From My Grandmother's Files: Mother’s Unshakable Faith
by Shirley A. Littleford Johnsen
It was on the train leaving Johannesburg that I realized that my mother was a woman of profound and unshakeable faith. It was faith, in this case, in my father. Apparently he didn't think it warranted, because all through the night I could hear him saying as he had first shouted after he leapt aboard the moving train as it was leaving the station, "Where in the hell do you think you're going?"
We were an American family traveling to the wilds of Northern Rhodesia in the early thirties. Dad, as a mining engineer, was widely traveled, but the rest of us were not. We had never been farther than the nearest summer resort. This assignment of Dad's was one of three years’ duration, and at last we could go with him. I was fourteen, my brothers seven and eight and my sister six. Mother had always dwelt in the bosom of her family of five sisters and her mother - the most unlikely candidate for the role of world traveler that I can imagine.
Our whole trip thus far had been one of high adventure for us. We first went through Washington D.C. to see Dad's relatives. We stayed in both New York and London, and finally took the steamer from Southampton, England to Capetown, South Africa. It had either been a dream or a nightmare for my mother, and a great pain in the neck to my father.
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