An Unfamiliar Kindness

Chapter 3

Author’s Note:

Until the late 1970s, connections between Britain, Europe, and South Africa were maintained by sea for passengers, cargo, and mail. The large ships completed the fourteen-day journey with considerable ease. One such liner was the Windsor Castle, a British Royal Mail Ship (RMS), which completed the journey between Southampton and Cape Town on a regular basis, always departing on a Thursday at 4 p.m. Only during the latter part of the 1970s did the arrival of the jumbo jet make air travel not only faster but also cheaper than ocean liners.

“The Troubles” refers to the thirty-year period of conflict from 1968 to 1998 between elements of Northern Ireland’s Irish Nationalist community (mainly self-identified as Irish and Catholic) and its Unionist community (mainly self-identified as British and Protestant). The goal of the former was to end British rule in Northern Ireland and reunite Ireland and create an Irish Republic. During this time, more than 3,500 civilians were killed.

The Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK that kicked off in early 1970 was a second-wave feminist movement, which followed the suffrage campaign of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It pushed hard to improve the conditions and quality of life in general for women. It succeeded in getting several laws passed, such as the Equal Pay Act in 1970, the s*x Discrimination Act in 1975, and the Domestic Violence Act in 1976.

Even though An Unfamiliar Kindness is woven around these historical facts, it remains a work of fiction, and all the characters and most of the incidents are imaginary and bear no reference to individuals alive or dead.