My mother - a part of her life I didn't know existed.

[curiouswombat]

I had the most unexpected conversation with my mother on Saturday – it is suddenly as if she is not the person I thought I knew – although not in a nasty way.

I suppose that because I’ve known her all my life, I tend to forget that I haven’t known her all her life – and that she might have done things of which I was unaware.

I must have had conversations with her so many times in the past, when we have discussed how far-travelled so many of the older generation of Manx people are, not just those who emigrated, but those you meet here, too. There was the elderly lady who had travelled across Canada by train in the early 1920s, or my great aunt who circumnavigated the globe four or five times after the age of 60.

Yet never has my mother mentioned travelling herself. When she went on holiday to Germany with my sister and brother-in-law 25 years ago she applied for her ‘first and only’ passport. She said so!

Then, today, when her arthritis and gout were making walking difficult, she was saying she really didn’t mind that she didn’t get far from home these days; the only thing she wishes she had done was go back to Kenya to see how it had changed.


Kenya? Pardon?

Oh, yes, she said, she had travelled to Kenya with her great-uncle Charlie, an officer in the Kenyan police force back in colonial days, after he had been home on his three-yearly furlough, in 1938!

Uncle Charlie Christian was quite a character – Mum has quite a few pictures of him, I have one.

Here he is on the right-hand side of a family group -



That must have been taken about 1920, my great aunts are still in their FANY uniforms, but my uncle Eric (born in 1917) looks at least three. (By the way, anyone who remembers my post where I thought I might have seen my Aunt Emily on TV - she is the one on the left in uniform - her sister Eleanor is on the right - hmm - could the person on the TV clip actually be her?)

Here is Charles Augustus Christian -



He was the illegitimate son of my great-grandmother’s sister; she died, probably of puerperal fever by the description handed down, and when my great-grandmother got married she took him with her and brought him up as an older sibling to her own four.

He was in the British army for years, in the cavalry. My mother says he was the first Manxman to be injured in WW1 – he was shot through the leg and then the bullet killed his horse – or so she has been told. When he left the army he went to Kenya and became an officer in the colonial police force – Mum has pictures of him organising a tug-of-war, I remember. She also has a tobacco jar made from a rhino’s foot – he shot the rhino himself.

He came home every three years on furlough, and always stayed with my grandparents, where he was like some sort of fairy-godfather figure to my mother.

In early1938 he suggested that he take this 11year old niece back with him – he was due to retire in 1940 and so would be returning home for good then – two years in Africa would be a wonderful opportunity for her which her parents wouldn’t ever be able to provide themselves.

Mum says ‘he could be very persuasive’ – she thinks her parents weren’t really all that keen, but thought he had a point. So she was added onto his passport, had new clothes made/bought, and set off by sea. She thinks they sailed from Tilbury, as she thinks they went to London.

The sea trip was just long, mainly she saw water, sometimes they stopped at ports but usually they stayed on the ship, although they got off a couple of times, she thinks possibly in Accra and Cape Town. She made friends with another family also going out to Kenya on the same vessel, and can remember playing with them on the ship.

Eventually they disembarked at Mombasa, said goodbye to her new friends, and went by train to Nairobi where they were met by some of Uncle Charlie’s ‘boys’ – native policemen. They travelled by ox cart to ‘somewhere with lots of bungalows’ – she thinks, looking back, that it was probably a police compound. Her abiding memory is that almost every bungalow was surrounded in roses! The ‘boys’ lived in a barracks nearby.

She said that, to be honest, she didn’t see much outside the compound, because Uncle Charlie was mainly working – and then, before he took her ‘up country’ or anything else, ‘There was Neville Chamberlain with his bit of paper, and whether there were telegrams, or just letters, it was quickly decided that it would be a good idea to send me home.’

Uncle Charlie sent her back with another family who were bringing children home. But she had no passport. So she remembers lots of bits of paper with official looking headings and things, and a lot of ‘discussions’ at Mombasa before she was allowed on the ship; and not getting off this time until she got to Southampton.

She says she realised her parents must have really wanted her back as her father actually took three days off work to sail from home to Liverpool, travel to Southampton by a series of trains, collect her, and do the trip in reverse. Apparently he never took time off work!

So during 1938 she did the round trip from England to Kenya and back, by sea, and her main memory of the whole thing is ‘lots of sea; and roses.’

By the time Uncle Charlie did retire the war had started. Only essential people could travel easily, and he decided to stay and make himself useful in Mombasa managing some sort of official ‘troops and navy’ comforts place. He caught a fever and died. He never did get to retire back to the island.

‘Probably,’ my Mum said, ‘it’s a good thing he sent me home. Otherwise I would have been all alone in Africa at the age of 13 or 14.’



I still find it weird that she did that, and yet it had never cropped up before in conversation! I asked my sister on Sunday if she knew, and she said "Kenya? Pardon?"....

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I have found a lot of elderly people that you might think had left quite boring lives, never going far from home, who have actually seen or done totally unexpected things.

But it did come as a total shock that Mum had been that far from home as a child!