Skip to main content

From Aunty Connie in 1991

Aunty Connie was grandfather John's older sister, (as some of you probably know). She was also the first women lawyer in South Africa and a very decent human being.

She was married to Uncle Jack. She hadn't seen Dad (Tony Hall) her nephew and Mom for the 26 years while they were in exile. We saw Uncle Jack and Aunty Connie when we visited them in Pretoria in 1972 and then again in 1975.

It's a funny feeling to realise you have a large family after having lived in such a reduced family unit for many years.

Uncle Jack and Auntie Connie presided over a large gathering of their clans on both occasions. Tea and sandwiches and cakes on the lawn. Very nice people. And it's not just the cake talking.

I think Connie was about 94 when she wrote this note, making a few mistakes on the type writer as she did so. Like me she was interested in preserving all branches of her family history.

7.8.91

My Dearest Tony and Eve,

IT IS UNDOUBTEDLY A GREAT FEELING THAT YOU ARE AT LONG LAST BACK HERE!!

where we can all have an opportunity of getting full details of a new layer of our joint family structure straight from the horses mouth.

I must fire this typist as soon as I can replace her!!

Thank you so much for your kind birthday wishes & for that charming relaxed photo of our dear John. It certainly helped me to erase the sore memory of the last time a saw him after the diagnosis had been confirmed, poor dear, he looked so shaken and lost.

We here Will be looking forward to knowing where he will be located so we can pay our respects in due course!

You may now take off your glasses & relax, for this is the end of the news.

All well here send love,

Aunty Connie

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...
32 comments
Read more

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...
24 comments
Read more

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...
71 comments
Read more