According to information supplied by Alan, Hilda died in about 1930. I'm sure this can't be right because I can remember her. It must have been 1941 or 1942 on one of our family's periodic visits to Capetown for Christmas. I couldn't have been much more than three then, so the fallibility of memory has to be invoked.
(Human memory, like perception, is a creative process; it tends to fill in the missing bits so that what is 'remembered' makes sense - not like a filing cabinet or computer where information just gets stored, even if it's nonsense. We hate things that don't make sense and are inclined to twist them until they do.)
But why else should the name "Auntie Hilda" have stuck in my youthful mind? Who would tell a three year old about their Auntie Hilda if she had died eight years before they were born?
My memory is of a woman with lots of blonde hair, bright red lips and blue eyes, that I would now classify as 'attractive' in a Nordic kind of way. The lips may be a creative fill-in, the eyes a logical inference, but the hair seems a definite image, quite vivid.
Beyond that, what I seem to remember is that upon being told that we would be going again to Capetown and would meet various Aunties etc, I asked if we would see Auntie Hilda. I was told that Auntie Hilda had got sick and died. I don't think I ever heard anything about her again from anyone, beyond acknowledgement that she had once existed.
It seems that she married someone called Tom but had no children - Alan tells me so. The Tom in question seems to have vanished from family memory. No doubt he could be traced, but so what?
Sorry, but that's all I know about Hilda. What did she die of so young? Why did our Dad never talk about her, the sibling closest to him in age? Maybe it's just that most people are just not very memorable.
Click one of these for
| Intro Brothers FAQs Parents Father-Side Mother-Side Kids Grandkids Creatures Snaps Contact Annex Search |