AN Inwardleigh man has published his father's lost memoirs of a childhood in South Africa. In 2003, Jeremy Griggs was helping his father Celadon to move out of his Somerset home, when he discovered a dusty black tin box. Inside was a faded school exercise book, containing an account of Don's early years in South Africa. 'My father couldn't remember writing it, when I asked him about it,' Jeremy said. 'We knew he had written radio plays as a young man, but we didn't think he'd had time to write anything after he opened a school in 1955. 'This account had been written in the 1970s, though.' It took Jeremy three weeks to painstakingly transcribe the account: 'My father doesn't have the best handwriting, so it really was a labour of love,' Jeremy said. Celadon's account begins with his arrival at Cape Town in 1919, when he was a four-year-old boy. It follows him through a sometimes bewildering childhood in the Orange Free State — relating his kidnap and rescue from a native settlement, his first brushes with romance, and the arrival of the family's first car. It evokes in vivid detail an era of dirt closets, steam liners, and tapioca pudding. After reading his father's account, Jeremy was determined to follow in his footsteps to South Africa. There he found the Anglican church where his great-grandfather had preached as a minister — and the young girl Sarah Fawkes, now a grandmother, who had been his father's first love. He recounts these experiences in A South African Childhood in a chapter following his father's memoirs, and also adds a transcription of his interview with Sarah. The book concludes with another transcription — of Jeremy's discussion with his ninety-year-old father, following his reading of the memoirs. It demonstrates that, without the discovery of the tin box, this characterful tale would have been one of the world's lost histories. A South African Childhood was launched on the 91st birthday of Jeremy's father Celadon. It is for sale from the JC Books in Okehampton at £7.50.
