The Wild Ones

I have probably mentioned here at some point that my maiden name was Jurd. I've heard it said ( I can't remember where) that the Jurds were Judds until there was a spelling error in a registry somewhere and so a new family was born. These registry error stories can be interesting and I'm pretty sure most families would have one, after all it's not so many generations ago that the majority of us were illiterate. 

My mother-in-law was born to Chinese immigrants in Malaysia 12 months after the Japanese invasion which of course was the beginning of the Pacific War. Her father went to register her birth and when asked the name of the child he stumbled and replied with her gender. Her official name has forever more been "a girl" although of course she is known by the name her family intended, which is Sophia to me and Xiu Zhen for Chinese speakers.

Anyways, I only added that story because I like it and it might be of interest to my children and grandchildren at some point.

Funnily enough, an interesting story from my Jurd history has been passed on by my mum (who was not a Jurd but a Keane). 

Mum's dentist told her that as a young boy growing up in country New South Wales, he attended boarding school with a boy by the name of something-or-other Jurd. The Jurd boy and the dentist would catch the train to their respective towns for weekends but the early train didn't actually stop where  young Jurd needed to alight and not wanting to wait for a later train he had devised a system...

The guard would be asked if the train could slow at the appropriate station and young Jurd would throw his suitcase out the door. It would start sliding along the gravel platform and our protagonist hero would leap from the train to land on the suitcase. The last our dentist friend would see of his mate each holiday was a gravel surfing wild thing!

My best guess puts this story at about 100 years old or up to about 110 years, the same approximate point in history when my own great- grandfather Jurd was becoming a minister in the Salvation Army. 

In those days Australia was a brand new nation and the Salvation Army was  full of newly Christian "wild colonial boys". I have always imagined my great-grandfather to be a staid and respectable "man of the cloth" but on reflection I realise that someone, somewhere probably has a story to tell about that wild young Jurd who went off and inexplicably joined the Sally Army!