June sixth nineteen fifty-two was the date on the death certificate.
My sister and I were trying to piece together the calendar of our young lives from the day our father died of a brain tumor in an Oxford hospital. I remembered our mother coming home with Sven that autumn, a tall filling-all-the-space American air force captain from the local American Air Force base, and announcing they were to be married and we were all going to live in Montana. He handed us much desired rationed sweets, as we said politely, they could go but we would stay in the house and look after ourselves thank you. I was nine and my sister seven years old.
Sven was killed in an airplane accident shortly after that and we never heard of him again. We didn’t imagine this but it begs the question of how long Mum had known him and what had been going on in her marriage before my father’s death.
The story we were told was immediately after our father died leaving my mother with no income, she went to the factory where he had worked and asked for a job. They hired her to help with the bookkeeping but quickly made use of her math ability and sent her to the American base nearby to learn how to use computers. She was to then return and teach the other women in the factory how to use these new machines to help with accounting.
My father had put his head in the gas oven while our mother was at her weekly movie date with a friend and we were asleep, and by chance was found by his close friend and neighbor who had come by for a cup of tea, dragged out and put to bed, only to end up in the hospital the same night. The story has always been that his brain tumor, not yet diagnosed, was unbearable. Indeed, he died a few weeks later at the hospital after the tumor was discovered and found inoperable.
June tenth nineteen fifty-three was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second and the entire country and every school child in Great Britain was ready to celebrate. The war finally over, food rationing coming to a close perhaps, and a radiant young woman ascending to the throne. We had already moved to Cliftonville by the sea, Mum had bought an eight-bedroom guest house with a ‘chalet’ in the garden for the family to use when the summer came and the house full of guests. The chalet was nothing more than a hut with a wall down the middle, but it sufficed. Our father and his brother owned the house we had been born in, in Oxford, and presumably this was sold to finance this new life, we shall never know.
How did all of this happen in one year? Or did it? Had we not remembered it properly? The dates raised more questions than we had answers for and my sister’s ‘we shall never know’ comment, finished the conversation for now. Will my daughters have questions like this when I die I wondered? I so hope not.
