Family

My mother told me that I had met my aunt when I was too young to remember. It was in Montreal, when I was a baby.

The Brown family comprised 14 kids: my dad, lucky number 13, had siblings who were old enough to be his parents, as the age gap was considerable. And when my grandfather, Sidney Brown, died, my dad was only two years old and many of his eldest brothers and sisters helped to raise him and his infant brother, my Uncle Don.

'Nanny' Brown, 1950s.

My grandmother (who I called "Nanny"), Vena Penk, was Welsh. I don't know if she ever returned to her home country after marrying my grandfather and moving to Canada, though I do know she lived for a time in Haiti and in California. The last time I saw her, I was about 10.

But one of my older aunts, Miriam, moved to Cardiff, Wales, after she married, and she was still living there when DW and I were travelling the Welsh countryside in spring, 1991.

When I told my mother that DW and I wanted to reach out to Aunt Miriam when we reached Cardiff, my mom gave me my aunt's phone number. My plan was to call her when we were in Conwy, to give her a couple of days' notice that DW and I were in the country, and that we would like to drop in for tea, if she was available.

Unfortunately, either I forgot to take the number with me when we left Canada or I lost the number from my backpack while I was unpacking and repacking it over the previous days. I was going to give up, but when we finally reached Cardiff, on the Bristol Channel in the south of Wales, I called my mother to get Aunt Miriam's number again.

DW and I planned to tour the castle, have lunch, and then visit my aunt in the afternoon.

"She's not home," my mother said when I called her.

"How do you know?"

"Because she's here, in Ottawa. I saw her yesterday." My aunt was in Canada, visiting her brothers and sisters who were living in Ottawa and in Montreal.

What were the chances?

At least we still had the castle to see.

In 50 CE, the Romans established a settlement in Cardiff, and after the Norman conquest, a motte-and-bailey castle was built upon the Roman ruins. Over the centuries, wood was replaced with stone and the grounds around the castle were further fortified. It wasn't until the 18th century that the castle and its lands were handed to the various Marquess of Bute (who also owned Caerphilly), whose heirs cared for the existing structures and added modern ones to the grounds. Today, the Welsh historic society cares for the castle, which is a grand palace that is built around a Norman keep, which is built on a Roman settlement.

In other words, this site is teeming with history.

As with other Welsh tour-guide photos, I was drawn to one of a peacock, which roams the grounds, as he was posed, tail-feathers spread, with the Norman keep in the background. I knew that the chances of getting the bird with its fan-like tail open was a long shot, if I could even get a photo of the bird with the old castle in the background.

What were the chances?

Our tour of Cardiff Castle completed, we also decided to visit the Welsh Folk Museum, St. Fagans, before heading out of the city. Though we didn't reunite with my Aunt Miriam, visiting her home city made me feel just that much closer to the Penk side of my family. I would eventually meet her, in 1999, after DW and I returned home from our two years of living in South Korea, at a Brown family reunion in Nepean. And Aunt Miriam bore a striking resemblance to Nanny Brown.

We eventually made our way eastward, back toward England. But we still had one more castle and a famous abbey to see before we explored the south of England and made our way back to London.

Stay tuned.