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Before my parents married, my mother had given birth to a baby, Sylvia, fathered by someone else. Although Sylvia's birth certificate states her father as "unknown," in fact his name was Cohen; a Dutchman who was Jewish, living in South Africa at the same time as my mother. His family were closely connected with the De Beers diamond-mining interests and, as I understand it, extremely wealthy. I am not sure how old my mother would have been when they met, but I do know that his parents made it abundantly clear they did not approve of the budding romance between her and their son. They had a nice Jewish girl back in Holland in mind for him. Promptly they started making plans for their son to move there, with the aim of neatly bringing an end to the relationship with my mother. I can only imagine the sadness both he and my mother would have felt after the edict that he had to leave the country was delivered. That was how it was back then: your parents had a lot of influence on who you married. To choose to go against what they thought was best for you, or family traditions, would only be for the very brave.

As fate would have it, World War I intervened; when the war began, young Cohen was called up to serve. I am not sure of the circumstances, but soon after signing up he was killed. I am quite sure my mother would have been utterly devastated to learn of his death. She was soon to have another life-changing and stressful episode to deal with: finding out that she was pregnant. I cannot say with any certainty, but I do wonder whether the pregnancy was not a complete surprise to her, with her secretly hoping that a Cohen baby might eventuate and provide a powerful reason for them to stay together.

Planned or not, the reality of being a young, unwed mother in 1914 was not easy. Shame was piled on both mother and child. Abortion was illegal and the backstreet operations were dangerous. The only other options were adoption or foster care. Adoption as a legal entity did not exist in South Africa until 1923 and the United Kingdom until 1926, so women had to create their own arrangements—as and when they could—with couples who wanted a baby. Foster care was generally the only realistic option. A woman would pay a fee to a foster parent and, in turn, was allowed visitation rights. However, stories of malnourished children in foster care were common. Some poor women couldn't face the grim choices in front of them and took matters into their own hands. The death rate among illegitimate babies during World War I was twice that of legitimate births. The Assize Court records for the nineteenth century show that half the murder victims were babies. How sad.

My mother would have known full well that children born out of wedlock faced a shameful existence. The child she was carrying was half Jewish, too, and goodness knows what sort of extra prejudice that might bring. On top of that, "bastard" children were never able my early years to inherit anything, and their often impoverished childhoods frequently turned into impoverished adulthoods. My mother thought that her unborn baby would be an outcast in her father's wealthy family. However, there were two things in her favor. My Aunt Ada, though secretly gay, was married. In those days, being gay or lesbian was never talked about. Homosexuality was a criminal act that you could be imprisoned for, and in South Africa prison meant hard labor. Instead it was kept very quiet and hidden in marriages. For Ada to have her sister's baby might well have served as useful evidence of a bona fide marriage. So Ada and her husband George Frieslaar, a mining inspector, could provide a stable home for Sylvia, and my mother could get on with her life knowing that her baby was safely cared for and she could still be involved in her life. It was the perfect answer to a delicate situation.

The reaction of the unborn baby's paternal grandparents to an unplanned pregnancy in the family was, perhaps, also unusual. The knowledge of a Cohen baby on the way brought with it financial support from the baby's paternal family. When Sylvia was old enough for boarding school, the Cohen family would pay for all of that, with her returning to Ada's home in the holidays.

Cohen senior was also good enough to look after my mother—not just his own bloodline. She was a milliner by vocation, and in the 1910s and 1920s hats were an integral part of a lady being well dressed; it was a good profession to be in. My mother specialized in making Panama hats and became very skilled at it. To give her security of employment, Mr. Cohen ended up buying the hat-making business my mother worked in and then gifted the entire business to her.

Things had all worked out far better for my mother than would have been usual for a single, pregnant mother at the outbreak of World War I. Her baby was looked after by her sister; she was living close by, which meant she could see her daughter grow up and be involved in her life; her child's education costs at good schools were paid for by the child's paternal grandfather; and she was the owner of a millinery business.

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I am not sure what took my mother to France from South Africa, but plainly something did. As fate would have it, it was somewhere in France that she must have met and fallen in love with my father, who was a medical student at the time. They went on to get married and settle in France. Soon enough a baby was on the way—my big sister Eileen. I don't have her exact birth date, but she was three or four years older than me so she must have been born in 1917 or 1918. 

Philippe's life as a doctor in France meant working in a hospital, an ongoing prospect that he felt didn't hold a lot of joy or promise for him. With a wife, a small child, and another one (me) on the way, he was keen for a fresh start. After the horrors of World War I, there was the promise of a stable, buoyant, and even flourishing 1920s stretching ahead of them like a tantalizing dream. Like many others exhausted by the grimness of the Great War, it felt like there were new horizons to investigate, new travel freedoms to take advantage of, and new lives to be explored. Being Catholic, Philippe approached the local priests with the knowledge that the Catholic Church was looking for doctors to go to the colonies to help staff the hospitals and—the other, unwritten, job of the Church—to spread the Christian faith.