Blog

A co-incidence spanning seven decades

Let me tell you about my mother, Elaine. When she was five and holidaying with her family along South Africa’s Garden Route on The Wilderness beach, she ran into the water.

My grandmother bounded into the ocean after her, but a vicious undertow swept them both out to sea.

As the waters pulled her down, my mother thought: “I’m only five, and my life is over. Already!”

  • Gwen Oosterbroek, Elaine’s mum and my grandmother
  • Elaine Oosterbroek at five years on the beach.
  • Gwen Oosterbroek with her children, Tyrell and Elaine.
  • Heather Warren as a teenager on Wilderness Beach
  • Ken Oosterbroek, Tyrell’s son, shot dead in 1994
  • Heather Maltby, nee Warren, the artist

Just as her consciousness began to pull away, she felt a pair of arms enfold her. Three youngsters had seen them floundering and pulled them back to the beach for resuscitation.

My grandmother, who lost most of her hearing in the incident, bought each teenager a gold watch inscribed: “I owe you my life. With gratitude. Gwen Oosterbroek.”

Her last sinking thought, she later told a friend, was that she had married the wrong man. She divorced my grandfather and returned to her true love.

The drowning incident was part of our familial topography, the reason for my grandmother’s deafness and my mother’s compensatory loud, clear voice that stood her in good stead as a high school teacher.

Fast forward 70 years. My parents retired to Cape Town. They’d been there a few months when pancreatic cancer laid my father low. He was gone within three weeks of the diagnosis, leaving my mother bereft ‒ decades of marriage reduced to a deep, unfathomable silence. As one day blurred into another, my mother strolled up to the communal lounge of her retirement village for a cup of java, where she got chatting with a few of the other residents.

  • Elaine Hurry, photographed with her beloved Molly in 2023
  • Click here to listen to Patricia Glyn’s interview

During the conversation, my cousin Ken Oosterbroek’s name came up because of a report in the newspaper that day.

An award-winning photographer married to Monica Zwolsman, Ken was filming township unrest in Thokoza when a bullet dispatched by the ironically-named National Peacekeeping Force cut his life short. The 2010 Bang Bang Club movie based on Greg Marinovich’s book describes those turbulent times.

Ken was my nephew,” said Mum.

“Ken Oosterbroek? Are you related to Gwen Oosterbroek?” asked one of the old ladies.

“Gwen was my mother. Why?”

“She gave me a gold watch,” came the reply.

They stared at each other across the seven-decade chasm before embracing in tears.

You might consider these tremendous odds, but we are never separate from the elemental power of water consciousness. The waters (and plasma) of our being are in our blood.