Memories of Mother, Mandela and the Queen

At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit in New Zealand in 1995, I was a young, callow journalist standing in line to have an audience (literally less than a minute) with Queen Elizabeth. 

I decided I would tell her how my mother lined the streets of Port Elizabeth to greet the then heir apparent on her visit to South Africa in 1947. The Royal Family had been invited by then Prime Minister Jan Smuts on a two-month tour to thank those who served in World War 2 and, of course, to bolster South Africa’s relationship with the United Kingdom. The visit would contribute to his undoing by the Afrikaner nationalists who used this as evidence that he was a sellout. In 1948, he would be voted out of office by DF Malan’s National Party.

My mother had served in the RAF’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, although she made a point of playing this down because she believed it revealed her age. I have the bronze cap badge – an eagle startled by something to its left, its wings intersecting with a laurel wreath beneath a crown. And I have her two medals and her discharge papers, which she kept in a chocolate tin bearing the image of Smuts, which was given to all who served. On the lid of the tin, a disembodied bronze face of Smuts says: “We rely on you and are grateful.”

Anyway, when I made it to the front of the line, I told the Queen the story of my mother on the streets in 1947 and the Queen smiled, revealing two rows of perfect milk teeth. “Tell her ‘thank you’,” she said. I did and my mother – almost 50 years after the event – was moved. 

That particular summit was to bear Mandela’s mark after news broke that the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha had executed the writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who had been tried and found guilty by a “special military tribunal”. Funny how the adjective “special” has its sinister uses. Special Branch. Special Military Operation. Special Military Tribunal.