Reeva: A Mother's Story (9 page)

She certainly loved school. From an early age she was driven to learn and improve herself. She liked to do well. She liked to take pride in her progress. She was a people pleaser by nature and that meant she always wanted to do her best for her teachers. In her box of childhood keepsakes, she stashed her Certificates of Merit for English, Afrikaans, Biblical Studies, Creative Writing (she won a cup for that too), Science, general Outstanding Work, Swimming Safety, you name it. One report from March 1998 gives her class average as circa 45 to 50 per cent. Reeva was awarded 5/5 for behaviour and the following marks: Accountancy 85 per cent, Biblical Studies 81 per cent, Afrikaans 80 per cent, Science 78 per cent, Maths 79 per cent, Biology 88 per cent, English 77 per cent, Xhosa 94 per cent, Geography 82 per cent. I was so proud of my daughter. How could I have produced her? I was never one to focus at school. I spent more time being sent out of the classroom than sitting in it, but Reeva was the opposite. She was extremely conscientious. She wrote reams of poetry, some of which was printed in the school magazines. As well as being an outgoing child, she had a sensitive side. Here’s a poem called ‘Footsteps’ she composed for one of the school annuals. The innocent words she penned now take on a haunting echo:

Tiny footsteps quake the home
…

Fleeing over, under and far away.

Bigger footsteps quake the infant
…

Raging, into, over and through.

Mother’s footsteps quake the heart
…

Loving, caring, weeping, mourning.

Daddy’s footsteps quake the cells
…

Nodding, pleading, wishing, hoping.

People’s footsteps quake the graves
…

Placing tiny footsteps over, under and far away.

In another, called ‘My Garden’, she ends with the verse:

I sit and think, the willow holding me

And watch the breezes give life and take

There in my garden, I can see

Each life is at stake.

Reeva never missed a day of school. She never said she felt unwell. She would be standing by the car waiting for me to take her to school. I was the one who was always late. I was called in by the sisters and told I was ruining my daughter’s life by being late each morning. It takes me time to get going first thing – my other daughter’s the same – but Reeva wasn’t like that at all. From an early age she was highly driven, highly self-motivated. Some people might call this borderline Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but really she was just inclined to be extremely organised. This was a girl who would have her school bags ready the night before, her room tidied. Every week she would take things out of her wardrobe and re-shelve things, rearrange her clothes. She was scrupulously structured and organised; she liked everything just so. She would never leave a piece of clothing on the floor. Neither would I, for that matter, but for a child and a teenager she was unusually meticulous. She always tried to please her teachers, but she went through one phase when, totally unlike her, she went off the boil in a few subjects. Sister Anne called her in and asked her what was going on, and then Sister Anne called me and said, ‘I think she’s in love with this boy in school…’

Hard work was something we all understood in our family. My mother and father met when they were both working in the same factory. As a family, we all have a strong work ethic. I was born on 26 September 1946, in Blackburn, Lancashire. I was an only child because my mother had such a difficult birth with me that she couldn’t get pregnant again. My parents never communicated a sense of sadness that they couldn’t have more children. They gave me a wonderful time growing up. We lived first in a terraced house on Heys Lane with a pub at the end of the street, and I went to the little local school. I remember my early life as idyllic, even though it was spent in an industrial town. You know the ‘four thousand holes’ in the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, the one that starts ‘I read the news today, oh boy’? That was said to have been inspired by a newspaper report that caught John Lennon’s eye about Blackburn’s four thousand potholes. My parents worked long days, 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., so after school I had to go to Granny up the road. Every holiday we went to London and saw a show, or we travelled to Wales or Scotland. As an only child, I was allowed to take a friend. They were thoughtful like that, my parents. They doted on me. I didn’t have to cook or do any cleaning or domestic chores, they just created a little cocoon of happiness around me. I hunted every Sunday. I did eight years of ballet and riding; Saturday was ballet day, Sunday my day with horses and ponies. I had friends who had horses and I used to ride with them.

My mother was a determined lady. She had always wanted to be a nurse but her mother wouldn’t let her, so after working all week in the factory she spent every weekend in the infirmary, working for nothing, studying in her spare time. She was eventually able to take her exams and become a nursing sister. Then she was happy. She loved her role as a sister at the hospital. She also hankered after a house with cows in the paddock next to us, so we moved to a bungalow in Langho, a small rural village about five miles outside Blackburn in the Ribble Valley. I had been very happy at my lovely secondary modern school in Blackburn but when we uprooted I had to move to a new school in Great Harwood. You had to fight to stand up for yourself there. On my first day, a girl smacked me in the chops, but by the time I left I was the best fighter in the school. Once, after I had danced with a boy on whom another girl had a crush, I was attacked by this girl and her friend. They grabbed me by the hair, but I responded by flooring them.

My father was awarded a medal from the Queen for thirty-six years of service in a factory with a royal warrant which had made guns and equipment during the war. My parents were working people and they instilled in me the idea that you have to provide. That was the environment I grew up in and to this day I love waking up, getting dressed in the morning, going off to work – even if it takes me a while to get going! Otherwise why bother to get dressed? I’ve always been a business woman, not a stay-at-home lady of leisure. I’ve run shops, cosmetic counters, laundrettes, pubs, catering businesses, stables, you name it.

When I was sixteen, my mother asked what I intended to do when I left school. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry.’

‘Oh, I’m not worried,’ she was quick to reply. ‘I’ve booked you in to start work at Boots the Chemist the day after you finish.’

I left school at sixteen and got a certificate in hairdressing. I was married at seventeen to Tony Cowburn, who was a toolmaker, and Simone was born when I was eighteen. They used to have a Saturday lunchtime dance at the Mecca and I met my first husband there when I was about fourteen or fifteen. We emigrated to Cape Town in 1965. Tony used to visit South Africa for work and stay for three months at a time. It was good business for him and he was doing well. He came back to our little house in Blackburn one day and said, ‘Why don’t we go and live in Africa?’ I had a primitive vision of what that might entail. What, elephants in the street and tigers marching around? But I thought anything was better than being in the same small industrial town I’d known all my life. I’d had a lovely childhood, but now I thought I wanted to see some of the world. His enthusiasm for the thriving business opportunities and the beauty of South Africa was contagious, so we left.

I arrived in Cape Town with baby Simone, and discovered very quickly that Tony seemed to have lady friends all over the place. My parents came to stay with me out here. And then my mother – still a nursing sister – told me she’d never wanted to upset me, but she knew he was friendly with all the nurses at her hospital as well. Anyway… the marriage got me here and then I left him. I just picked up my child with nowhere to go, no work, nothing, and how I survived I don’t know, but I did. I think that’s why I am strong and resilient today. I couldn’t even boil an egg then. I spoke to my ex-husband on the phone the other day when he called to speak to Simone and he said, ‘Do you still have the tin opener?’ My parents had done everything for me and I’d never learned to cook. When I was first married I used to go to the supermarket and stock up on tins of food. It must have been terrible.

As a single mother, I held down about three jobs at once to make ends meet. We lived in this little room in Greenpoint, full of fleas. I met another girl who was also alone with a child and we moved in together to reduce costs and help each other out. We survived. At one stage I was working in hairdressing by day and in a smart restaurant club in the evening. We used to wrap the kids’ Christmas presents in newspaper. Simone was a lovely little girl. She enjoyed reading and burying herself in books. My parents had always had lots of books too. We had next to no money. To get by, I tried my hand at every sort of advertised job you can think of. I once went for an interview to be a dental nurse and the dentist told me that every Saturday they provided treatment for abscesses. He explained how they cut into the gum, drained the abscess and there was often a lot of blood. These were the patients I’d be tending. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,’ I said, keen to get the job. On my first morning he reminded me that, should I feel queasy, I must go out of the room. Well, I was out of the room the whole morning. We had one of those conversations – ‘This isn’t working for me, it’s not working for me either’ – and that was the end of my apprenticeship as a dental nurse.

My parents fell in love with South Africa too, and moved out to Cape Town permanently. I went to stay with them for a while, but that didn’t work. You can’t go home to your mother and father! So then I got my own little place. I worked for a surgeon for eight years, and then I moved into cosmetics. Stuttafords department store introduced Christian Dior products and I got the job to run the counter. I loved it. Simone and I survived and she had a wonderful, happy childhood. I made sure of that.

I still had my love for horses and kept my own horse at Milnerton Riding Club, and that’s how I met Barry. He was born in Cape Town to a family with an illustrious racing heritage. His uncle Cookie Amos was a brilliant horseman and top trainer in South Africa and his other uncle, Stanley Llewellyn Amos, was for many years the top jockey; he won almost every big race in the country at least once. The two uncles brought him up because his mother divorced his father and in the aftermath he went to live with them. Stanley Amos won no less than 2,507 races – which was, at one time, a world record. Barry loved the world of racehorses. He hardly ever went to school. When he did go, he’d give tips to the teachers and get away with murder. He’s intelligent, very intuitive, and he speaks Xhosa, English and Afrikaans. As a youngster he had worked for Cookie Amos and then became a private trainer to Alfie Heyns in Cape Town.

We went to the movies on our first date and saw
Chariots of Fire
. We clicked immediately. Before Barry, I’d had a boyfriend who was very wealthy and suave, but Barry was my wild man of Borneo. He was big and tall and had a beautiful figure; he’d just lost twenty-five kilos and could even boast a six-pack in those days. Five days after our first date, Barry asked me to marry him over dinner – and I said yes. That was our first dinner together and it was so sweet; he went to a lot of trouble and cooked me fish, knowing I was vegetarian, and had candles on the table and a bottle of wine. He was a gentle, strong man and the epicentre of fun at the equitation centre; we loved the same things, horses and so on. He phoned his mother and told her he was getting married and I phoned my mum. We had to phone our exes to get the court papers and we were married five days after the proposal – just ten days after our first date. Simone was thirteen when Barry came into my life. I’d told her I was thinking of marrying him and she, being a melodramatic teenager, said, ‘I’ll kill myself!’ I said, ‘No. You’ll be fine.’ She stormed off to live with her father but rang me after a week and said, ‘Mummy, I want to come home.’ So she did and Barry has been ‘Pop’ to her ever since.

When I first met Barry he was doing amateur racing. He did so well I suggested he take out his training licence. I didn’t want him to get old and look back and regret that he’d never given it a go. I said, ‘You must go and do that. That’s what you want to do. That’s what you love.’ He took out his licence, and he’s been breaking in and training horses for forty years now. It’s been up and down in terms of financial stability, but Barry has sound expertise. He’s known for being one of the most experienced racehorse conditioners on the circuit and for being a master at steering unsound horses back to competitive fitness.

Two years ago, some big owner took him out to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand rand and we didn’t have money set aside, so Barry had to close his stables. The owner had a ‘carte blanche’ agreement with Barry that he never honoured. He never paid him a single rand. It bankrupted Barry, wiped us out. It was an emotionally wrenching experience for him. He’s always loved his horses and gained satisfaction from watching them develop, and then suddenly he had no horses, no means of earning a living or filling a day. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He sat there, depressed, smoking, and then this happened… It was blow upon blow because Reeva, of all people, was so proud of seeing him in his racing environment. She took such interest in his racing world. She loved helping him in the yard, hearing about his prospective winners. She loved the excitement of the races after seeing all the days of training and conditioning that goes into getting a horse ready to compete. In her box of favourite things, she kept a cutting of a photo of Barry at Arlington with the race card of his runners. In the years when she was at varsity she spent a lot of time in and around Barry’s yard. A lot of her friends were here. It was a busy, fun atmosphere. Abigail, an assistant trainer who became her close friend, always described Uncle Barry’s yard – as she called it – as a ‘halfway house’ with lots of interesting people coming and going, and Barry would be sitting behind his desk, this big man with this big grey beard, smoking like a trooper, a glass of whatever by his side – and he never had his shoes on.