A Somerset West resident who recently celebrated her 104th birthday on Thursday 29 February has had only 26 opportunities to celebrate her official birthday as the other 78 were held either on 28 February or 1 March.
Jeannette Giliam, born on Leap Day (29 February) 1920, is adamant she wasn’t born on any other day and is now “26 years old”.Her big day was celebrated with her family in Somerset West, a day daughter Lesley Bradfield described as simply lovely.
A couple of days later DistrictMail & Helderberg Gazette caught up with Jeannette to talk about her remarkably long life, the details of which she vividly remembers, almost exactly as they happened.
She missed the flu pandemic by a couple of months, but lived through the Great Depression and she remembered her mom sending food to people who had no food in their homes.
“I remember the post office and some of the railway lines were blown up. It was pretty hectic, but we played hard too and danced a lot and took the good with the bad. We worked overtime without receiving any overtime pay.”
Three years later, at the end of 1942, Jeannette and her husband were married, and she said she always “marvels at people who get married so quickly” as she and her husband courted for a year before they got engaged (and they remained engaged for two years) before they married in Hermanus.
HONEYMOON TO REMEMBER
“For our honeymoon we booked into a hotel in Cape Town, my father knew one of the local military policemen who got us in there for a week. We were supposed to leave immediately after the wedding, but we left only at 22:00, when there was total blackout everywhere as submarines were spotted next to the coast, so no-one could have any lights on. The motor vehicles had stuff on their headlights that blocked the light out and allowed for a pinpoint of light to shine through.
“We caught a lift with my brother and his wife who was seven-months pregnant, and we had to make a plan to dim our headlights for we had none of those stuff they used to block the headlights with. So we took some brown-paper bags. The first one we tied around the headlight with a piece of string. We had a brown paper bag for the second one, but no string left, so we had to make a plan, and that is when my sister-in-law pulled a piece of elastic out of her panties, which was used to tied the bag around the other headlight.”
During the Second World War she worked for intelligence, and it was her job to go through letters sent home from the army men. “I had to see if these letters did not contain any sensitive information. We went through some very funny letters, but I can’t divulge any of that!”
Post-war life is tough
She described things as “being tough” after the war, but she had to be strong for she had two boys and a girl, Terence (80), Darryl (78) and Lesley (who was seven years younger), to look after.
“My children moved from school to school. That was an education in itself. Interestingly, they learnt to speak Afrikaans in Salisbury.”
She also worked at Bothner’s music shop for a couple of years, demonstrating the pianos to clients because she was a gifted pianist who had received her performance licence by age 14, and as part of the job she had to know all the popular music of the day, in addition to the classics.
Jeannette currently has 23 great grandchildren, 12 of whom are overseas so she doesn’t get the opportunity to see them that often, but she said many people are moving overseas and families are breaking-up, something she said started happening after the Second World War’s end when people who married and remained within in their communities now migrated to the cities in the quest for jobs and that is where families started breaking up.
Jeannette’s sage advice for people who want to reach her great age is “to eat what you want and drink what you want. I also have a drink every night, and if it gets very “gesellig” then I will have two drinks.”
