Within a few days, our boys, Simon, 9, nine, and Nicholas, seven, were at Broadview Avenue Public School. During the day, I rushed hither and thither doing my best to cope with yet another move in my life. First stop: Sears, in Carlingwood Mall, to buy the recommended winter clothing which we would all need.
Six weeks later, we found a house which we liked. We moved in on 17th November 1987. Our goods and chattels arrived from England, but we still needed to buy additional items since our new house was so much larger than our British home. We had a family room, for a start!
I was at home alone one Sunday morning soon after we had moved in, when the doorbell rang. Brian had gone to church and had taken both the boys with him. I didn’t know anyone in our neighbourhood. Nevertheless, I opened the door and a couple in their middle years stood there, smiling broadly. “Are you Susan?”, they asked. “Yes, I am. Who are you?”
Their answer almost floored me. The gentleman was the son of my grandmother’s brother, one of the two who had been traced by the Salvation Army all those years ago. This man and his wife, no longer working with the Cree, were now living in Kingston, Ontario, where he was Canon of a local Anglican church. Their daughter was attending university in Ottawa, so they had come up from Kingston to see her and had decided to call in at our place on the way.
I formed an instant connection with these lovely people, as did Brian when he came home later with the boys.
So began a wonderful relationship which has continued to this day. Over the next many years, we visited one another when we could. Brian and I went to the wedding of their two children (that same little boy and little girl whom I had first heard about when I was sixteen), but the final icing on the cake came the first time my parents visited us in Canada. Down we all drove to Kingston, and then, too, to Cobourg, to meet another brother and his family. We loved them all. They were, indeed, “family” and it felt like that from the beginning. After all, the two men and my mother were first cousins, though they had never met before, of course, and their experiences in life had been very different.
I don’t think any of us could get over the wonder of our all being together. We would never have thought it possible, especially when my side of the family had been living all those miles away in southern Africa. Yet here we were, one big family gathering in Canada, which country I would never have guessed was to become part of my destiny. I could hardly come to terms with the way things had turned out. It was almost surreal.
Even today, as Brian and I continue to visit those of the extended family who have not passed on, I still find it difficult to believe that we had discovered these long-lost relatives and were now enjoying every minute of their company in real time, in person, in a foreign land. They have added so much joy to our lives here and all because of a chance knock on my grandmother’s door in the 1960s, and her decision to hand over a pound sterling to the two people from the Salvation Army standing on her doorstep.
