Lynette Johns
I GOT a Facebook friend request a week ago and accepted with a smile and a tear. But work and family pressure got the better of me, and I didn’t acknowledge the request, not even with an emoticon, even though I did know who the request was from.
The surname is different, she lives on the other side of the world, but she is my very first best friend – Gail Williams (who now goes by the surname Nilsen).
On Thursday evening Gail posted decades-old pictures on my wall, photographs of my grandparents, my mom, my sisters and I with Gail, and the memories came flooding back.
My two sisters and I were born in my grandparents’ house in Loerieweg, Bridgetown, Athlone. The Williams family lived next door.
Uncle Jan kept all manner of animals, including goats and doves.
The youngest daughter in the house became my, and my sisters Renee and Nadia’s, first best friend.
I would like to think that we were formidable even back then, wearing cool hipster pants, giving the adults a run for their money and insisting that our hair be left untamed, but I was the shy retiring type and my hair was untamed without any insistence.
I was happiest with Gail, playing in the sand, checking out the goats and wondering if Uncle Jan actually ate his pigeons. They did offer us goat’s milk – we were hipsters.
Our road faced a tract of land and a river which bordered the Nantes – a large open park.
It was not unusual to see cows grazing opposite the road. They never bothered us much, until one day a couple of cows, back then I would have said an entire herd, ambled over the road and right into our front garden.
If you ask me now what we were doing moments before that I would honestly say we must have been playing in the sand. Screams rang out; how do you tell little girls that cows are not going to hurt you.
We were inconsolable. They were big cows, chomping the grass and flowers, inching closer to my grandma’s prized purple Christmas (hydrangea) flowers.
According to those who remember, the cow herd was right there, with his long black sweep, herding the cows across the road, back to their plot of grazing land.
Calm was restored and we went right back to playing our game. Often the Johns sisters would knock on the Williams’s door.
Aunty Stella would usher us in and there we would stay, playing housy-housy when it rained or climbing one of the trees in their garden.
I was about five when we moved to Mitchells Plain, but we went back often to visit my grandparents and to play with Gail. When my grandparents died, so too did our bond.
Over the years there have been a few best friends; my second best friend, Gadija, I made on my first day of school – it was a friendship that lasted for decades, until she died eight years ago.
Today, I have a handful of friends who’ve stuck by me through thick and thin, friends I can’t imagine my life without.
So when Gail popped up on Facebook I was so thrilled, here she was after all these many years, still as beautiful and bubbly as ever.
She lives in Norway, is a special-needs teacher and a hobby cook. (In my mind that means watching a whole lot of the cooking channel and then insisting that chicken should first be brined and that lamb should only ever be slow-roasted.)
Her life sounds wonderful, she lives in a tiny village surrounded by mountains; okay I want to remind her, there are many tiny villages in the Cape so she should just come home now.
I giggle when she writes that the closest place to get a cup of coffee is the local petrol station; when we grew up the closest cup of coffee was in our mother’s houses and it was the cheap instant variety.
She’s chatting to me while she and her partner are bundled in their winter woolies on their way to have coffee, 35km away from their house.
Meanwhile I complain that the reason I don’t go out is because Mitchells Plain is too far from everything else.
But at least she misses Cape Town’s beaches and the madness you can only get in the Mother City.
l Johns is news editor of the Cape Times