Call me Friede.

My mother was a brilliant, beautiful, complex woman. She was born in 1928 in Germany during the dying years of the Weimar Republic. My mum was the illegitimate daughter of a Berlin trade unionist who moved from lover to lover like a bumblebee flies from flower to flower in spring. Her mother was a free spirit who managed seedy hotels in Hamburg's Reeperbahn. When my mum's dad walked out on their family, my grandmother found another lover to help pay the bills to rear her daughter.

Unfortunately, My grandmother's lover found that a baby cramped his style. To keep her man, my grandmother agreed with his proposal that my mother had to live, with a foster family on weekdays. On weekends my mum was allowed to visit her mother because her lover returned to his wife and family in another city.

It was not a great solution, but it was a solution. Both my mum and my grandmother survived Hitler and the war, whereas neither my grandfather nor my grandmother's lover did .

As it was a time of Nazism and misogyny, my mother suffered much in her youth. But she was philosophical about it. "I lived, so my suffering will never be as great as the dead."

Yet those years of Nazism left a smudge on her soul, and no matter how joyful she might appear in the company of others, there was a persistent melancholy in her heart.

After the war, my father, a member of the allied occupation forces, courted the woman who would become my mother. It was a rocky love affair that had a few break ups. Eventually in 1947, they wed in Hamburg, and then returned to my dad's native Yorkshire.

In 1999, after 52 years of marriage, my mum died of cancer at the age of 70. Her life was beautiful and profound. But it was a journey which ended before she found resolution with the many chapters of her life.

Many became acquainted with my mother through my dad, Harry Leslie Smith’s book, Love Among the Ruins, and The Empress of Australia. There is, however, no exploration of her life in middle and old age when she was afflicted with ill health and was compelled to be a caregiver along with my dad for my mentally ill brother. That along with heart disease and severe rheumatoid arthritis took their toll on my mother's body and emotional well being. She did not have an easy old age, and that disappointed her greatly because she believed she deserved at the very least an easy third act.

Had she lived longer or been allowed to choose a different path, I think she would have become a marvellous writer or academic. Like so many women from that time, the world of academics, writing, or journalism was not afforded to her.

Throughout my mum's life, she kept a journal because she had few people she trusted enough to give the full content of her heart. Sadly she destroyed much of her writing before her death. I have only a few scraps remaining from her written notes.

Today, I have enclosed to you, one of the scraps from my mum's writing of long ago because it displays much of my mother's character.

“The Sun was like a red ball in the sky, the mist was rising, and the grass was still wet with the morning dew. It promised to be a lovely day. But everything felt different in me. Children’s excited voices floated through my open kitchen window. I heard them running, trying to catch up with friends. Their words were hurried, bursting with so much to tell one and another because it was the first day of school after a long hot summer.

I remembered once my house stirred with activity, and there was hardly time for my children to finish their breakfast before they began the first day of a new school year. Between arguing and joking with each other, my boys checked to make sure they had packed into their school bags, the lunches I made for them at the break of dawn.

Then, each of my children sped out of our front door with the speed and surety of a bird who learned to fly free of its nest.

On our street, commotion reined until nine o’clock when the school bell rang from the school located, at the back of our house, and stillness came to our neighbourhood.

But on this first day of school, everything felt wrong because even though there were still children rushing excitedly to school, mine were not there. How could they be because mine were now grown. They were young men who long ago moved from this house to make their way in the world.

I felt alone in the silence, like when I was a child and couldn't find my mother after an air raid in 1941, in my hometown of Hamburg. Then the quiet broke. Outside, I heard a realtor pounding a “For Sale” sign on our front yard like he was an undertaker hammering a nail into the coffin containing the remains of my past.”

My mother, brother, and father are now dead. I think of them often and hope that whether the time I have on this earth is long or short, that I can introduce others to these unique people who do not deserve to be forgotten as they made many contributions to making our society better for us all.

Elfriede Edelmann Smith Oct 20, 1928- July 2, 1999