Flawed Legacy

By E. I. Fletcher

This story will be of particular interest to anyone raised in a large family and born during the Second World War in the United Kingdom and the separations that caused for safety reasons. It describes conflict arising from a shared property inheritance. The romantic and emotional life of the protagonists range across North Wales, London, and South Africa. An ethical viewpoint is raised with marriage and romantic affairs.

Readers will enjoy the descriptions of landscape in the different countries and the author sets importance to these because of also being a professional painter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Feb 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482809695

E. I. Fletcher

The Writer grew up in a large family born during the Second World War that was separated for its duration. She is a professional oil and watercolour artist living in Cape Town. The tale is described with a painter’s eye and based on her experience of siblings inheriting a shared property and the conflicts that can arise emotionally and financially. Romance and extramarital affairs affect her characters in surprising ways.

Book preview

Flawed Legacy

E. I. Fletcher

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Copyright © 2016 by E. I. Fletcher.

ISBN:                  Softcover                        978-1-4828-0970-1

                            eBook                             978-1-4828-0969-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction and the resemblance of characters in it to any people living or dead other than those clearly in the public domain and events including businesses or companies in the past or present are purely coincidental.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/africa

CONTENTS

Prologue: Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire

Chapter 1     Cape Town

Chapter 2     Cape Town

Chapter 3     Cape Town

Chapter 4     Cape Town

Chapter 5     North Wales

Chapter 6     North Wales

Chapter 7     North Wales

Chapter 8     North Wales

Chapter 9     North Wales

Chapter 10   Cape Town

Chapter 11   Cape Town

Chapter 12   Cape Town

Chapter 13   Cape Town

Chapter 14   North Wales

Chapter 15   North Wales

Chapter 16   Cape Town

Chapter 17   North Wales

Chapter 18   North Wales

Chapter 19   North Wales

Chapter 10   North Wales

Chapter 21   North Wales

Chapter 22   Cape Town

Chapter 23   Cape Town

Chapter 24   Cape Town

Chapter 25   Cape Town

Epilogue: Cape Town

The dark threads were as needful in the weaver’s skillful hand as the threads of gold and silver for

the pattern which He planned.

from

‘The Loom of Time’

Anon

WELSH

Note: ‘ydd’ in Welsh is pronounced ‘ith’ in English. The county of Merionethshire and Gwynedd are the same. Machynlleth has a guttural ‘ch’ as does Dolgoch.

Aber = estuary

Afon = river

Arian = silver

Bore da = good day

Coch-y-bonduu = red beetle

Croeso = you are welcome

Diolch = thank you

Dolgoch = red field

Fach = small

Eglwys = church

Huw = Hugh

Llyn = lake

Plâs = mansion

Plynlimon Fawr = five peaks

Tad = Dad

Uchaf = upper

Y Ddraig = the dragon

AFRIKAANS

Note: Berg is pronounced ‘berch’ ‘ch’ is guttural and ‘baai’ as ‘bye’ in English.

Agter = beyond

Baai = bay

Bakkie = open van

Berg = mountain

Blou = blue

Boom = tree

Donker gat = dark hole

Fynbos = fine bush

Groote Schuur = large barn

Hout = wood

Huizen = houses

Klein = little

Kloof = cutting

Kommetjie = a little basin

Melk = milk

Noord = north

Oost = east

Paarl = pearl

Riempie = a thong

Rinkhalsslang = cape cobra

Robben = seal

Rooibos = red bush

Taal= language

Vygie = mesembrianthemum

PROLOGUE

BUSHEY HEATH, HERTFORDSHIRE

JUNE 1945

Margarite clutched her nurse’s hand as she and her twin sister Caroline trudged along the hard dusty pavements of the north London suburb of Bushey Heath. It was a hot day and they had taken a bus from Paddington station after a five hour steam train journey, interrupted by several stops and changes, from North Wales. She was filled with foreboding and too unhappy to shed the tears which might have been the only way to persuade Nurse Elizabeth to stay with them. Nurse Elizabeth wore her Princess Christian uniform of dark green coat and hat with pale green and white striped dress and was taking them to their mother’s house, where they would see her for the first time since their birth four years before. Then she would leave for a long overdue holiday and as she was the person they knew and liked best beside their maternal grandmother Henrietta Williams, Margarite anyway was fearful of being left there without her.

Their two older brothers had remained with their Irish nanny in the house they were now going to when their mother, Olivia Stephens joined their father for their birth in the Orkney Islands near his air base; after their christening they had been taken to Plâs y Ddraig, a house in North Wales to be looked after by Nurse Elizabeth and their grandmother.

Mauve rhododendrons rose above the wooden fence separating the pavement from the gardens of the houses and scented honeysuckle tumbled over it and attracted humming bees. She was thirsty and the back of her legs were pink and sore from the rough covers of the train seats. The Great Western Railway steam train had been crowded with shiny faced young soldiers wearing an itchy looking khaki uniform and carrying bulging kit bags. They had been laughing and talking all of them exhilarated because the Second World War had ended a few weeks before.

She was sucking a boiled sweet given to comfort her while they walked along the seemingly endless pavements and she was pulling on Elizabeth’s hand in a futile attempt to slow her down and delay what she sensed was about to happen. She became more anxious with every step and soon after they arrived at a strange house and she kissed them goodbye before she left and as far as Margarite knew, it was forever.

The large Edwardian house they had just come from was above a coastal village in Merionethshire where they were far from the German bombs dropping over England. Their father had died early on in the war and their mother, Olivia Stephens needed the help offered by her mother. The twins had no recollection of her or had ever met their two older brothers, and having not left the house or village before were now far from home and soon to stay with virtual strangers.

Eating with a knife and fork at meals was the first difficulty she encountered because she had only used a spoon and fork before so needed help. There was a swing and see-saw in the garden and she hung on grimly to the latter, which had no handles, fearful she might fall off. Model aeroplanes ran along a wire stretched high between fir trees; her brothers enjoyed playing with and she pretended to be interested. At times a man was there who might have been her mother’s friend although she was too young to know.

She wandered through the upstairs rooms one morning and pulled out the drawer of a big chest in one and was moving stuff inside it around, when she cut her finger on a sharp object. She pushed the drawer shut and hastily wrapped her handkerchief around the cut to prevent blood staining her clothes. Later on that morning she heard the adults saying it was a razor blade, something she had never seen before.

Another morning, having tired of running up and down the landing the girls climbed onto a window-seat overlooking the garden. They could move the window latch, which they were not able to at home where there were heavy sash windows, so they opened and shut it as a game. Caroline had settled in better than she had and played more with their brothers so Margarite was jealous and decided to punish her and waited until her fingers were in the gap between the window and frame before slamming it hard on to them. Now Caroline was sobbing loudly and blood was dripping on to the floor.

Hearing her cries the Irish nanny came upstairs and took her to the bathroom to wash and bandage the wound and comfort her in a soft brogue. Margarite listened to what they said out of sight behind the half open door and as Caroline said nothing about how this had happened, she realized that nobody else would know she was the culprit and think that her sister’s injury was accidental. She knew she should confess but with every day that passed it became harder until eventually she put it to the back of her mind, where she hoped it would disappear forever. This was her first remembered experience of sin and the uncomfortable sensation of guilt that accompanies it. She remembered the gold stars that their nurse sometimes stuck on a board in their nursery for good behavior, and knew this act would not have earned her one.

She went onto the verandah one hot afternoon and saw a man stirring orange juice and tinkling ice cubes in a jug. When he had poured them all a drink they sat on striped canvas deckchairs in a circle on the lawn. Margarite knew she was meant to feel happy with her new family but was too bewildered and homesick to integrate as she should.

Later, she had no recollection of the reunion with their nurse or of their departure from Bushey Heath but she was back in Wales where she knew everyone and did things better. She used to beg Elizabeth who was miraculously with them again, never to go away in case she grew up unable to buy a train ticket or take her own temperature with a thermometer when she was ill, anxieties which had surfaced soon after their visit.

A former friend of her mother’s told her that Elizabeth did not ask for a holiday longer than one afternoon and evening a week again until she was certain they would be happy in her absence and she learned from conversations with her peers that many had experienced similar situations, and one had suffered a nervous breakdown later on in life after staying with strangers throughout the war.

Most children were evacuated from vulnerable regions of the country when Germany started to attack; some had been sent abroad to relations they had never met before and others to foster families where they boarded, often unhappily. A friend who had remained with her parents and nanny in London came back from their afternoon walk in the park, to find the house flattened and her parents and cook lying dead in the rubble. Decisions about safety were not easy to make and resulted in children being safe but unhappy, or content but at risk of injury or worse from enemy bombs.

Their nurse continued to care for the family as they became older eventually becoming their London housekeeper and when she retired had been helping them for over half a century. She was the kind of child’s nurse that may well no longer be found in the twenty first century.

CHAPTER ONE

CAPE TOWN

SUNDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 2012

Margarite van Breda snuggled under her duvet and reached for the novel on her bedside table. She had got lucky in the local library that morning and seen the shiny spine amongst the other worn ones and when she took it from the shelf saw it was still on the best seller list. The author had worked in MI6 so the thriller should be factual and not of the genre with gratuitous violence and a plethora of expletives.

Even though the days were lengthening she liked to go to bed early and read rather than watch television unless it was a good programme, which was rare with the reduced bouquet they had. She missed the sports channels they had before her husband retired but they had decided their cost was too high considering that too many films were repeated.

Their ground floor apartment was in a mid-twentieth century two storey block in the suburb of Claremont in Cape Town, and had high ceilings which were ideal in summer but not winter. The older Cape Town houses rarely had central heating so she had bought moveable oil radiators and dressed warmly to combat the chill which persisted from June until November except for the occasional day when the berg wind blew down from the Karoo and you would think that summer had arrived. The flat had been altered to an open plan before they purchased it and she made a studio by enclosing a balcony overlooking the garden.

She had left England a year after she met Peter van Breda a South African chartered accountant. She had driven from her home in Oxfordshire to Provence for a painting course and he had flown to France from Johannesburg; although initially they hardly spoke to each other, by the end of the fortnight this had changed.

They were married a year later and soon after went to live in the Dordogne. There they provided bed and breakfast for visitors to their eighteenth century stone built farmhouse, and when not redecorating the rooms or replacing any cracked tuiles roman on the roof were outside painting landscapes there. Aspects of French living were a surprise such as when the logs for the stove were dumped in the middle of the lane beside the pigeonnier by the merchant who drove off without offering any help. The pile of wood blocked local traffic through the woods and took hours to move under shelter and longer for Peter to chop into manageable lengths. They had put a sceptic tank in the field below the house when they added a bathroom which would have been done sooner if the workmen had been endowed with any sense of time, a well-documented fault of the French artisan.

After a few years when the vicissitudes of rural life became more apparent and their bank accounts were depleting Peter decided they should return to Cape Town where he would start his own accountancy practice which should bring in a higher and more regular income. In France even if his French became fluent he would not be allowed to do that and the amount of visitors for bed and breakfast had been unpredictable and dried up in winter. They had made friends with the local French but the majority of youth had left for the cities, Paris being the favored destination. Their parents, many of whom had never travelled more than a few kilometres from their villages in their lives, missed them terribly but said there was a dearth of good employment in the Dordogne and most jobs were in the vineyards.

So soon after arriving in Cape Town they had rented an apartment in the block they eventually bought in and Peter’s practice prospered as he soon attracted clients by word of mouth and advertising. Now retired, she was glad that he could pursue his artistic goals. He had grown up and been schooled in Cape Town so had friends there who had helped them settle in and she had no regrets about leaving France.

The lawn in the centre of the block was bordered with strelitzias, named after the duchy of Mecklenburg Strelitz in Germany where Princess Charlotte was born in the nineteenth century, tall stemmed blue and white agapanthus and blush pink day lilies. Orange clivias grew beneath camellias and in summer a camel’s foot tree, phanera purpurea with orchid shaped magenta flowers although named for the shape of its leaves, crepe myrtle, lagerstroemia, and her favorite shrub, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, all flowered. The brunfelsia petals changed color every day from a deep violet to lilac and then white, when they died and a new bud opened to repeat the cycle. Their scent was intoxicating and the white flowers resembled cream poured over the darker violet and lilac petals.

A side street giving access to the garden and front entrances of apartments was screened by a hedge of crimson and magenta bougainvillea entwined with pink hibiscus, while a large avocado tree produced pears in season. She ate so many once that she could not look at them for months after. The only plants to remind her of England were the hydrangeas, called Christmas flowers in the southern hemisphere, because of flowering then and snowdrops that brought back memories of the white carpets seen in English woods as winter was departing.

Her daughter Julie had come to stay with them soon after they moved into a rented apartment and a couple of years after, when they had bought a ground floor apartment she stayed again and then met André Oosthuizen, a young and handsome Afrikaaner, which had been the start of a relationship culminating in marriage and two children, Charlotte and Julian. Julie lived in an ocean suburb a short drive away and Margarite collected the children from nursery school when her daughter was working as a florist in the day while her Xhosa maid looked after them and helped in the house.

While she was reading she heard the telephone ring and she wished she had done as Julie said and cancelled the landline so she could talk in comfort especially in the evening but as she was loathe to spoil the recently painted rooms with wiring for an extension had not done this, so grabbed her dressing gown before going to answer it. She guessed it would be Julie who had always been wide awake later in the day, since a small child, and walked along the passage hoping not to disturb Peter in the next room. The telephone sat on a counter dividing the sitting room and kitchen and she picked it up quickly.

Hello. Is that Margarite van Breda? It was a male voice she did not recognize.

Yes. Who is it?

My name is Garth Thomson. You don’t know me but I’ve just been staying a few days with someone you do know, Rowena Bischoff and George and have a message from her about your Welsh land. It was an upper class English accent.

Oh, what have you heard? Hold on a second while I get a pen.

She looked around for it and the note pad which always disappeared when she needed them, and seeing them beside the stove grabbed them and asked him to tell her more.

It would be best if we could meet near where I’m staying in the city. I’m not familiar with Cape Town and am hoping that you can come to the Blue Dolphin Café at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront tomorrow morning and have a drink with me, so I can give you the message. Do you know that café? I was there yesterday and it would be a convenient place to meet.

Yes, I do know it but why can’t you tell me now?

Rowena thought I should tell you in person and she has given me something for you.

She hesitated because she had been surprised by an intruder and robbed of her wedding ring and necklace when Peter was out one morning and another time she was deceived by an internet hoax so was warier of strangers. Nevertheless his cultured speech was reassuring and she had made friends with Rowena when she was living in Cape Town and they had golfed together although she had not heard from her since she left the city two years ago.

That he had a message about Wales to give her helped her to decide: she and her four siblings had inherited, forty years ago, roughly five acres of woodland above Dolgoch, and a tenanted farm above that in addition to a small sporting estate inland. They had sold their grandmother’s house soon after her death and kept the remaining land.

Her stepfather Vyvyan Anderson, had initially inherited the sporting land from his wife when she pre-deceased him at a sadly young age. He had given it to his son Sam, their half-brother and the four of them; probably because he already shot in Suffolk and Scotland with friends and had no need of it. It was since managed by an estate agent in Machynlleth, the county town of Powys their nearest county inland and her oldest brother Robert and Caroline. In the last five years she had not heard anything about it so this was her chance.

She felt isolated from what was happening there because of being six thousand miles away and the present land agent would only communicate with two siblings as this was their policy with multi-ownership of a property or land which she had thought surprising at the time but had not questioned when her sister told her, hoping that everything would be continue as before. The two in charge were her oldest brother Robert and sister Caroline who went there for holidays although he was now living in Italy.

Dolgoch village had become popular with tourists and holidaymakers as the years passed after her grandmother’s death. Bordering the estuary of the Afon Dyfi it offered sailing, golf, tennis, bowls and swimming off the mile long sandy beaches to the north. The majority of vacationers came from the Midlands but latterly more were from further parts of the British Isles and overseas. She hoped something had not happened there such as floods or damage to the woodland. The income from the sporting estate and from the farm was now being held back which was of great concern to her and she had to economize.

The income was vital because her UK pension had been frozen by the government at the rate it had been when she first received it because she lived in South Africa which was one of the few countries where English born pensioners were not sent their pension even when it had been paid up. This forfeiture of pension was for purely political expediency and there were other countries the UK government would not send pensions to such as Australia and Canada who had been fully subsidizing their UK pensioners to make up for the shortfall but were also upset with the British government for expecting them to do this and threatening to stop.

She could only guess where the income was kept as she had not been able to discover the account number or where it was. In the meantime the estate lingered unsold which did not surprise her. Grouse shooting and fishing for trout were not as popular as they had been in the Edwardian era when her ancestors had built Plâs y Ddraig and entertained their friends with outdoor sport and there was a dwindling market for moorland compared to that for a large Scottish estate that might include a luxurious dwelling for its owner.

She had since stopped playing golf as an economy and speculated that Cudlipps estate agency in Machynlleth who dealt with the estate, kept the income on deposit to pay expenses but as the years passed she wondered why they needed it and what they were actually doing with it. Meeting Garth was a chance to hear as Rowena would not have given him any message that she did not think was important.

She and Rowena became friends after the Bischoffs had come to Peter for financial advice but George had later moved from Cape Town to a job in Johannesburg and since they left she had not heard from her, and did not anticipate that she would see them again because the enormous distances between South African cities often curtailed friendships.

They had said they would be staying with her aunt in Johannesburg and intended to buy a house in or near the city. She would ask Garth Thomson where he had met them, and apart from being curious about what he had to tell her she was rarely invited out for a drink by a stranger and it appealed to her adventurous side. He said he would be reading a newspaper and sitting on the top deck of the café, which she knew from taking her grandchildren to eat there in their school holiday.

Her feet were now cold because the flat was still chilly after a wetter than usual winter and the rooms would not warm up for another month when the sun became stronger. She tiptoed back along the passage hoping not to disturb Peter but when he called out to her, she opened his bedroom door and went in. She had decided not to tell him who she was meeting in case he was anxious about her going on her own and suggested she cancel it. She would say it had been Julie on the telephone.

His concern was not unwelcome as she felt cared for. Her first marriage had given her personal freedom but she had become lonely when Julie left for boarding school and she was living in rural Oxfordshire far from London, where her husband worked and this combined with his long commute and her meeting Peter had contributed to their parting after almost twenty years of marriage.

Peter was propped up against pillows absorbed in a sudoku which had replaced the crosswords he had formerly liked solving. He looked up and mouthed