Discovering the diaries and my father
Take One. Who was he? Who was my father, the 27-year-old pilot whose plane went down in the Indian Ocean off Ceylon, on June 12, 1943? I was three-and-a-half years old, and my only memory of him was actually of a plane, a silver wing taking off in the sunlight from Patricia Bay, north of Victoria. My father was declared lost for several years. I grew up waiting for the lost to be found. I used to imagine him walking down Musgrave Street looking for our home, and meeting me, and saying what a wonderful daughter I was.
Now I am about to open his diaries.
I only learned that the diaries existed after my mother's mind (her brilliant mind) and memory had become fragments of what they once were. My mother's friend Irene told me about the diaries. I found them in my mother's empty apartment after she had gone into a nursing home.
The eight identical red books were at the top of the bedroom cupboard, behind the box holding pieces of her exquisite wedding gown and 14-foot train, with satin roses, made by her mother, Lal.
Discovering my father in his diaries
I had been told that my father wrote a page a day for his entire adult life. Not for his entire adult life, it turned out. The last entry was on the day he proposed to my mother. Their engagement day.
Alan had come home to Victoria on the night boat from Vancouver to propose.
4 Saturday, June 1938.
Over to Elza's at 2:30 armed with the diamond just in case the moment should present itself. Found her lying on the lawn at the front of the house on a rug. Gorgeous hot sun — it struck me the diamond would sparkle like mad in the sunlight; it also struck me that with the hot sunshine warming her she could do nothing else but melt when I gave it to her. So I did, just as she lay there.
My daughter Rhondda, then 17, was with me when I found the diaries. We read the final entry. Rhondda said, "Where was her house? Where was the lawn?"
We drove over to Lincoln Road, about four minutes away. I knew where it was. Just down the lane from the tall house with the rolled roof where I was later to grow up fatherless. We imagined the proposal.
My father's diaries were written in ink, a full page every day from Jan. 1, 1931, to June 4, 1938. Over 2,730 pages.
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