Two years ago, I discovered that all my letters and diaries had been thoroughly soaked and were rotting away in their sogginess.
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This disaster was one of the things that prompted me to begin writing Love Letter. (You can read the origin story here.)
Every time someone tells me a story from their life, I feel like I’ve been given a gift. Using that logic, please accept the story below about something I found while trying to save my water-logged documents as my gift to you for my birthday.
I turn 55 this Friday, 30 June. I’ll send all subscribers another little gift then.
And here’s another for non-paid subscribers who have been considering going paid. Click on the button below to look at a discounted rate.
Below today’s paywall, are 10 (5+5 to honour my age) more little stories.
Stitched in
When I was a young reporter at The Argus in Cape Town, we did different beats and were sent to different parts of the newspaper to learn various aspects of journalism.
I spent a few months working for Argus Woman, a weekly insert. It was run by Mo Pithey, a foul-mouthed wonder of a woman, who scared the crap out of me at first but ended up being one of those big-hearted people who'd go to war for ‘her people’. She smoked like a chimney and swore like a sailor. She seemed irascible but she had a steady hand on her sense of humour and it always felt as though there was a smile under the cranky façade.
I was brand new, fresh out of university, and she discovered that the first outfit I wore to my first formal job as a reporter had been made by my very own hands. She thought this was quaint and cute. At that point, crafts were at the low point of the feminist story – to sew was to be patriarchy’s bitch.
She asked me to make an entire wardrobe of clothes which I would then have to model for Argus Woman. The irony of the publication’s existence under the gnarly gaze of a cantankerous feminist is somehow wrapped up in all of this, but is not the story.
So, there was my task: to sew a set of clothes and then to model them.
The stress! Some of the designs were complicated, time was limited, and it was a shitload of stuff to make.
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At one point in the deadline panic, I decided to take the absolutely zero-sum of extra money I had left over from my tiny starter salary (I had also found my first pay slip in the flooding disaster) and pay a seamstress to help me.
She had a small sewing room in a pokey little building near Newspaper House. She's the one who made the jacket and the white shirt, not I. I was too inexperienced and impatient for shoulder pads and collars.
I wish I'd acknowledged her help in the article. It’s the least I could have done, considering how she saved my ass.
I also wish I'd claimed the money back from the newspaper that I had used to pay her, but I have been stupendously and stupidly polite about money for all my life.
Mo had brought in a stylist to help dress me. He chose the colours (hot pink is not my thing) and he chose all the accessories.
I found the shoot awful. I hated it. I felt hot and shaky all the way through. I was stiff and self-conscious and deeply ashamed of all my perceived shortcomings, on top of which I was a 23-year-old dressed like the wife of a Tory backbencher. I never wore the clothes again.
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This whole job was such an unpleasant experience in my first year as a reporter – on so many levels – that I was surprised to find the insert in my sodden loot. I didn’t know I’d kept it.
But here it is for our amusement, and as a reminder that turning 55 means the cupboard of your past is a deeper place to rummage around in for stories.
Ten more tiny stories below for paid subscribers.
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