I suspect she picked up something of her mother's spirit and a great deal of bad luck to boot.
She has been claimed by South Africa, Britain, France, Kenya and New Zealand as one of their own.
Great thread C16. I missed the fact that you had posted here and posted exactly the same article as you elsewhere. I have a put a link there to this one.
The only child of a French father and an English mother, she was born on a Belgium ship tied up in Durban. Her father went to work in the Congo and sent her and her mother back to South Africa when tribal wars erupted. He was killed in those wars when she was three months old. When she was three her mother remarried.
"My stepfather was well-off, and a racing driver. The men would do circuits and they would often let their wives race against each other. When my mother drove the choke stuck and she couldn't control the car. She hit a barrier, the car burst into flames, and she died."
Her father's cousin became her guardian, and she went to live with him, his wife and his sons in the Congo. "They were really the only parents I knew. When I was seven my "new" mother went riding as she always did. The horse came back without her, and a lot of time elapsed before they found her as they didn't know where she had been riding. Apparently the horse had stepped on a puff adder. She was thrown, and then bitten in the face by the adder. When they found her she was dead."
The observer of fools in military south and north...
