Unsung

One cannot choose one’s relatives nor can one choose one’s neighbours. Always immediately to the North of us, we have had excellent neighbours. Norgate is a sleepy neighbourhood here in North Vancouver. The houses were built in the 1950s but, at one time, it was thought that it would be a good site for Vancouver’s international airport. There is evidence in our gardens of the river estuary on which it is built. Nowadays the Capilano River spills into a narrow estuary to the west between us and West Vancouver’s Park Royal Mall. We are low lying so that houses cannot have basements, the rocks that we dig up in our gardens are rounded and grainy, stone that has been vigorously smoothed by the movement of the river over thousands of years.

The people who live in the neighbourhood are an eclectic bunch. They are a mixture of working professionals and retirees who have found that the houses that they own, only 10 minutes drive from the heart of the City of Vancouver, are no longer the cheap options that they once were. Suddenly society woke up to the fact that this is a great place to live. The commute is relatively easy for those who work, despite traffic clogging bridge crossings, the goods and services are handy for us all. We are become, unexpectedly, owners of very valuable houses.

I know of nobody famous who lives in our area. No Kardashian lurks around a Norgate corner, no Tom Cruise flies over our houses. But like everywhere in the world we are never entirely separated from those people who hit the headlines. The 6 degrees of separation theory suggests that if we really want to meet Paul McCartney then it will take on average about 6 phone calls. We all have our heroes whom we would like to meet. Over the last 30 or so years, I can think of Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry, Billy Connolly, Spike Milligan, Peter Ustinov. I would love to sit down with Bruce Springsteen. Leonard Cohen and Nelson Mandela would have been great value. Locally I am a fan of John McComb and Phillip Till. In the past T.E. Lawrence and Robbie Burns would have enthralled me. But just occasionally, close to home, one hears of somebody who is a real hero. In this case it is probably fair to say that here in North America, this is a person of whom we may not have heard. Robert Harold Lundie Strachan, however, did not escape notice in his native South Africa.

Our neighbour, Rob Moser, (He, his wife, Carol and son, Richard, are our Northern neighbours therefore excellent), arrived at Bean Coffee shop the other morning and presented me with a large manila envelope to have a look at. It contained old copies of ‘Time’ Magazine and some news clippings and personal letters. The clippings contained articles about his relative Robert Strachan, known by his second name, Harold. I read them and then googled him. Reading about this incredible human being enlightened me to something which I knew little about. Harold Strachan, nicknamed ‘Jock’ for his Scottish ancestry, was an exceptional human being.

Being born in Pretoria in 1925 and dying at the age of 94 in 2020 in his native South Africa, he could hardly have lived through a more incredible period in the history of that part of the world. He joined the South African Air Force at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was a war hero, being a part of many bombing raids over Germany. Reading between the lines, however, one senses some guilt at the part he played in the fire-bombing of Dresden. Who knows but what he made himself after the war may have been caused by his role in that terrible episode? If that was the case then he more than made up for his wartime exploits in his post bellum life. He found his cause in the anti-apartheid movement, particularly when it was written into law in 1948. He found a niche with Govan Mbeki on his ‘Voice of the People’ newspaper. Somehow, because of his wartime experience, he was cajoled into making explosives for the cause, even though he had only dropped them and never made them before. I want to believe the Wikipedia report that no people were killed in the acts of sabotage that his so-called expertise helped perpetrate. He did, however, go to prison for sabotage, tried under the Explosives Act. He was given 6 years, subsequently reduced, 13 months of it spent in solitary confinement also having his teeth removed, something that seems inexplicable. It was not his only stint in gaol being given a further period under the Prisons Act when he had an article published in several newspapers criticising the treatment of Black African prisoners. After release and house arrest his house was shot up by unknown assailants.

Having read some of Mr. Strachan’s personal letters, albeit one’s written in later life, I was struck by his commitment and his passion. It also came across that here was a man who was extremely black and white in his thinking and, Dear Reader, I do not mean in his anti-apartheid stance. It is unlikely that he dealt much in shades of grey.  How many of us make disapproving noises about certain aspects of world events? Some demonstrate by gluing their hands to the highway or chaining themselves to trees. But, Dear Reader, how many of us would go to prison for our beliefs, a harsh South African prison at that, and how many would risk the death penalty and eventual solitary confinement, to speak out against something so blatantly wrong? Harold Strachan talked the talk and walked the walk.

 He was a hero who risked an ultimate martyrdom. He seems to have lived on a much higher intellectual and moral plane than most of us, and thereby might be the problem. Some of that was not conducive to holding onto a wife and maintaining friendships.  Having said that, I would love to have sat down with him and simply listened. But, at the same time, I do not think that it would have been a conversation that was calm and relaxing. Nor should it have been, the best chats challenge us and make us think. But I am left feeling uneasy about this man, believing that even solitary would have had difficulty being confined with him! It would have been difficult to put a label on him. Some would have seen his writings as treason and his actions as terrorism; others would have seen him as a champion of the down-trodden , a fighter for freedom. Hearing what people who knew him thought of him, we discover that it is indeed true, he was a man who was difficult to live with. Here was a person who held certain views which would have had him pilloried and de-platformed in modern day society. Harry Strachan was no saint. In this day and age where we seek perfection in our icons, simply put we ain’t going to find it. We witness them being today’s hero and tomorrow’s villain. There is no such thing as perfection in human beings. Like the rest of us, Harold Strachan was walking across a valley, balancing on a wire; he must have been  continuously vying with the Jekyll and Hydes of his own character. Is it any wonder that after all the hardships he put himself through there were major flaws within him which he often failed to suborn? In the words of William Shakespeare,

“He was a man, take him for all and all, we shall not look upon his like again.”

I have seen written on a tee-shirt, “Sometimes you are the statue and sometimes you are the pigeon.”

 I think that reading what Strachan went through for his indisputably worthy cause, there is a lesson for all of us in our unaccepting modern world. We need to take our heroes and villains with their warts and all. They are never always wrong and never always right. They may ‘stride the world like colossi’ but there are things in the ‘deep heart’s core’ which cause our gabs to gape at the unacceptable actions and words of the whole being. None of us are perfect, none of us should be throwing stones in glass houses, none of us should look at what somebody has achieved and ignore them because they are not very nice people.

                        Reading his letters I have come to agree with the biographical description of Harold Strachan in Wikipedia.  He was astrant which I believe is Afrikaans for ‘irreverent’.  Maybe I, who have only skimmed the surface of his story, should simply leave it at that, but at least Rob’s uncle should not remain unsung even when the singing is not always harmonious.

Thanks for reading.