Minnie Strydom’s Rescue by Kathleen Nicholls
MINNIE STRYDOM’S RESCUE
Minnie Strydom’s wedding was not what her family had expected on the day she was born, nor had planned for during the years she had been growing up in the small platteland (country) town where her family had lived for generations.
For a start, she was not marrying a good Afrikaans boereseun, a member of the Kerk, and someone who would uphold the traditions of the Volk. Minnie had fallen in love with David Farland, a product of the invasion of good farmland by the damned English, who were always scratching for gold, instead of taking what the earth offered for the pot or the hunt.
What made the matter worse was that David Farland had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and that Minnie was going to be married in his church and had converted to his faith. David had attended Christian Brothers’ College and had absorbed the Church’s teaching that, in the eyes of the townsfolk, could not have been more dangerous than Communist policies from Stalin himself.
Her mother had argued with her and tried to point out that marriages between people from different backgrounds were never successful. She had not worded it in that way, but had done her best to introduce Minnie to other young men, whom she and Kobus, Minnie’s father, considered “more suitable”.
None of this had any effect on Minnie. All she had said to her mother was: “But Ma, I love David and he loves me and that’s all that matters.” Her parents discussed sending her away to stay with her aunt in the Cape, but realised that, if David followed her there, it would make it easier for him to see her.
In the end, they became resigned to the fact that they could only delay the wedding until Minnie was twenty-one, which would be in another six months, and that they might as well make the best of it.
Minnie’s mother threw herself into the plans for the wedding and arranged for another aunt to make both the bride’s and the bridesmaids’ dresses. Minnie had not known what she wanted at first, but after seeing a photograph of her great-grandmother’s wedding dress, decided that she liked the style and after searching through numbers of pattern books, found one that matched and a great deal of satin and lace was purchased and the dress took shape over the next few weeks.
Minnie refused to wear white, to her mother’s distress. “What will the Kerkmense think?” she asked continually. Minnie just shook her head and said: “It’s my wedding, and I want the dress in an ivory colour.” In the end, she got her way, as she had always managed to do. Her father had always been proud of Minnie and although an elder sister and three brothers had preceded her, he indulged his youngest far more than he had any of her older siblings.
Her elder sister, Sanet, had married a farmer from the Swartland and was living near Piketberg. She was some ten years older than Minnie, and as is the way with many older sisters, still viewed Minnie as a child. She was scornful of David’s family, “They’re not our people,” she would say.
Minnie felt as if everyone in the town, with the exception of David, could not accept that the world had changed. This was 2002, South Africa was a multi-racial society, with a black government, and nothing could change that.
The townspeople she came into contact with, still bore the way of thinking of the apartheid era, and knew all the details of families that had been “tainted” with having coloured relatives. In spite of the new constitution, the majority of South Africans had no place in their quiet little town, to their way of thinking. They still treated as inferiors most of the Africans and Coloured people (Minnie had often thought that it was strange that a race that was basically pink, could define other people with darker skins as “coloured”, as if pink was not a colour in itself).
She had not gone out of her way to befriend the people her family regarded as “aliens”, but could remember the devastation her brother Pieter’s childhood friend, Sipho, had shown when he found that he could not go to school with Pieter, or even, for that matter, remain his friend. They had played together in the dust as four-year-olds, had made bows and arrows and tried to hunt with them, but once Pieter had gone to school, Sipho had no longer been acceptable.
The ironic thing, Minnie thought, was that Sipho was now studying to be a lawyer, specializing in human rights, whereas Pieter had retained his small town mentality even though he had worked in Cape Town for a while.