Brenda was born before George and Ruth but a few years after Patsy. I don't really know a lot about her though I've seen a bit of her in the last decades partly because she was the last survivor of that generation.
My first memory is of her being in the Claremont Villa family home in Cape Town in the 1940s. She was being courted by an affable man in uniform called Smiler. (Lots of servicemen came sniffing around the younger Smith girls.) I doubt that Smiler was the name on his birth certificate but I never heard him called anything else.
Smiler was sent 'up North', as they used to say, to oppose Rommel in the North African Desert. He returned unscathed and soon Brenda and he were married. A bit later they joined the Rhodesian exodus and fetched up in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia (shown on the map).
Smiler found work on the railway. While coupling carriages he got his thumb stuck in the works and lost part of it. I remember this because in less economically productive circumstances, not long after, I lost the top joint of mine making a homemade bomb. (But that's another story.)
Brenda bore a daughter, still referred to by some as 'Baby Brenda' to distinguish her from her mother. And two others called Norma and Lynette. These, now well over 50, have had children and grandchildren of their own of whom I know next to nothing.
Brenda herself, who was helpful to our mother Muriel in her later years, returned to Capetown like most of the rest of the 'Rhodesians' when majority rule came in. She lived mainly in Fishhoek, and died in November 2007, the last of our mother's generation.
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