Wayfarer

50 years ago - 60 nearly - my grandfather used to write a weekly column for a local newspaper. He called himself "Wayfarer", to preserve his anonymity since many of his friends and colleagues would presumably have read the paper. The column itself is called "The Quiet Moment" and would nowadays be classified as "inspirational writing", the kind of thing one might find in the "mind, body and spirit" section of your local book shop. He wouldn't have recognised the terms, I don't think - he was simply writing about his Christian faith and the faith of probably the majority of people reading the paper, and describing how it applied to his life and work. The clippings were faithfully collected by my Grandmother (I have been told) and pasted into exercise books with the date of publication written below each. The books themselves are something of a curiosity but not the subject of this blog.

I never really knew my grandfather - he died when I was four years old, and in any case lived over 2000 km from where we did when I was very young, so we only saw him and Granny when we visited on holiday or vice versa, and I remember little of these trips. But he had a personality, by all accounts, which was larger than life. He was intelligent, a scholar, with higher degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities. His sense of humour and capacity for spinning yarns and making puns were legendary. His disregard for anything as mundane as advice on his health (stop smoking and don't eat so much) likewise. His life spanned the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars and a number of other world changing events. He was both a man of the cloth and a man of letters. He died aged 72, some 41 years ago, as a result of a second stroke and is buried in a simple grave with my grandmother and father in Somerset West near Cape Town, where all three of them lived out their last years.

I learned of him through my elder siblings, who had had more chance to know him, through my parents, who referred to him often during mealtime conversations, through my aunts and uncle, and through people I have met and still meet who have said to me "I knew your grandfather ..." and have then gone on to recount some or other aspect of his character or accomplishments. Some have even told me I look a bit like he did. Perhaps this is becoming more apparent as I move into middle aged hair loss and further waist expansion. I also learned of him through his poetry - he wrote a small book of verse, most of it Christian poetry, of which I have a copy and into which I dip from time to time.

And now I am getting to know him through his newspaper columns of 60 years ago. Some of them speak to events of the time - the continued expansion of Communism, the horrors and hard aftermath of the second World War, the worrying rise of Afrikaner Nationalism in South Africa. Some of them speak to events within the church. But most of them speak to his faith and how he lived out his faith in the day to day life of Joe Christian in Cape Town in 1950. Some of his writing is dated and nowadays politically incorrect. He sometimes speaks of Black African South Africans as "the natives" and no doubt there would be those who today would consider some of what he wrote condescending and racist. He was in some senses a man of his time, in others not. But beneath it all I think there lay humility and concern, probably anxiety over the future of his family (DF Malan would have been in power for 2 years and my grandparents' youngest child would have been 10 years old when the columns were written). There is also wisdom in the writings, I think - the kind of wisdom which is borne of hard life lived and not of theories studied. Coming as he did from England he brought a different perspectives on South Africa's problems, quandaries and possible solutions. That is not always a good thing - foreign manufactured solutions to local problems are often far wide of the mark. But in his case I think he uses the breadth of his experience to good advantage.

Perhaps most striking is the fact that the issues he writes about are not terribly different from the issues which are written about in the Mail and Guardian blogs in 2009 (I seldom read newspapers so wouldn't know what is written about in the paper copies of our dailies anymore). The problem of pain, why bad things happen to good people, whether religion is a good or a bad thing, hanging on to time, the problem of contempt, being kind, being a good sport, prayer and servility, dealing with problems, waiting for an answer, aspirations, doing and not just dreaming ... these could have come from just about any period of human history and any context. I'll quote just one sentence from the column I have uploaded: "Life would be different in South Africa between Black and White, between Afrikaners and English, in our homes, churches, schools, offices, if everyone gave priority to the good things they know about people, and refused right of way to the less good." I see nothing dated about that observation and advice.

As I make my way through two boxes of musty old exercise books, I hope to discover more of this man who loomed so large in our childhoods - what made him tick, what he thought about X, Y and Z, how he handled the difficult situations he found himself in from day to day - and thereby discover a little more of myself, since I share one quarter of his genetic material and a deep love for the person he called "son" and I called "Dad".