Rex Tate
Photo Courtesy of Lynnda Heard, North-By-NorthEast Magazine
Rex is a member of the local RSL (Returned
and Services League), an organisation that supports returned war veterans and
serving members of the armed services. Rex is an ex-bomber pilot with the airforce
and fought in WW II in Europe around Italy. He was a young twenty year old then
and while based in Scotland, met a young Scottish girl named Sylvia, from
Portsoy, during a barn dance. He had apparently caught her attention with his
dancing, jumping around like a kangaroo! She invited him home for dinner and he
met her parents. They were in love and got engaged during the war. At the end
of the war, her whole village came to farewell her in style as she moved to
Australia, sailing on a ship and having arrived, married Rex. They moved to
Alexandra after sometime and spent a long time here, raising their children.
I met Rex at a gathering in the local
library. We chatted and hit it off. Rex is enthusiastic about Alexandra. He is
a founding member of the historical society and yet looks to the future and
supports new ideas, even as he helps preserve the best of the past. At his age,
he walks around like a man twenty years younger, he seems to want to do, and give
as much as he can. He has worked with Aborigines and truly respects them in a
way that I have seen in few. He talks to me about Demming – the American who is
regarded highly in Japan for his understanding of quality, and encourages me in
every dream or idea I come up with, to do something concrete. He wants to work
with me to show our school kids how they can learn and practice the spirit of
the ANZACs in the way they do their team projects in science!
I did not know then that Rex’s wife was
ill. I had never met her. Later, when I ran into Rex one day, he mentioned that
Sylvia had passed away a few days ago. They had had about sixty years together.
Rex invited me to attend a memorial service they held for Sylvia with a
traditional Scottish theme – playing of the bagpipes and blessing of the tartan
cloth. Sylvia still retained her connection to her home town all these years.
Her family and friends from there sent condolences, flowers. They read poems in
a Scottish dialect, and told a moving and cheerful story of Sylvia’s life.
Returning the same generosity of spirit, Rex’s family has planned to send
Sylvia’s remains back to Scotland. Her spirit lives both here in Australia and
in her home town, on the other side of the world. I guess that is the thing - a
spirit and love are not bound by distances. Her life story has been made into a
play on war brides by her daughter and is staged around Australia.
The service itself was held in a local
church hall. Everyone wore a piece of Tartan. Rex told me how the tradition
came to be – the blessing of the tartan. The Scots under English rule were once
forbidden from speaking their dialect and wearing their traditional tartan
cloth, as they represented their desire for their own freedom. The tartan is
traditionally a woven woollen cloth with crisscrossing horizontal and vertical
patterns that the Scots make their traditional dresses out of. The only place
and way they would get around this restriction was wearing the tartan under
their church clothes or carrying a piece of it, hidden, and during church
prayers, they would call upon God to bless the tartan. In closed church
meetings they could speak a bit in their own dialect as well.
The bagpipes were something else! It is
spectacular to hear them up close and see someone play them in full Scottish
dress. The sound of the pipes is haunting and gets into your soul, deep inside.
To me it brought back instant memories of the “Nadaswaram” that I hear played
in South India. The two instruments may look different, but there is something
about the sounds of both - they seem to have seeped into our genes over the
centuries and you don’t realise it until it suddenly awakens the spirit and a
certain mood in you. The sounds just transport you back in time and space, you
feel, you know you belong to a
culture where this sound comes from. These are surely music and sounds of the
soul. I left the service with Rex’s ribbon of tartan that he gave me to give my
daughter - she loved it! I walked away from the service feeling strangely
familiar with a culture different to mine - beneath all the outside trappings
we are all similar. We can celebrate the good life of a person even as we mourn
them, it is the only good and logical end to all of us – we wish!
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