July 2011
It was 1941, a pleasantly warm day and Harry Phillips' mum was talking to her neighbour, Mrs Jones, outside their house.
'My Jack's just sent me a letter from South Africa.' she declared, 'Of course, he can't say exactly where he's stationed, but he says of all the places he's been in the war, this is the loveliest.'
'Is your Jack with the 8th Army, then, Flo?' said Mrs Jones.
'Now come on, Elsie, careless talk costs lives. You know I can't divulge that.'
'No, of course not, I was forgetting. Still, you say that with all the places he's been stationed, like Rome and Egypt and Greece, he thinks South Africa is the best?'
'That's right and one day, when the war's over, he says he'll take me there.'
But he never did, as when Jack Phillips returned to civvy street, it was as much as he could afford to take his family to Yarmouth, let alone anywhere abroad. Then, within five years of returning, Jack developed cancer and his dreams of one day taking his family to South Africa vanished.
Flo thought it ironic that after five years of fighting against Hitler's war machine and coming through without a scratch, he succumbed to something he couldn't fight in peacetime.
'When I grow up, Mum,' Harry assured Flo, 'I'll get a job where I can save enough for us to go to South Africa.'
But somehow, with the expense of moving to a new house in a nicer part of the country, there never seemed to be enough left over from Harry's early wage packets to fritter on foreign holidays. Then of course there was all the 'trouble out there' as Flo put it, in the ensuing years.
Eventually she too died, not from cancer, but from a virus going round. Harry in due course got married, but again, Jenny and he only ever seemed to have enough to pay the mortgage and occasionally have a cheap holiday in Britain or occasionally the continent.
Then one day Harry was made redundant from the bank he'd worked at all his life.
'No matter how many shocks you get in life, you never get used to them, do you, lass?' he said to Jenny.
'That's true, Harry,' said his wife, 'but you've got to look for the silver linings to the cloud.'
'What silver linings?' her husband replied.
'Well, you weren't far off retirement anyway. Come on, admit it, you were counting the days. You can take early retirement and the mortgage is paid off and we've no dependants to worry about.' It still pained Jenny, the fact that they'd never been able to have kids. Still, it was no good crying over spilt milk.
'Look, for years you've been talking about how you'd love to visit South Africa, after all those stories your dad used to tell you about it, so why don't we actually go?'
That is how, after fifty years of waiting, Harry and his wife awaited the taxi to take them on the trip of a lifetime.