My #MakjangMonday
(is not on a Monday again)

She was not yet twenty but she had found the man she wanted to marry.
Let’s call him Bill; it’s a common enough name for the era we’re talking about. And let’s call her Fiona White for the same reason.
It was the early 1940s and my great Aunt – my father’s Aunt to be precise – was the daughter of a cattle property owner. This was practically landed gentry in that part of Australia at the time and, unfortunately, the nearby Brown family had run out of brothers for her to marry like the rest of her sisters.
(Yes I’m related to half that town and yes there’s a park named after my grandmother’s family and yes we try not to visit because it’s weird how everyone there is related to each other and related to me because all the Brown bothers and the White sisters kept marrying each other, it was a thing).
But I guess if your husband is also your brother-in-law it keeps things in the family and at least they weren’t cousins (that came later).*

My grandmother didn’t marry a Brown either, FYI. My gene pool thanks her.

Aunty Fiona fell in love with a Ringer who worked on her father’s station. My great grandfather was apparently very unimpressed with a mere station hand being his future son-in-law and made his objection to the match clear. But nobody stands between a White woman and what she wants and my great Aunt was determined to have him.
Bill got a job in another city to make some more money and build them a house and then he was going to send for her. Did he leave because he got a good opportunity or because her father drove him away? I don’t know for sure, that part of the story has been left out.
Either way, he left.
And then there was a war.
And she never saw or heard from him again.+

Now, my great Aunt found someone else to marry who was also not a Brown and had kids and lived her life like people do. She was apparently quite content, grieved appropriately when her husband died, and settled into her 70s with the endless vivacity with which all my father’s apparently-immortal Aunts face life.
(Seriously, they’re so old and have buried all their husbands and are more probably more active than I am.)
One day my Aunt, around 75 or so, was listening to the radio and who should she hear but Bill. He was giving an interview from his home 2000 kilometres away and when she heard him speak she was sure that it was him. Surprised and somewhat nostalgic, she sent him a letter via the radio station asking him if he remembered her as a girl he’d known a full 60 years beforehand.
She didn’t have long to wait before a letter from him came back.

“I have never stopped loving you,” he said, “Marry me, finally.”

And so she did.

Happy ending.

*This part of my story is wildly exaggerated. There were only two brothers but they did marry two of my grandmother’s sisters. Hey, it’s Makjang Mondays, not Documentary Mondays.

+It wouldn’t be makjang without my great-grandfather’s role in this story. You’ve probably already worked out that Bill did not just disappear into the ether as it seemed from her perspective. He wrote, planned, saved money, built them a house – everything he said he would do. Enter the disapproving father who dealt with his daughter’s stubbiness by waylaying and destroying all her lover’s letters so that she never knew. Before the internet, before mobiles, before most houses in this part of the world even had landlines, this was an effective way of ensuring they never communicated again. When the war started, he enlisted and many people lost contact with loved ones during this time. She moved on because she believed herself abandoned.
But even with all her father’s scheming, a giant world war, and the tyranny of a vast continent, they still ended up together finally. And what could be more makjang than that.