A few years ago, I needed to write my memoir to understand myself but as my mother had had a great effect on my childhood and the person I became, I realised that that was where I should start. However, it soon became apparent that her childhood was the reason for who she became. So perhaps I needed to start with my grandmother, who died when my mother was eleven years old. But I didn't even know my grandmother’s name!
‘My Mother’ I came to realise was the only name I had ever heard for my grandmother, when mentioned by my late mother. Grandmother had died giving birth to twin boys and they and another boy of 2 years-old, my mother’s half-brothers, were the only family she had. There was a step-father who died not long after that. As an English-speaking South African, this was how my journey to the ‘other side’ of the Anglo Boer War began.
Something I have come across quite often in my recent reading of South African history, is mention of racial-conflict and I am always surprised to discover that this means between the Boers and the British. It explains now why I always felt, growing up in Pretoria in the 1940s, that the Afrikaans speaking children seemed to hate me. It might also explain why my mother did not tell her children that her mother had been from a Boer family, withholding her name and any information she might have had, on what her mother experienced during the war...
