Imagine her surprise when the Salvation Army suddenly contacted our grandmother to say that the organization had managed to trace the men! This was, it transpired, mainly because one of the men was, or had been, a minister in the Anglican Church in Northern Ontario working with Indigenous people. He was married and had two sons, one of whom, now an adult, was also an Anglican minister working with the Cree in Northern Ontario. He, too, was married, with two young children: a boy and a girl.
We could see that our mother was excited at the prospect of connecting to her two uncles and their families.
John and I found it hard to believe that we suddenly had a larger extended family that we had thought. We were old enough to remember that our grandmother had just one sister, Aggie (Agnes), whom we had met a few times in Portsmouth when we were young. That was all.
The excitement in our house was palpable as my mother set to immediately, writing back to her mother in another blue airmail asking to be put in touch with her uncles, too.
Thus, began a lengthy correspondence across half the world between my mother living in Southern Rhodesia, and these strangers in Northern Ontario, Canada. Soon photographs were being sent, though these had to be put into envelopes, because airletter forms did not permit enclosures.
My mother showed us the photos she received but, as a teenager, I can’t say that I took all that much notice of these people living so far away. I was happy for my mother to reconnect, but I knew that we would never meet these foreigners whose lives were so different from ours.
Fast forward fifteen years or more.
Our family of five had by then left Africa. Political turmoil had become unbearable. My parents were living England. So, too, were my two brothers, one of whom was married, and I. We had all arrived at different times and were not living in the same town.
In 1975, I had married an aerospace engineer. We soon had our own house, two boys and busy lives to lead. We were living in Hampshire on the south coast, but by the mid-1980s my husband was not happy with his work projects which, for political reason, were sometimes cancelled at the last minute by the government of the time. When Brian was offered a position in Ottawa, Canada, we decided to emigrate from the UK. My husband had always had a liking for Canada, perhaps because both his father and grandfather were Canadian born, one in Winnipeg and the other in Stratford, Ontario. Both his ancestors had returned to England, though, where Brian’s father had been raised since the age of three. Brian’s father had served in the British Navy but had finished his career working for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in London, England, and had never given up his Canadian passport.
So it was that on 2nd October 1987, a very cold Friday afternoon, or so it seemed to us, Brian, our two children and I arrived in Ottawa, where we stayed at an apartment hotel on Cartier Street. On Saturday morning, we bought a Ford Taurus car from Campbell Ford’s dealership on Carling Ave. On Monday, Brian began working at Canadian Astronautics Ltd.
