Joan was my mother's second and, I think, favourite sister. Like most of the girls of the family she followed in our mother's footsteps and worked behind the counter at the Wellington Fruit Growers.
Met Victor Henry Callister and they married in 1935/6. Their son Graeme was born in November 1938. Graeme says he thought Callister was an English name but now believes it comes from the Isle of Man, a truncation of McAllister (Scots). In Graeme's words: "Like the Manx cats who dropped their tails, the 'M' in McAllister got lopped."
I only met Victor a few times and knew him as Uncle Cally. Everyone called him Cally. He was a sales rep for a biscuit company. Graeme dimly remembers his Ford car with a dickey seat that folded out at the back.
Cally volunteered for the army in WW2 and fought in Egypt and Italy where he was killed on 18 December 1944. His grave is in the Castiglione South African Cemetry (Grave II,G,17).
Every year or two our family went to the Cape on holiday. I have all sorts of memories from the 1944 holiday when I was six.
My mother, David and I went down first (by train), our Dad having to be at work. We stayed at first with Joan in Clifton. The house was on the lower slopes of Lion's Head Mountain that sweeps sharply down to the sea. It was reached by a series of steps. The beach was not far away - just descend the steps, cross the main road, go down more steps (hundreds of them). Graeme and I did it often.
I can only list some of these things. They are not in any order of awfulness.
In spite of it all I enjoyed that holiday as kids do when they are six. I travelled back to JHB with my Dad on the train - he to return to work, me to school. (This was January 1945). Ma stayed behind to vist David (through a screen) until his statutory 6 weeks of incarceration were up.
Not long after Cally's death Joan met Bill Gill from Ashford in Kent, in SA with the RAF, an aircraft mechanic.
In 1947 Graeme was sent to boarding school in Kimberly about 500 miles to the north-east of Cape Town. (There was a fund to support the families of war casualties - white ones anyway.) By the time he returned for the holidays Joan and Bill had been married in Cape Town.
In my view Bill was not a very likable person. He disliked Graeme from the start. Graeme comments "I cannot understand why a man can marry a widow with a child and then not accept the child."
They lived most of their married lives in the Claremont house that had previously been our Grandfather's. Joan died in 1974, of cancer I think. Bill succumbed to a lung condition in 1977.
Joan and Bill had a daughter, Marilyn, in about 1948. I never really got to know her and last saw her briefly in 1979 along with her husband, Raymond. I liked him a lot. He had a large 1950s American car, all tail-fins and chrome. He died in 1998. Marilyn is still around.
Graeme was my closest cousin, in all respects. We shared much of our childhood and adolescence even though we only saw each other about once a year. As we got older we wrote letters most weeks.
After Joan's second marriage Graeme's life was marked by conflict with Bill and estrangement from the parental household. Because of this Graeme was at boarding school much of his schooldays. The domestic tension came to a head when Graeme was in his teens. In Graeme's (slightly edited) words, "...after the latest fight with Bill I walked to Patsy and Piet's house in Plumstead [about 3 miles away] and they refused to let me go back. I eventually went to the boarding section of my school. This was when I was 14. I never really went home after that, being either at school or staying with people."
In 1960 he took off for Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at the invitation of Aunt Stella but spend much of the time in Ruth's household.
In 1963 Graeme was about to take a cheap flight to London to try his luck. This was common among people (including me) who were rootless, adventurous, desperate. or just plain mad. (Graeme was not mad).
He got a call from a friend in Windhoek in South West Africa (SWA, now Namibia) saying that an architect was desperate for a draftsman. So he went there instead and stayed for a number of years. Returned to Rhodesia briefly and then went back to SWA.
Graeme always had a flair for drawing. At the age of about 8 he taught me to draw aircraft, cowboys and guns, comic-book style. (I can still do a reasonable cowboy hat.) He progressed naturally into professional draftmanship, mainly in the architectural field.
In SWA he met and married Francis, "a born and bred South Wester", who gave birth to two girls, Hadley in 1968, and Janet in 1970. Hadley is married and has a son called Travis born April 2002. Janet, now living in JHB, is married to Paul (yet another of that name) and has a son, Keegan (born 1999), and a daughter, Jessica (2001).
In the late 70s Graeme and Francis moved to Pretoria where after a short interruption they still live.
When I was at their home in 1994 a curious event took place. Shortly before 5.00 pm hundeds of doves alighted on nearby roofs, fences, trees. At five o'clock Graeme went out with a large bag of corn and other seeds and scattered a kilo or two of it around the back garden. The doves (and a few free-loaders of other species) descended and ate it. Seems this remains a daily ritual. You can read more about it on the Creature Feature page.
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