1942 - Continued

At the time my mother was writing her diary entries from January to November of 1942, my father was in the air force. There were many details omitted from mum’s dairy that I would dearly love to know. She mentions nothing about my dad in the air force, but she does talk a lot of friends and acquaintances going missing, or dying and she is terribly worried when the Japs invade Australia. "Will they come for South Africa next" she wonders.

After my dad died in January 2000, his brother, Graham, got hold of and sent me dad's war records from the South African Defence archives. Suddenly a door opened into part of my father's life about which I previously knew nothing.

Before dad enlisted, he had completed a BSc degree at the University of Stellenbosch in 1939. He went on to do an engineering degree at the University of Cape Town in 1940 but after a year he decided to join the airforce.

I learnt from Graham, who was also in the air force, ahead of dad, that "all airforce recruits had to undergo long and boring ground training [near Pretoria] before being sent to flying school."

This ground training took the best part of 9 months and finally dad was able to start flying training on Tiger Moths at Baragwanath in October 1941. "After 50 hours flying" according to Graham "pupils were posted to an advanced flying school where you had to complete 100 hours on service type aircraft."

My father's advanced training was on a twin-engined Oxford Airspeed. The Oxford was primarily built for the Royal Air Force but seven were modified for the South African Air Force. Dad got his wings on April 10, 1942.

Six days later my mother's diary records "Got home from school this afternoon to find Nat [my dad] here. He'd got in from Pretoria that morning. He had to be up at varsity [University of CapeTown] to meet a friend so I only saw him for 5 minutes. This evening Mrs G. [his mother] rang me up and asked me out for the weekend, so quite obviously Nat had asked her to ask me."

While my dad waits for his next posting in the air force, he courts my mother. The weekend at his family home in Stellenbosch was tense. "I didn't have a minute with Nat alone all day. Mrs G obviously keeping Nat and me apart. We had to play a game of chess to be alone. Anyhow he held my hand all the way through flick tonight." After the weekend my mother returns to her family home just beneath the University of Cape Town. Dad visits her and tells her he loves her and has done so for two years. My mother is so happy.

In April 1942 dad was 24, nine months older than mum. They were so young!

1942 - A Good Year For Marriage

.
A few years after my father's death in January 2000, my brother found a diary of my mother's which dad had looked after in the 17 years since her death. My brother photocopied the diary for me. It was written in a soft-covered exercise book called "The Croxley Manuscript Book" and she had inscribed, in bold letters, "1942" on the top left hand edge of the cover. At the bottom right there was space for name and subject. She had written "N. Smith" in her beautiful handwriting and printed "DIARY : PRIVATE" underneath.

Paging through the daily entries felt a bit like prying into the life of someone I knew, yet did not know; it felt a bit rude; how would she feel if she knew I was reading her diary? I wonder if she ever peeked into my diaries? It was a long time since she'd died, and at least sixty years since she had written these notes, and it definitely didn't feel right. But each entry was so enchanting, written in her familiar script, I just couldn't stop.

In 1942 my mother was 23, turning 24 that June. A lot of her friends, and also friends of her siblings, were off in the army or navy or airforce, fighting for Great Britain in World War ll. She was a teacher at SACS Preparatory School (that's Elementary School in US English) and seemed to spend all her free time going to the movies which she called "flicks", or going to dances with groups of friends, always on the lookout for "Mr Right".

Mum knew my father then because she spent weekends with his parents. But she doesn't say how she met him or if she was in a relationship with him, or even if she aspired to be in one. And he doesn't appear in the diary until March. In the meantime, in the months leading up to his arrival, she is on the brink of despair. She received a letter from a sweetheart who told her not to wait for her. And now she is really "on the shelf." She is "doomed."

And then one day in March she writes an ecstatic entry about a letter from my dad who is in the airforce. He wrote to say he would be getting a weekend off soon, and would visit. She writes "I wish I knew how he felt about me. I'd marry him tomorrow if he asked me?"

My dad visits the next month. He declares his love for her and by the end of June they have announced their engagement. They marry on November 21st 1942 and live happily ever after.

Well, I seem to have skipped over the diary from April until November - perhaps there will be more in the next blog.

But, the diary and the year 1942 really circles back to when I met Tim in Cape Town in 1996, 54 years later. One evening we compared family notes and I learned that Tim's parents were married on the same day in 1942 that my mum and dad married. How about that for coincidence?

Perhaps it was destiny and we were meant to meet and marry, even though it took us til our fifties to get there!

On Aging - thinking about my mother

I have been thinking a lot about aging lately, what with my 62nd birthday looming. I remember my mother at the same age and how old I thought she was. And now I'm the same age, but still feel young. How can I have held such different perceptions? If my mother knew then that I thought she was ‘old’, how would she have felt? She didn’t act old. She was a great reader, had a lovely sense of humor and was pretty active.

The other day I did a major division and replanting of some clivia, a South African plant which likes the shade, flowers in late Winter/early Spring, and requires little more than the annual winter rain to produce its pretty orange flowers. Transplanting the clivia got me thinking about my mother again. I had to dig deep and then lift quite a weight of plant that had sprawled into a large cluster. It is fairly shallow rooted and sits on a ball of juicy, fat tendrils all bunched up in a fleshy tangle. Dividing the plant needed some brute strength but eventually I had clumps of new stock to plant.

I remember how hard my mother worked in the garden of the 14 acre property she and dad moved to in the seventies. Her dream was to landscape a few acres of the property as a Protea garden. As I puffed and panted, and dripped drops of sweat, creating new holes for the clivia, I thought of my mother with her spade, digging, planting and watering her seedlings. She must have been in her late fifties, early sixties then. I remember her long brown hair pulled back in a pony tail and twirled into a bun. She wasn’t grey like I am now; she had grey wisps around her ears and forehead. I can see her, toiling in the sun, standing up when she saw me walking towards her, leaning on the spade as she wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her arm, wearing a smile that said “phew, this is hard work.”

And then we’d chat about the cultivars she’d nurtured from seed. We’d walk up and down her rows of seedlings while she explained how to tell when a plant was ready to go in the ground. All the babies needed hand watering and that seemed like a big job every day.

It’s strange that I have these memories of my mother as a gardener now because I can’t remember her being at all interested in the garden when I was a young child and we lived in suburban Cape Town. I think passers-by would call our grounds “unkempt” for it had a wild and abandoned air about it, very well suited to childrens' imaginative games. Robin Hood, The Faraway Tree, Jack in the Beanstalk, we had all the props! We even had a tennis court at the back which I know suited my mother because it was less space to manage.

The other thought that keeps recurring is “what is the point of the work if we are just going to die?” Mum didn’t live to see her protea garden thrive. It was still in its infancy, and the rows of seedlings still lined the nursery, when she died at 65. And although I was already in my thirties, I still thought she was ‘old’ and that’s what happens when you get old. You die. I am now nearly as old as my mother when she was diagnosed riddled with cancer.

The question I struggle with today is: “If her destiny is my own future, how do I make the days really count?”

 Mum in the early 70's at Lagoon Farm, Hermanus

Dual lives

I first met Tim in Cape Town in 1996 and decided to join him here in West Marin in 2000. We talked of maybe one day spending 6 months on each continent to satisfy both our needs to be 'home'.

Stanford University decided to open a new Overseas Centre, their first in Africa, in Cape Town, South Africa. About a year ago, Tim was appointed the first Director of Stanford's Cape Town Bing Overseas Studies Program and we will be resident there for 6 months each year.

Tim and his colleagues spent this last year looking for accommodation for the students, premises and staff for the centre, and faculty for academic courses.

The first batch of students arrives in early January for Stanford's Winter Quarter (out of winter into the heat of Cape Town's summer!) Yesterday I was lucky enough to be at their first meeting at Stanford, to see some of the faces that will be a big part of our lives for the first three months of 2010.

The second batch of students is putting in their applications as I write. They will be in Cape Town for Stanford's Spring Quarter, April to mid June.

Tim and I will leave Inverness at the end of November, returning in mid June 2010. Lots to do before we leave, not the least of which is to find someone to stay in our house while we're away!