THE BLACKRIDGE HOUSE - A Memoir

<p><em>A quest is never what you expect it to be.</em></p><p><br></p><p>Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branches of a tree outside her window. Bedridden her memory fading she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail - dogs a mango tree a stream - she has no idea where exactly it is. 'My memory is full of blotches' she tells her daughter Julia 'like ink left about and knocked over.'</p><p><br></p><p>Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother unsettled lonely and confused would this perhaps bring some measure of closure? So begins a journey that traverses family history forgotten documents old photographs and the maps that stake out a country's troubled past. Kind strangers willing to assist in the search lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live. Taken as one <em>The Blackridge House</em> is a meditation on belonging on the stories we tell of home and family on the precarious footprint of life.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>