68) My Sister-in-law Sandra

Don and Sandra

After a while we got a letter from the Australian Embassy in Pretoria asking us to come and have and interview in connection with our application to immigrate to Australia. They asked us to be there on 1st August and as it was such a significant day in our lives we would have liked to have gone on that day but for some reason we could not make it then and phoned and changed our appointment to 18th August.

We were very excited about it but a little nervous too. The man who interviewed us was very friendly and put us at our ease. He asked us why we wanted to go to Australia, where we wanted to settle and told us quite a bit about his country. I remember he told the boys that although Koalas looked nice and cuddly they were not really very friendly animals and that they had large claws and could also bite. He gave us a lot of literature about housing, climate and conditions in Australia and he told us that he did not see any reason that we would not be accepted as immigrants. We told him that we were thinking of going to live in Townsville. There were a number of people from Umtali who had settled there and we thought it might be good to have a few familiar faces to begin with. Also we liked the sound of the Townsville climate and being close to the Great Barrier Reef was not too bad either. He told us that they would of course have to verify that Jonny’s apprenticeship papers were genuine but as long as they were we could expect to have a positive result very soon. We knew that the papers were genuine so we had no worries on that score and thought it was all cut and dried. When we left our new “Australian friend” gave us a little kangaroo lapel pin each. He told us that they were only meant for people who had been accepted but he was so sure of us we could get ours now.

While we were in South Africa we visited all of Jonny’s family and of course they were sad to think that we were going to live so far away and that there was a pretty good chance that we would not see them again. We stayed with Don once again on the plot which he called “Groote Sikel” (Big Struggle) in a place called Lustof, on the northern outskirts of Pretoria. By then he was divorced from Wendy and we met the new lady in his live, Sandra. Sandra was a divorcee with a 16-year-old daughter called Vanessa and a little girl called Leigh-Anne who was about four. We liked Sandra immediately and did not change that opinion of her right up to the time she died in 2003. She was only a few months younger than I so she was only 59 when she died. She had not been well for a while; she had problems with her kidneys. She was a lovely girl, a good cook and a real homemaker. She was also very artistic and loved to try new crafts. I remember her doing ribbon embroidery, woodcarving and pottery. She was also very gullible and Don was always teasing her.

She had a badly damaged left eardrum and had very little hearing in that ear. She told me that when she was about 14 or 15 she had gone to stay with a friend and during the night she had had earache. She was in a lot of pain so went to the bathroom cupboard to see what she could find for it. She found a bottle that must have reminded her of the liquid paraffin that her mother would use when she had an earache at home and poured it into her ear. But unfortunately it was not liquid paraffin but Acetone. It was terribly painful and she said she screamed loud enough to wake the dead and her friend’s parents came running. They took her to the local hospital but there was not much that could be done. The scaring on the eardrum never healed completely and it left her a little deaf.

When she met Don she could not drive a car and so Don set about teaching her. She had an awful lot of trouble with the gears and so Don bought her an automatic car and she passed her test easily. Not long after she had passed her test, but before she had moved out to live on the plot she was going out to the there for the weekend. For some reason Don could not go and collect her as he usually did so it was decided that as she had her own car and she had passed her test she should drive out on her own. Saturday afternoon after work with Leigh-Anne in the car she headed for Lustof. She had never driven on the highway by herself before, so was very pleased that she had negotiated the on-ramp without any problem. So she just relaxed and drove along looking for the Lustof off ramp. But after a while she began to think that things were not quite right, she had not seen anything that was familiar but she pressed on until she saw a sign that gave the mileage to Witbank. As she knew that Witbank was to the east of Pretoria she realised that she was on the wrong road. At the next off ramp she turned round and headed back to Pretoria. Once Leigh-Anne realised that there was a mistake she started to cry for Uncle Don, which upset Sandra and she started to cry too. She got back to town found the correct road and tried once again to get to Don. When she arrived at the plot, about two hours later than she had expected to be, of course Don was very worried. She told me that he had said to her “couldn’t you tell by the sun that you were going east and not north?” We both doubled over with laughter at that. She, like me, had no idea of navigating by the sun and to us this was just a stupid question.

While we were staying with them I asked her if she was going into Pretoria on Saturday morning. I had a few things I wanted to buy and I knew it would be easier to go with her as she knew Pretoria well and could show me the best places to shop. She told me “No one goes to Pretoria on Saturday” I asked her “Why” and she told me “because it is too busy”. I knew what she meant but it did sound funny, why was it busy if no one went there?

Sandra was not very fond of chicken to eat and she told me what had put her off. When she had been married to her first husband he had had an operation on his stomach. The day that he was to be discharged some people invited them to come and have lunch with them so that she would be able to relax and enjoy her husbands first day at home. Being Sandra, when their hostess was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches to the lunch she went and asked if she could help. The hostess said no but Sandra stayed and chatted as the other woman took the chicken out to the oven. When the woman started to cut it up Sandra saw green liquid pouring out of the roast chicken and she watched in horror, as it was just cut up and put on to a plate. She thought that if her husband ate it so soon after his operation, he would bound to be sick. Before they sat down to lunch she managed to whisper to him that he was not to eat the chicken. Sandra did not like to offend her friends so she ate a little of the chicken but her husband used the fact of his recent operation to avoid eating and also to leave early and they rushed home where Sandra was very, very sick. The doctor was called and he diagnosed food poisoning. Sandra told him about the family eating the rotten chicken and he agreed that that was the source of the poisoning. The next day she phoned them to thank them for the meal expecting to be told that they were all sick but they were fine. She could not understand that as they had all eaten a lot more chicken than she had. She spoke to her doctor about them as he told her that they probably were so used to eating meat that was off they had built up a resistance to it and it had no affect on them. I think it was very heroic of Sandra to eat some of it and not to let her husband eat it. She told me that she would have been too embarrassed for the both of them to refuse and she thought that in his weakened state it would be just too much for him.

Much later Sandra’s mother, Mrs Nel came to stay with them. She was in her nineties and when we first met her, she was surprisingly fit and fairly clear minded. She would tell us of the things she remembered when she was a little girl. Her parents lived out on a farm a long way from the nearest town and they would go by ox wagon about once every six months and the journey could take between three and five days. Then they would do all the shopping they needed and would attend church. She was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and they had a special service once every six months for the farmers in the outlaying districts. Twice a year they would all get together and they would have communion, baptise any new babies, join couples together in marriage and I suppose hold memorial services for those of the parishioners that had passed away in the preceding six months. Although her short-term memory was slipping a little she could remember her childhood well and she would tell us many stories about the old days. Sandra was very close to her mother and she looked after her until, when she was about 94, she had a fall and broke her leg. She was taken into a nursing home, but she was very frail by then and contracted pneumonia and passed away.

I remember Sandra as such a good hostess. She seemed to remember people’s likes and dislikes. She was always ready with a cushion for someone’s back, a stool to put their feet on or a hat or some barrier cream if we were sitting in the sun. She was also so very appreciative, when anyone gave her anything she made them feel as if it was just what she had always wanted and they would feel so good about having given it to her.

The last time we saw Sandra in 2002 just before we left South Africa to come to Australia she did not look well and was having some health problems but it still came as a big shock when she died so young. She is greatly missed by us, all her family and her many friends.