were no more letters. My mother struggled first with Depression that gradually slid into Alzheimer's Disease and our opportunity to ask her was lost.
I think that my disquiet at not knowing things was brought to a head by reading Martin Booth's memoir, Gweilo (Golden Boy in America), a book he wrote at the request of his children when he was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour in 2002 as they wanted him to expand on the stories he had told them of his boyhood in Hong Kong in the early fifties. His book ends too suddenly - as he and his mother reluctantly leave Hong Kong, he mentions that they returned four years later, but of course, the book detaiing that time was never nor will it ever be written. My husband who is a few years older than Booth and who was a teenager in Hong Kong at the time described in the book read it, too, entranced by his own adolescence being brought back to life for him and realising that he witnessed several of the events described by Booth. We have both decided to start writing descriptions of our own childhoods to leave for our son, so that he knows where he came from and can, perhaps, share that with his children in due time.
My mother's incomplete story has to be finished first and with the help of my sister-in-law I have started to dig around and to see what I can find out. She sent me copies of my mother's birth certificate and of my parents' marriage certificate, both poignant as all such documents from the past are, the little details so telling, such as the designation of the bride and groom as European on a certificate issued in Pretoria, South Africa in 1942. As I was looking at them, I remembered that I had been given a packet containing some old letters and cards. I hadn't looked at them at the time - I think it was in the middle of a family visit - but had just stored them in my filing cabinet. When I got them out yesterday, I realised that here was a way in. As well as my mother's school leaving certificate, my ration book dated the year of my birth in 1954, and some clothing coupons from 1946, there were two letters from South Africa both written in 1964. Although both have addresses on them, I doubt that there is any point writing to to them forty six years later, although GoogleEarth did show me a small, neat bungalow at one of them. One is from my mother's older sister who would be one hundred and four if she were still living, but the other was from a niece and in it, she listed her children and their ages, four of them all a few years younger than I am, three boys and one girl. I googled the names of the boys adding South Africa to try and winnow the hits down, and I think I have found my second cousin and an e-mail address.
With a certain amount of trepidation, I wrote to him, explaining who I was and why I was trying to contact his family. Now, I have to wait and see if he is indeed the right one and if he replies. So, we might be able to fill in some gaps in our lost history. Keep your fingers crossed.