LOVE AND LOSS

Luky;

An amazing and exciting story about a middleaged Wesselsbron lady whose first attempt at novel writing proved to be a winner reminds me strongly of an author on my mother’s side of the family.

She had two favourite first cousins who were writers, a brother and sister. 
  They are enshrined in our family history because, when they were teenagers, the brother and my mother fell in love.  

He called on my grandfather, a blacksmith, in his foundry, to ask for my mother’s hand in marriage.  
  My grandfather, who was five foot tall and four and a half foot wide and was normally the most lovable man alive, picked up a piece of iron and chased my mother’s cousin.  
  He did not believe in first cousins getting married.

Though obedient to her father’s wishes, my mother for a long time remained deeply in love with her cousin, who wrote a column for a newspaper.

She worked in a warehouse, and he would come in and buy goods at her counter, while her colleagues turned tactfully away.  
  Then, a few days later, they’d be in the store, waving a newspaper: 
  “I gazed into a pair of deep blue eyes and gained new inspiration!” they’d read out for the benefit of the rest of the staff. 
  “No price for guessing whose eyes those were, eh?”

The story had a sad ending.  The cousin died at sea between Holland and England during World War II.  
  All that was found of him was a bottle with a message that was sent to the address of his parents and his sister after it had been washed up on some beach.  I don’t know what it said.

Looking back today, I think my mother saw his sister in a haze of reflected glory of her first love.  
  Strongly built and with brunette hair, the cousin would often visit us.  
My mother – uncharacteristically – was never too busy to put her work aside and have a chat with her. 

The cousin must have been in her late twenties or early thirties when she married and moved to another town.  
  In those post-war days in Holland few people owned a car or much money.  
 To visit relatives in another town was like leaving the country, so I never saw or heard from her again until my mother told me the sequel to her story thirty years later.

My mother had gone back to Holland on holiday and visited her cousin.  
  And this is the story my mother told with unconscious and unintentional humour, because being the eldest of ten children herself and having had four of her own, she had the highest regard for parents of large families.

“You remember my cousin Marie?  She married a very sickly man and he died.  
  By then she had given birth to seven children in rapid succession.  
  At least he had managed that much.  So here she sat with this huge family, the youngest still a babe in arms.  
  She couldn’t leave them to go to work and she had to feed them.

“As you know, she and her brother were the writers in our family.  
  So she’d spend the day looking after the children, washing, cleaning, shopping and cooking.

“At night when they were all in bed, she’d take the top off her old Singer sewing machine, put it in front of her rickety kitchen table on which was perched an ancient Remington typewriter.  
  Seated on that hood and typing on that machine she wrote dozens of books.

“She became very popular and her publishers always commissioned her to do a book for the teenage market in time for publication before St Nicholas’ Day.   
  Armed with that primitive equipment she managed to put every one of her seven children through school and afterwards through university.”

I know how she wrote.  My mother had bought me some of her books before we left Holland.  
  They must have been well written, because half a century on I can still remember the one in which humble, hardworking Henk gets the girl, while Bob, the attractive, debonair student gets the brush-off.

My callous twelve-year-old self had been rooting for glamorous Bob.  
  I felt quite sorry to see him in the last chapter, his jaw set, driving down the polder in his convertible, splashing mud on Henk the loser, who, plodding on his clumsy bike passes him on his way to the farmhouse whence he had just come, rejected.  

As for Henk, he found the front door ajar and the girl of both men’s dreams standing there, her arms wide open to welcome him.  
  I could only hope for her sake she wouldn’t rue the day once sanity set in.

It must be lovely to have an imagination and create one’s own world of fantasy, whether the story is written while one is seated on a Singer hood or on an office chair, and whether one types it on an ancient Remington as my mother’s cousin did or on a computer as the Wesselsbron lady did.

Speaking from the limiting experience of one who can only write about things after they have really happened, moreover, I can think of no more delightful a way than that of my mother’s cousin of putting seven children through school and university.