My mother has been dead now for nine years.

I think of her often but she has been on my mind more of late because of the World Cup. That might sound strange, but it is because of the venue. She was a South African war bride, brought home in 1945 by my father who had been a gunnery instructor in the Transvaal once he had escaped the fall of France in 1940.

Mum`s story was an odd one. She was the youngest of four and her two sisters and brother were much, much older: twenty, fifteen and ten years older than she was. She was a change of life baby. The story goes that her mother didn`t know she was pregnant, thinking that she was in menopause, and that when the news of her giving birth reached my grandfather who was drinking in the railway club he fainted. She seemed to leave South Africa without much of an attempt to keep in touch with her siblings, writing only to the sister nearest to her in age and, when that sister died in the early sixties, there was no further communication. I know there is a raft of South African relatives but have no means of contacting them.

Little things hearkened back to her South African origins. Certain words that we used in the family were Afrikaans. We didn`t poop, we took a kak. She insisted on adding curry powder to Shepherd`s pie, a tribute to the Boboetie she`d grown up eating. I grew up knowing more about Jan Smuts than I did about Winston Churchill.

Today, T and I were talking about accents and he said that he liked South African ones. I have a reasonable gift for mimicry (I have to struggle when talking to someone with an accent no my own not to fall in to imitating them) and amused him by carrying on the conversation in a reasonable South African accent. He then asked me if I could say anything in Afrikaans. At first, I said no, but suddenly I heard my mother singing to me and the words came back. I sang two songs to him as we drove home from the mall: Sarie Marais and one about a farmer called Ferreira. How accurate I was I had no idea until I was able to look the songs up on the internet. The answer was pretty damn accurate. I found it slightly scary that songs I have probably not thought about for nearly forty years came back so clearly.



I raised a toast tonight to Patricia Agnes Flaherty late of Pretoria, Transvaal.