(Extract from The Trumpeting Elephant newsleter May/June 1999. Editor: Margaret Walton)
Memories of Early Valley Life
Mr. Theo Aronson, world renowned author,
who was born in Kirkwood and who now lives in England, has taken a keen
interest in “The Trumpeting Elephant” to which he subscribes. To our great
delight he has written the following article for us – we only hope that there
will be more articles on his childhood in Kirkwood.
A VALLEY COUPLE
Theo Aronson
My mother came to the Sundays River Valley
in 1910. Her name was Hannah Wilson and she was a teacher. As the township of
Kirkwood was still being laid out, she lived and taught in nearby Bayville, on
the banks of the river. I have a photograph of her at the time, in ankle-length
skirt, white blouse and with her hair in a loose Edwardian knot on the nape of
her neck, taken against a surprisingly empty, almost desolate background. My
mother always looked very young for her age and many years later when I used to
go out walking with her, her ex-pupils, who to me looked astonishingly old,
would totter up to greet her as ‘Miss Wilson’. My mother was very proud of
having started the first library in Kirkwood.
My mother seldom spoked about her childhood
but after she died I did some research into her background. Her father, who had
been born in Aberdeen in Scotland, was a sailor who jumped ship in Cape Town
and spent a roving, restless sort of life. At the age of 60 he settled,
strangely enough, in Aberdeen in the Cape Province, where he married a girl of
17. The couple had eight children, of whom my mother was the youngest. As I was
not born until my mother was 45, I – who am not that old – had a
grandfather who was born almost 180 years ago, in 1820.
Sometime during the First World War, my
mother went to Cape Town to marry a man who left her, quite literally, standing
at the altar in full bridal dress. She returned to Bayville and married my
father; on the rebound, I suspect. She was then 32, he 30.
My father, Philip Aronson, was born in Riga,
Latvia which was then part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. He came to the Valley
in 1914, when he was 24. He had an older brother there, who died young. My
father first had a shop in Tregaron, which I think is still there. Why it was
called Tregaron, I don’t know. Many years later, when I was on tour of the
United States to promote one of my books, I was in Los Angeles to appear on the
famous Merv Griffin Television Show. As I left the studio I suddenly passed a
small restaurant called for some reason, “Tregaron”. It made me feel that, in
many respects, I had journeyed a long way.
My parents were married in 1919. In that
same year they built the house in Harrod Street, Kirkwood, in which they lived
for the rest of their lives and in which they celebrated their Golden Wedding
in 1969. They died – first my mother and then my father – within three months
of each other, in 1970.
One final anecdote. When I was in my
twenties and working in London, I once put a pack on back and, all alone,
hitch-hiked from Ostend in Belgium to Kirkwood. The journey – it was really in
the nature of a Napoleonic pilgrimage and resulted in my first published book,
‘The Golden Bees: The Story of the Bonapartes’ – took six months. I arrived
home in time for Christmas. Although my mother travelled quite extensively, my
father never left Kirkwood except to go to Port Elizabeth. There he sat, for
year after year, decade after decade, going only to Port Elizabeth on either
the Uitenhage or the Addo road. Well, when I arrived home that Christmas,
having completed a 6000 mile overland journey, my father asked me which way I
had come. I started to explain that I had travelled all across Europe, through
the Middle East, down Africa, but he cut me short.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Did you come through
Uitenhage or through Addo?’
