Reeva: A Mother's Story Read Online Free Page B

is, about my child, my beautiful daughter – the most wonderful, perfect child who meant everything to me. I really, really loved her. Barry as well. We were besotted with her.

From the minute she was born, I thought she was just beautiful.

Barry and I had been married for two years before Reeva came along. I was thirty-six, nearly thirty-seven; he was forty. We’d both been married before and had one child apiece: Simone, who I gave birth to when I was eighteen and still living with my first husband Tony in Blackburn, Lancashire, and Adam, from Barry’s first marriage, who now lives in England. After two years of marriage, we were overjoyed to have a child together, we really were. Reeva made us a little family unit. Barry came to collect us from hospital in the Combi van. Just so that we felt like a complete family, he brought all my dogs. I looked out and honestly you could hardly see Barry for dogs. We carried Reeva home in a carrycot, a contented baby. Those early months felt very blessed. I couldn’t wait for her to wake up in the morning and start rocking her little cot. Barry was the same. Simone, too, couldn’t stop picking her up to cuddle her. We were all just mesmerised by her.

In 1983 Barry and I were running the Burliegh Equitation Centre in the middle of Table View, a west coast suburb of Cape Town. We had 160 horses in livery and a little restaurant on site, which I ran. We used to stage show jumping events and organise hunting meets. It was a very sociable world and we are both gregarious people. Reeva came everywhere with us. We never left her. If we went out for supper, she came with us. She was part of our busy, sociable life. She was under the table in her cot in the restaurant two days after she was born. We lived in accommodation right in the middle of the centre. When you live with animals, you spend most of the time outside. We never had much money but there was no shortage of love and contentment. Our farm home was modest but cosy, with pictures of horses on the walls and lots of people in and out. With all the noise and bustle, Reeva could sleep on a clothes line.

I didn’t go back to work properly until she was four. I wanted to spend every minute of the formative years with her. We had an open house. There was always a lot of fun going on with the young people who had horses with us. Claire, our next-door neighbour now in Greenbushes, was one of the girls on the farm. She was at school in Cape Town and she and her sister kept their horses with us. She used to come every Friday to our little farmhouse to sleep over with six or seven other girls. Michael and Lyn would drop off their daughters Kim and Sharon every weekend; they had their own room with us, and the cousins made quite a foursome with Adam and little Reeva.

I remember one day when I had to go out, I asked a lovely young girl called Michelle, who was studying for her final school year matriculation exams, to come and look after Reeva. She called on me only the other day, having dug out these sweet photographs of that day she spent babysitting. She’d been thinking about Reeva and suddenly remembered she had them somewhere. It was such a kind thing for her to do and I’ve put them all in a frame together to display at home. There are cute pictures – Reeva, aged two, smirking behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. Reeva sitting on the kitchen floor, covered in flour up to her ears, with the contents of a kitchen cupboard around her. Reeva, trying to eat toothpaste from one of twelve tubes I’d stored away after a bulk buy in Makro, the wholesale store. A real little character. Those were the days, hey?

At the age of two, she had her first pony and she was so proud to wear her little black riding jacket, tie and jodhpurs. She was best friends with a toddler called Melt, my friend Colleen Loebscher’s son. They were inseparable. We used to feed them together, bath them together. They used to play happily for hours, zooming