There’s never any shame in asking for help, and other lessons from a role-model grandmother
When I imagine my current unemployability resulting in the steady erosion of my assets as the effects of the pandemic deepen – there goes the car, there goes my second last pair of shoes – I take strength from the example of my grandmother, may she rest in peace.
Stella Lewin was one of seven siblings, with names peculiar to their time, like Eunice, Beulah and Dudley. These give them a slightly otherworldly quality, as if they didn’t really exist.
Long deceased and shrouded in the distant past, their legacies grow dimmer and dimmer. Celebrating my grandmother here, I am privileged to bring her alive again.
One of her brothers, known as Cassie, fought in the Boer War, the First World War, and the Second World War. He had a bar of chocolate given to him by Queen Victoria in recognition. He never took a bite of it.
He is the one who conforms most typically to the notion of a hero. Gallant, brave, selfless. Male. I’m sure everyone looked up to him.
Did they come to look down on Stella, after what fate had in store for her? For me, she is the true hero, someone who dealt with extreme adversity all on her own. She was resourceful and brave and she didn’t let pride get in the way of survival.
The children of itinerant missionaries, Stella (which means ‘star’) and her siblings were raised on mission stations all over the place, the far reaches of the Northern Cape, the Karoo, the edges of every major city.
Perhaps this unsettled upbringing manifested in her relationships, which were unsteady and impermanent. She married someone who left her for someone else when she was pregnant with my mother, and my own uncle was just a tyke in short pants.
Her parents were far away, her siblings scooped up into their own lives. For some reason, this ‘fallen woman,’ whom I have no doubt was a subject of social condescension, found herself homeless, with two small children.
Stella asked a man she knew if her small family might sleep on the floor of his office at night. He let them in, furtively, after his colleagues had left, and arrived early in the morning to help them away.
A few weeks later, she found refuge for herself and her two small children in a room above a florist, in exchange for painting the signs for the flowers that were sold.
My grandmother made herself useful. She started helping the florist with their ‘books,’ tallying expenses and income and the like. She taught herself how to do this and her benefactor didn’t mind her applying for a job as a bookkeeper as her proficiency grew.
Decades later, Stella was managing a team of over 30 qualified accountants for a large company. She retired well.
She’d also had some colourful episodes on the way, one of which was to collect payment from the Chinese mafia on the East Rand in exchange for the medical prescriptions her bent pharmacist husband was supplying, but that’s another story.
By now, the various men in her life were long gone, dead through alcoholism or worse, while she flourished.
These episodes are recounted in her memoirs, which I have by my side. She dictated them into the tape recorder she used to send us cassettes every Christmas. My mother, another remarkable woman, typed them up.
My grandmother’s example inclines me to believe that no matter how hard life gets, I will be able to find a floor to sleep on, and the kindness of strangers to light up the potential they might see in me. Without work and the prospect of work, and my vocation as a theatre-maker looking impossible, I remember Stella.
The light of her star guides me to believe that I too am resourceful, and that there is never any shame in asking for help, no matter what happens. I am starting something new, out of necessity, something that will take time to grow.
I don’t always have the energy or the self-belief I need, but when I remember my gran and what she achieved, I know I can do it. I come from a line of strong women, and I hope it shows.
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