This is my Lovely Day

Luky;
To a twelve-year-old girl unable to understand English, my first school term at Greenhill was a jumble of impressions. How well I understood the confusion at the Tower of Babel.
"Silence", Sister called at my first boarding school supper. "There is much too much talking."
"Much too much, ah! Veel te veel", I said to myself.
It's amazing how quickly you pick up a language when nobody speaks your own. What was surprising to me was that I understood the big words more readily than the simple ones.
"Loyalty, girls, loyalty", Mother said, regarding us majestically through her goldrimmed glasses. "Semper fidelis is our school's motto."
"Loyalty, loyaliteit, trouw!" I recognised instantly, "semper fidelis, always faithful, altijd trouw. So that's what it means. But why make such a song and dance about being faithful?"
For then as now, loyalty was not a virtue I found difficult to adhere to. Then as now I knew that if I could only attain to the virtue of charity, everything else would be puddy-sticks, as the children say.

Scared
And yet I realise now how important the virtue of loyalty is, and how rarely it is found. I recall the young man who was in love but wouldn't get married, saying he was scared stiff of commitment in case the marriage failed.

Creak or two
Despite having been married for so many years, I'd still never dare to set myself up as a marriage counsellor. My own marriage underwent shaky patches when my husband and I were at loggerheads or took offence at a random remark. Joseph was our peacemaker.
"Dad, do you love mother?" he would ask very sternly.
My husband would regard me with a jaundiced eye, dying to say: "No, I can't stand her", but when he looked at his little mentally challenged angel with the flaming sword, he could only say: "Yes, of course I love her."
"Then you must speak nicely to her", Joseph would say.

"Forgive him"
I didn't get off lightly either:
"Tell him you forgive him. He says he loves you."
To Joseph love is far more simple than it was to us because he is not caught up in the intricate web of pride, nor does he bear malice.
I was in town once, shopping with a friend, when we bumped into her husband who was taking another woman out to lunch. He felt an ass and so did the woman. Although she was most attractive, she seemed to crumple at the sight of my friend.

Sudden Beauty
My friend was an exuberant down-to-earth sort of woman, but she seemed to grow in stature and become extraordinarily dignified and beautiful all at once.
She smiled politely at the woman and waited for her husband to finish his jumbled explanation. Then she nodded at them and said: "Bon appetit to you both."
As she and I walked off she started chatting about everything except husbands. But for her white lips, I might have thought the encounter hadn't affected her.

Womanly heart
This friend of mine was a very modern woman. And yet when she met her husband taking out another woman to lunch, she reacted no differently from the way the most old-fashioned of women would have done. Underneath her glamorous exterior quivered a heart as vulnerable as that of any woman since Eve.

Like an anchor
I think the wedding vows are such a steadying promise. Religion in her ageless wisdom knows what the young bride does not, that her marriage to that extremely handsome and eligible man will also contain thorns.
But because most marriages bring forth children and all marriages are contracted between people who feel at least temporarily drawn to one another, loyalty must prevail.

I always knew that if I had  walked out on my husband I'd never again have put on the wireless - it would only have taken a recording of "This is my lovely day", to recall a sundrenched day in Johannesburg all those years ago and have had me returning straight back to him.

Where my husband was concerned, I was no different from the next woman.

*Youtube 'This is my lovely day '. Click into the link to hear Lizabeth Webb sing
 'This is my Lovely Day'


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58e1rxKAUzI