Memory and memorials

Sunrise this morning

The nights are getting longer here in Portugal, and we have had quite a bit of rain, which is not the cold endless rain of England, but wondrous and welcome and leaves shiny puddles for us on our daily walks, and tiny spears of grass happily leaping up everywhere, and beauteous clouds!

Being close to soixante-dix (70) I kind of watch my memory, and find, like Billy Collins in his wonderful poem Forgetfulness  , that there are things that slip away, that hide in some corner of the databank of my brain, only to pop out unexpectedly when I'm lying in the bath late at night.  

(Soixante-dix is french for 70.  In our Portuguese classes we are learning numbers, and like English and Afrikaans and Spanish, the other languages I know, Portuguese numbers follow a pattern: cinquenta, sessenta, setenta,  ... (fifty, sixy, seventy etc..  But French is so strange, they make you do calculations for some obtuse reason.  So 70 is sixty + ten, and it gets even weirder, because 80 is quatre-vingt!  Four times twenty!  And ninety is quatre-vingt-dix!  Four times twenty plus ten!  And it gets even worse but I won't go on.  Apparently it is based on the vigesimal or base-20 system used by both the Mayans and the Celts.  Like four-score in ancient texts? )

Information Age

Most of us are probably ADD nowadays, due to the constant technological bombardment, especially by the little computers we carry around in our pockets messing with our brains, so forgetting things is fairly normal, but I do find words not coming to me when I want them to quite frustrating.  

Pregnant with the twins

I think it all began during my first pregnancy at 23, and there is substantial evidence that pregnancy and motherhood affect our brains because of a variety of elevated hormones in pregnancy, and little sleep for years after.   ( I LOVE sleeping for 8 or 9 hours every night now!)

The years of being a student before I had my first child is a time bathed in sparkling light, my own Belle Epoque, when I was drunk on knowledge, philosophy, language.  And my clever mind could memorize poetry and remember vast tracts of books and images in order to write copiously from my memory for numerous 3-hour exams, quite easily and well.  

Emma aged 1.

When Emma was a year old I went back to university to finish my post-graduate teacher's diploma and really struggled with studying and exams.  It was like hitting an unanticipated brick wall at times during those last six months.  

Our lives consist of epochs, and generally we stumble from one to the next, mostly unaware how our lives will change but taking the grand leap into each epoch with faith in the NEXT THING.  How else to explain all the strange things we do as intelligent animals?  

Having my children was a different kind of golden, and each epoch has momentous events.  I'm in the autumn or winter epoch right now, which is so strange how suddenly it comes upon you.  

And memories are like that too, I think.  We have sunny memories of happy endless days, ecstatic blue-skied moments, and charred memories of terrible hours, agonising seconds that stretch forever, hurtful times.  We can somewhat choose which happy things we remember, but the sad or hurtful or terrible things seem to stay stuck fast in some room of our minds forever.  

The other morning Emma sent me a video that had popped up on her phone courtesy of Google, of the little granddaughters singing Happy Birthday to a cousin, when their speech was still quite newly fashioned.  It is only really nine or so years ago, but time is a funny thing.  We both had ready tears watching the sweetness of those little characters, who are now gawky tweens.  

Little Jess on my lap

Children grow so fast in adult time, and although mine are all most definitely adults, their little gossamer-haired heads, their perfect features and their cuddly bodies climbing on to my lap are still perfectly real in recollection.  

I never want to forget those memories.  I want to die before I don't know my loved ones.  

My mother and grandmother were exceptional ordinary women.  As most of us are.  Women do so much in history but are mostly not memorialised with statues or days or streets named after them.  So many men became famous because they had all the time and space in the world to themselves, they didn't have to be bothered with all the washing and childcaring and ironing and cleaning and making and cooking and all those other present participles which women are still doing every day.  

Before good contraceptives, and still sadly in much of the world of today, women just fell or plummeted into this role of primary carer/cook/washerwoman etc. just because they had sex, voluntarily or in-.  And their lives as creatives, their potential for study, for future professions, just came to an end.  

Granny Gracie with her two
small daughters, Joan and Nora.

An article in the newspaper about
the first women in the WRAF. 
Grace Hewitson was my
grandmother.

My British grandmother went to Art School in the early 20th century, I have her portfolio, such exquisite draftmanship and painting ability.  She played the violin, was one of the first Royal Airforce women to work in signals at Suttons Farm Airfield during the First World War in England, was well-educated and beloved of her siblings, her father, an esteemed major in the Army, and her spirited mother.  A South African RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot on leave during the war was invited to her parents' house, quickly proposed marriage, and soon after the end of the war, off she went to South Africa, where she immediately had two daughters, longed for her mother and siblings, never played the violin again, never drew another line. 
 

My gorgeous mother with Timmy

My mother Joan, Gracie's eldest daughter, married an RAF mechanic whom she met when his torpedoed ship was diverted to Cape Town during the Second World War, and then Joan promptly had a daughter herself, and then miscarriages until a son, and then accidentally, years later, me.

My mother with all of us.

She was incredibly intelligent and mathematically sharp, helped my dad study, teaching him maths, gettin him through all his exams to become an electrician and then a refrigeration and airconditioning engineer.  

When I went off to school she found a job at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, working for the professor of Pathology.  He discovered her profound intelligence and empathy and enquired about putting her forward for a scholarship  to study medicine!  But it was rejected because she was too old, the board who decided such things thought it would be a waste.  She was 39!  

I remember my granny, she was a small woman with delicate hands, the best giggle, who spent a lot of her life in pain, but who was always interested in us and loved us.  I loved her.  

I remember my mother.  She still lives inside me.  She was a large beautiful complicated woman with a huge heart who spent much of her later life in pain, but always loved greatly, her children, her friends, all her relatives, and also clouds in a field, seagulls, England.  I still love her.  I still miss her grand encompassing love.  

Great-grandmother Nora

But I don't know my great-grandmother, except that her name was Nora and she looks rather lovely and serious in old sepia pictures, and I know she was most likely a good mother because her three surviving children were allowed to become themselves.  

Plaque at St Stephen's Garden of Remembrance.

So there is a brick in the garden of remembrance at the little church in Pinelands (the same one where I rejected god as a small child).  My sister arranged for it to made and engraved and installed,  remembering our parents.  But that is my mother's only memorial, and she is mentioned under my dad, and in 50 or so years no one will know who she was.

We are these beings, these vivacious spirits, with all our magnificent feelings and passionate experiences, our desperate challenges and substantial successes, our writings, our photos, our paintings, our many many meals made and dishes washed up, the scraped knees bandaged, the hurt child restored, the manifold makings of the enormous landscape that is a life.  

And all this will be gone and unremembered, along with the majority of people who have lived on this earth.  And maybe this is as it should be, millions of lives lived well or poorly, over and forgotten, generation after generation, after all we are just animals like hummingbirds, elephants, fruitflies.  

But I will light a candle tonight for all my women ancestors, known and unknown, a small memorial.   

Georgia!

And here is a large charcoal drawing after Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers.  She was also a "badass", as one of my sons once noted after walking enchanted through an exhibition of her long prolific life. 

She made a whole lot of charcoal drawings which I had not seen before, and although I am not so fond of charcoal, I did enjoy the messy-handed drawings I made this week.

Old friends and Growing up

Our friends, in Portimão

Four days with friends staying, wonderful!  From Australia, but both belong to that vast diaspora of South Africans, the Scatterlings of Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiWnHmmRIm8 .  Rob grew up with Tim, as he is the younger brother of Tim's best friend.  Rob and Eurika showed us such hospitality in their beautiful house in Sydney when we visited them in Australia in 2016, and it was wonderful to reciprocate at last!  

Two men on the beach

It is quite seldom as a couple that you find another pair where all four people get on extremely well.  These two make up one of those couples.  So there was walking, and a boat trip, and swimming in the sea (by the women while the men sat under an umbrella), and delicious meals, and shared conversations of varied profundity and hilarity.   

From the boat

Tim and Rob reminisced about people and events, family members and church congregants.  All the everyday things that happen to us through the years of childhood, and these are the ones which we paste into our memories, remembered for a variety of reasons: a kind teacher, a mean girl, a storm during a church picnic, your first crush.  All part of the moving pictures in our heads.  All seen slightly differently, but recollected clearly.  All so long ago now.  But still luminous.  

Tim and Rob spoke a lot about their schooldays and the different characters of the teachers, and the cuts (whippings) that the boys got then, just for failing tests even.  I thought about how many cuts I would have received if I had been a boy!  

My brother and I, long before the letter
that changed my life

When I was about 14 or 15, I decided I had had enough of school.  My brother, who had already moved to England, was the one who wrote me a passionate letter about the importance of EDUCATION, and managed to change my mind about leaving after grade 10.

But grade 11 was hard for me.  I didn't fit in at all.  I went to a strict academic school for girls which spewed out the indoctrinating Christian National Education of the repressive regime of South Africa in the 60's and 70's.  I was too nonconformist for that milieu.  I questioned everything, I was no good at sport (another prerequisite to success), and I didn't believe in god.  I believed in reading, in trees, in Art, in classical music, in sex, in the beach, in love, in poetry, in passion.   (I still believe in all these things.) 

So to save my sanity I began bunking (playing hooky from) school.  Many days, I would ride my bike to school, and I wouldn't even enter the building.  I would just park my bike, walk on down the path at the back of the school which went past the hockey fields and swimming pool, to the subway under the railway, where I would catch a ride on a train somewhere.  It didn't matter where, the beach was one way and the city was the other.  

Cape Town Symphony Orchestra

Most Thursdays would find me sitting in the City Hall watching the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra at their weekly practice.  

Or I would walk up through Adderly Street to the Public Gardens and feed peanuts to the squirrels, having bought an avocado or two from the vendors to eat as my lunch.  I might just spend an hour or so reading on a bench there, surrounded by happy squirrels and pigeons.  (I frequently stole books, falling in love with their covers and the wondrous story that would take me away.  My dad gave me pocket money which bought four books a month, but it was never enough.)

Cape Town company Gardens

Sometimes I went to the Monte Carlo movie theatre, which always had the earliest matinees, and I would sit in the enchanted dark and watch movies. I was put off that though, for there were too many lonely creeps sidling up to this schoolgirl in her uniform and doing stuff with their crotches, so often I had to leave hurriedly and miss the rest of the story.  

I was utterly convinced that no one would notice at school, I thought they would be happy that my rude presence was gone, but of course after some time a teacher would report too many absences and I would be called in to the principal.  She was a tall authoritative woman and I was scared of her.  I really would try then, after her stern warnings, but a few weeks later the wanderlust would grab me and off I would go again. 

In grade 12 my parents were called in and I was threatened with expulsion.  My poor embarrassed mum and dad managed to persuade the principal to give me another chance, but there were three or four of these meetings before I realised my days of freedom were over. If I didn't stop walking out of school I wouldn't get my Matric certificate.  I wouldn't be able to go to university where I could do all the wonderful things I wanted to every day: Paint, Have Sex, Read, Write, Paint etc..  

I wonder if I would have been as brave and determined if I had got a hiding every time I was caught?  

But I am convinced that this was my education.  All children really educate themselves, depending on what they are interested in, what grabs their fancy.  It's why we choose certain subjects to concentrate on, and go all out doing extra work on them, not just what is given by a teacher.  

I educated myself while absconding from school.  I learned independence (like how to make maps of a city in your head, how to ride a train without paying, how to get away from lecherous men, how to steal books {I only stole about 20 books in my life, and never anything else},), I learned everything from books, (the words used for body-parts we never mention, how trees grow to a great age, how the little black letters on a page could show me how someone else had felt the exact same way as I was feeling, more than two hundred years ago).  

I learned to live with my own thoughts, I learned to be alone but not lonely.  I was passionate about Art and Literature and Poetry and could fill all my waking hours happily and productively.  

I was so lucky not to live with the threat of caning.  

I was so lucky not to have the technology of today.

Frontispiece of a book my mother gave
me a few years before she died.

When I apologized to my parents many years later, my mother professed to not remember anything about the fact that I had been such an awful teenager, that she had spent anxious hours wondering when I was coming home, where I was, if I was pregnant, if I would ever make anything of myself.  

She told me instead that I had always been her wonderful daughter!  That she adored me.  Which, I suppose, is all you want from a mother.  Someone who lets you become yourself, knowing you are loved abundantly, always.  

A little study of imaginary plants for today.

Leaves