SHAUN SMILLIE

MY MOTHER would tell me a story and I was sure it wasn’t true. It went like this: Her great-great-grandmother had seven sons. When the Anglo-boer War broke out, six of them went to fight for the British, while the seventh took up arms for the Boers. The story my mother told was that the seventh son was captured and was to be hanged for treason.

In desperation, his mother wrote to Queen Victoria in a plea for clemency and her son was spared.

Not long ago I discovered that my mother’s story was true. Well, sort of.

One evening I encountered the no-nonsense stare of Eliza Cheney, the mother of seven sons and my greatgreat-great grandma.

Along with the photograph on the web page was a story. The seventh son’s name was William Cheney and he was tried for high treason for fighting for the Boers.

A genealogical website told of how he was fined £3 (R60) in the Pietermaritzburg Magistrate’s

Court, but there was no threatening hangman’s noose.

As for that letter? It wasn’t a letter to the queen, it was that photograph of grandma Eliza and her spooky gaze. William’s mother Eliza was so proud of her six boys fighting for the British she had a portrait taken of herself with her sons and sent it to the queen. In return, the story goes, she was sent a signed photograph of Queen Victoria.

We don’t know if she ever forgave William. My heritage, on my mother’s side, is of pioneering families who arrived in what was then Natal.

They stayed and along the way they were moulded by the historical events of this great country.

And this story, twisted a little by time, tells of a South African family fractured by ideology, and hey, can we relate to that today.

Smillie is senior writer