102
2:14): she traded off her ration of Red Cross cigarettes for vitamin pills for the children despite the incensed cries of racketeering from smokers. The family was reunited in Lourenco Marques in September 1942. We learned how mother had nearly died of pellagra in the camp. Father met us at the wharf and took us ashore to the hotel where they were staying. Mother took one look at us from the top of the stairs and said 'Go and wash your hands and let's have lunch'. Two memories from this period in South Africa. Dad returned to the South West Pacific. Mother's frustrating hunt for accommodation ended when she applied for a post as a teacher at the Hebron farm school at Lions River. The only snag was whether the Natal Education Department would recognize her Columbia MA and teacher's diploma as sufficient for the one room farm school. But some official took that risk in the days before Dr E.G. Malherbe made Columbia's name respectable in Natal. Mother set up her regime in the wattle and daub hut to teach the transients whose parents were able to snatch leave when they could and come to the farm. Soon the walls of the hut were decorated (as all our homes had been) with a time chart that marched in century steps from Cheops to Churchill: with hemispheres for geography and a constantly changing set of items to illustrate humanity's cavalcade. The other memory is of family prayers when she had a home of her own in Amanzimtoti. Our Apostolic gardener and his family took part. He was a patriarch and was given the Chinese honorific title 'Lao' - old one- and often used to end prayers with a paternal blessing in which he moved round the circle shaking hands and singing. My parents educated one of the sons who now teaches in the Transkei: in her list of intercessions, he headed Saturday as her own children headed the other days of the week. The war ended: there seemed no future for my father in South African shipping. The rest of the family emigrated to the US. My parents were then nearing 50: they encountered a US determined to forget the war as quickly as possible. For two years my father was becalmed on land while he acquired the US citizenship essential if he was to sail under the American flag. Before long, superannuation and savings began to run
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker