Gallery Samples Stories of our Ancestors | Page 58
them with scorn while Alma was having a happy time being a young girl in a whirl, as far as
‘whirls’ went in those days!
It says a great deal for Ellen’s determination that only through her own hard work she
managed to buy a large Victorian single story house in Pietermaritz Street (a while ago it was
still there next door to what became Wardkiss
Hardware but it could well have been pulled down by
now to make way for more businesses)
The house had a lot of very big rooms with high ceilings
and the main living room extended to a bay window
onto a veranda facing the street. Here Ellen embarked
on a Spirella Corset Training Course and she became
the corsetier in town. In her front rooms Ellen and her
large Persian cats received her lady customers,
measured and fitted them and sent them away looking
pouter-pigeoned, stiff and matronly. Oh those corsets!
Ellen was large and hard-bosomed and as a teenager I
witnessed the ceremony of disrobing and robing as we
shared a room at my parent’s beach cottage at Park
Rynie on the Natal South Coast for a brief holiday. Oh
my, all those laces and hooks and eyes: No man could
or would ever get through them.
In the photo above are Ellen, Les and Ruby in Durban in the 1930’s. Ellen must have been in her
late 40’s and Les and Ruby in their 20’s when the photo was taken, probably soon after their
marriage in 1934. Oh yes, Ruby did enjoy her nice legs. Such a pity I got the Hodgkiss version!
Ellen seemed never to have had a man in her life, nor even a boy she liked enough to go out
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