A mother's untimely death

A woman’s presence, or rather her absence, is felt most acutely by children. In our family, the impact of a woman’s death in 1943 has rippled through generations, shaping our relationships and attitudes to motherhood.

My mother was six years old, the second of four children, when her mother, Elsie, died. After that, her life was divided into two periods – before and after her mother died.

The reality was that a young man – my grandfather, Wilfred Colvin – was widowed with four children. The eldest, Irene, was seven, the youngest, Ian, was seven months. Between them was Winnie, my mom, and three-year-old Jack.

Elsie’s death was unexpected. She was 30, teaching her girls to knit and read, nursing an infant and trying to keep up with her toddler son.

She made supper, washed up, put the children to bed, made the girls’ school lunches and finally went to bed. As she put her head on the pillow, she said to Wilfred: “I am so tired.”

He looked up, and in that instant saw she had stopped breathing. He raced to fetch the doctor, but by the time help arrived, she was gone.

Elsie was a Grobler, the youngest of 10 children born to a dour Afrikaner descended from the Voortrekker Piet Grobler. Her family had settled in what is now Limpopo and lived in Polokwane. She was given a primary school education and taught to type, so she could work as a secretary for a law firm.

At 16, when she was already working, she met my grandfather, a Scotsman.

Many years later, when Wilfred died, my mother was given an old handbag that had once belonged to Elsie. It was empty, except for a side pocket. Inside the pocket she found a comb in a cover. She pulled the comb out of the cover and a little yellow card fell out. A faded message was written in pencil. It read: “My darling Wilfred, I love you so very much.” It was dated July 1928. Elsie was 16 and Wilfred 21. That comb and card are my mother’s most treasured possessions.

For the young couple, a future together seemed impossible. It was just a few years after the Anglo-Boer War, and neither family would accept their child marrying the enemy, so they eloped to Joburg.

They were married, but when they went home, she lost confidence and couldn’t tell her parents what she had done, so they continued living apart as if nothing had happened. Except that she was pregnant.

“There were the expected repercussions, but there was little to be done,” my mother explained. “Her parents accepted the inevitable, but his were less accommodating.”

When the baby arrived, Wilfred’s father immediately fell in love with his first granddaughter, Irene – and became reconciled to his Afrikaans daughter-in-law.

“He loved her more than his own daughters,” Wilfred told his children. “She was such a gentle, loving girl.”

When the old man was ill, Elsie nursed him and fussed over him.

The couple, whose marriage was now officially accepted by their families, moved to the Eastern Cape, and my mother was born in King William’s Town.

They moved on again and finally settled in Potchefstroom, where Wilfred, a teacher, taught at the technical college. After my mother was born, the two boys followed in quick succession.

Elsie should never have had four children given her frail constitution. Her heart was damaged when she had rheumatic fever as a child. Her death was not dramatic; her heart just stopped beating.

The children weren’t allowed to be at her funeral. They sat in the car and watched from a distance the coffin being lowered into the ground. The image that was seared on to little Winnie’s memory was of purple flowers and black clothes. It is a colour combination she has never liked. In the car that day, Irene and Winnie tore into their nails. Neither of them ever stopped biting them.

Wilfred knew he couldn’t cope. The baby, Ian, was snapped up by one of Elsie’s sisters. Little Jack was sent to Wilfred’s mother, where he ran wild on the farm outside Polokwane – never having a haircut or wearing shoes.

The two girls were farmed out to another aunt. For a couple of years, they were passed around. They were bullied and beaten and often just neglected. When their father recognised their suffering, he made a decision that was to change the girls’ lives for the better. He sent them to boarding school at the convent in Potchefstroom.

The nuns instantly recognised they were traumatised and, for the most part, they were kind. At night, when they came into the dormitory to say goodnight, there was one who would kiss each child on the forehead and whisper a soft word.

Many years later, when I was ready to start school, my mother insisted I go to a convent. Throughout her life, nuns have been friends. As an adult, she converted to Catholicism.

Elsie was a good mother. My mother remembers a huge coal stove in the kitchen where she used to bake batches of little jam tarts which she dished out to all the children in the neighbourhood. Her home-made ginger beer was legendary, as were her dried peaches and canned fruit.

“My abiding memory is of her slim figure with an apron round her waist,” my mom says.

When she wasn’t darning socks, she made her girls rag dolls. She told them Bible stories and taught them to say their prayers. They learnt nursery rhymes from her, and my mother could read before she went to school.

When I was a child, my mother regularly took us to the cemetery in Potchefstroom to put flowers on Elsie’s grave. We would pull the weeds out, polish the headstone, say a prayer, and carry on our journey.

The last time I was there was with Jack and his wife, Bi, in 2002. My little boy, Stuart, two days shy of his third birthday, was with us – the same age as Jack when he lost his mother. We stopped when we were driving from the Cape to Pretoria for Irene’s funeral. Jack walked straight to his mother’s grave.

“What does it say, Mommy?” Stuart asked, tracing the letters on his great-grandmother’s headstone with his baby fingers.

Elsie’s name and the dates of her birth and death were engraved in small letters on the stone. But across its centre – in big, solid type – was just one word: “MOTHER”.