I think my mother, who will be 97 later this year, may be the oldest person evacuated from her home during the Knysna fires.
Her story has a lot of chapters and she was rescued in stages by many kind and heroic strangers, each doing their bit. Briefly, she resides in the care centre of a local retirement village.
The only road to it was cut off by huge walls of flames, there was no way that anyone could drive through them.
They had to stay on the Belvidere/Brenton peninsula. Care centre staff successfully evacuated them to a communal hall at Brenton-on-Sea until they had to be moved from there to the Brenton Hotel, where the frailest patients were put into bedrooms and everyone was given tea and soup.
After some time the hotel was also in the path of the approaching inferno, and they all had to be evacuated down to Brenton Beach in the dark, in a raging storm with icy gale force winds, sand stinging them, with all the surrounding hills alight. It was a nightmare.
They were carried down the steep path by hotel staff and firefighting volunteers in hammocks, hastily-made from hotel linen. They were also given hotel blankets.
All the other evacuated residents of Brenton-on-Sea joined them there.
The hotel receptionist contacted 4x4 owners to come to the rescue and they drove at breakneck speed along the beach from Buffalo Bay and collected as many as they could, including the frail old people with their wheelchairs, oxygen cylinders and all their gear, and took them to safety in Sedgefield.
Other volunteers in Sedgefield had set up an emergency base, and they were all directed to a comfortable bed for the night, mostly in private homes.
My mom, with some of the other frail residents and nursing staff, was taken to the Masithandane Respite Home, a new facility that recently opened in Sedgefield.
It was midnight by then.
She remained there for two days and nights, until they had to be evacuated again when fires raged closer to Sedgefield.
This time they were moved to Astral Bed and Breakfast in Wilderness, where they have been kept comfortable by the nursing staff who have been devoted in their care, and the kind and wonderful owners who attended to their needs for the next 10 days.
They will return to their homes in Belvidere tomorrow.
I cannot begin to thank all the wonderful guardian angels who assisted my mom and many others like her. It is a miracle that she is around to tell her story.
The next day a blackboard outside Pembreys on the Belvidere Road said: “It is the end of a chapter, but not of the book”. How true.