Mum fights backThe mists of time create a soft blurring of all of those things that when you were a child, you thought you could never get beyond.
Since Tuesdays with Morrie I have come to believe in living wakes. In other words letting people know what good things I think about them before it can no longer be said directly. And often as I dredge through my memories, some of those things which I held to be so critical to my own sense of identity when it occurred, were trivial and innocent in retrospect.
Our children, expect that we might subjugate our histories, our loves and our lives in sacrifice to a perfect devotion to them. Sometimes we simply do so without there prompting.
In fact, it is often the case that the very idea that we might have once had lives is often a source of great embarrassment to our chlidren. And what that does is to remind us is how we exacted the same treason on our own parents.
For many years I simply refused to recognise that my mother had her own fierce sense of identity, that she had lived her own proud young life and then simply buried it in the dutiful repression of the 1950s and 60s when women were sent back to the kitchen after the relative liberation that the war had brought.
One hot Friday afternoon when I was 12, as school ended and we traipsed out tiredly towards the bus that would take us home, my mother appeared to collect my sister and I. It was a complete but welcome surprise.
She announced, only after she had the car underway so that we might not escape, that we were leaving home, leaving my dad. Now whilst my father and I were in a permanent state of conflict if not conflagration, and I had always felt that I was somehow a source of excruciating pain to him for my imperfections, I was for a moment most put out by the idea that our idyllic middle class existence would be rent apart.
But when my mother announced that we would go to her sister in Durban, happiness descended for that was where holidays were held.
It was an 8 hour ride in a Chevrolet Impala to Durban in those days. So it was late and dark when we arrived. There was some tension in my aunt?s household. But my sister and I launched into our completely unexpected holiday with gusto.
It is sometimes remarkable quite how oblivious we are as children to the pain of others around us.
The telephone was in constant use that weekend as peace negotiations were engaged upon. And, by the time Sunday came around, my father?s will had prevailed and it was announced that we would head back to Johannesburg the next morning.
By this stage we were well ensconced in our holiday and greatly disappointed that normal service would be resumed so soon.
So when Monday morning came we dawdled tragically down to the waiting Chevrolet Impala. Except now, my aunt was coming with us. She was leaving her husband. In her case it wasn?t simply a feisty and impetuous show ? for it involved him, copious amounts alcohol for which he had developed a taste that would last many years, and of course a floozy at the Copacabana.
And so we headed off to Johannesburg. My aunt, all her baggage including a set of golf clubs, my mum, sister and I. Actually her golf clubs were on the seat where I would have been whilst I balanced precariously like a nodding dog on the rear shelf of the car. In those days seat belts had not become de rigeur.
Somewhere just outside of Pietermaritzburg, a black man on a bicycle veered out from a side road into the path of a speeding DKW. I did find it somewhat bemusing as I flew off the rear shelf onto the golf clubs to see a car bouncing wildly through the fields. But DKWs were rather bouncy cars like Citroens. And we, most fortunate to be in a car that might have been made by General Patton, simply ground to a slow halt.
When we got home that night, it seemed as if a small hiccup had happened and everything simply returned to the way it was.
Except, that in so many ways the perfect predictability of a middle class, middle of the road fabric of happy family life had a tear in it that we would always remember. And it would always remind us that my mother, who to that point had simply been the one who provided for us, had and would always have a spark of life that we would have to learn to pay close heed of.
In some strange way, the end of innocence sometimes brings its own blessings.