- Cape Town's supercentenarian Rosalie Wolpe is turning 111 later this month.
- She won't be able to have her usual birthday tea party due to the strict Covid-19 protocols at her care home.
- Her son, David, attributes her long life to eating healthily, exercise, hard work, and two glasses of sherry a year.
After working six days a week for much of her very long life, and keeping rooms for a few students to help support the family, 110-year-old Rosalie Wolpe now likes to sit quietly in her spot in the sun at her care home at Highlands House in Cape Town.
Tiring quickly during previous visits, and in strict isolation due to a wave of cases and deaths that stunned care homes at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, her son, David, is hoping for a fleeting heavily-PPE-clad family visit on her 111th birthday on 25 August.
There will be no tea party as usual, but at least they might be able to see each other again.
"My mother will leave us due to loneliness, not illness nor old age," said David Wolpe wistfully, as he hopes for permission to visit on behalf of her scattered family, with her daughter, Janet, living in Australia now.
"At her 110th birthday, a little girl was bouncing a ball at her and she was catching it and throwing it back," he marvels, as he looks forward to seeing in person how she is managing now.
He used to visit a few times a week before Covid-19 changed the world, but that has not been possible and he misses his "Mrs Common Sense".
She likes to sit in the sun, join a game of bingo, or listen as a newspaper is read to her by her carers, according to the Cape Jewish Chronicle, which recently celebrated her upcoming milestone.
Not able to speak on the phone for long periods, and not that keen on Skype, Rosalie, like many other elders in isolation, have been cut off from normal contact with the world.
Generous
Rosalie was born in 1909 and attended Springfield Convent in Cape Town, which had accepted Rosalie, "a good Jewish girl", because of its generous spirit.
After her train ride from home in Muizenberg to school in Wynberg every day, the girls would pile into a horse drawn cart for the final bumpy "taxi" leg of her journey to school.
She played cricket, unusual for girls at the time, and, according to the Jerusalem Post's celebration of her life, also hiking, where she met her late husband, Maurice, on Table Mountain.
She walked a lot because she never had a vehicle and did not want to rely on people.
Her husband, Maurice, was described by David as an "extremely brilliant man", a Trotskyite. He was yanked out of a university sciences degree after first year because in those days many families valued immediate work over study.
As a result, working at jobs where he could not use his intellect, he felt the loneliness that many highly intelligent people feel when not able to pursue their dreams.
Rosalie balanced the "quiet enigma" in the home by being "Mrs Common Sense" and "extremely practical" around their father, says David, who once finished the difficult crossword in the newspaper before the train had left the station on a dare by a fellow passenger.
He died in 1969.
The family had lived in Worcester for a while and David credits the Worcester schooling system for his sister Janet's head start, which was noticed when their mother decided to move them back to Cape Town and she was allowed to skip grades to a higher grade.
Rosalie bought a small grocery shop in Cape Town from a couple having problems, but about 18 years at the shop after her third lease she was told to go.
The first Pick 'n Pay set up shop nearby and competition was hot, so she eventually closed shop.
She was offered a job at the Pick n Pay and a well-known shop called Chongs, run by a family of Chinese origin, due to her good reputation as a shopkeeper.
Family
She chose Chongs, and eyebrows were lifted by "people who were terribly racist in those days".
"They were a lovely family," said David of the shop's owners.
Rosalie worked six days a week in her own shop, staying on for an extra hour on Saturday, and part of her closing up routine was the arrival of an elderly frail woman, who could not work properly to support herself, to collect some food Rosalie would give her to take home.
She took the telephone orders, managed the flow of bicycle delivery men with their wicker baskets of groceries, and at night in the pre-computerised and bar code era, painstakingly annotated sales of single tins of jam or a loaf of bread for the shop's records and month-end accounts that had to be sent out.
"I think she felt a lot of guilt for spending so much time away from us, and working," he says.
To make up for her absence during their school holidays, she hired a school teacher to look after them.
He says he only mentions that the teacher was coloured because, as a young boy, he was puzzled why she did not join them on trips to the sea at St James.
He says his mother was never outwardly political, but he credits her for his own awareness and personal views.
"She worked with a woman from the terrible fascist organisation, the Ossewa Brandwag (OB). Well, the war was over and they just got on with things.
"But one day, a black bricklayer walked into the grocer in dusty clothes after work, followed by a doctor shortly afterwards.
"The OB woman went and served the doctor first. When everybody had left, my mother went up to her and said, 'In this shop, it is first come, first served'."
To her "fair was fair".
Arrested
Perhaps this is how he was drawn to anti-apartheid student politics, where he served on the Student Representative Council.
He said he was among those arrested in 1969 and again at the famous 1972 crackdown on the organisation at the University of Witwatersrand by apartheid police (along with an ice-cream seller who had spotted a business opportunity before the police arrived).
When his mother heard about his political involvement and arrest, he received a letter from her after his eventual release.
His "very unsentimental mother" wrote: "I am very proud of you. Now leave the politics alone."
He went on to complete his degree and, after a long career of teaching and lecturing, now deals in stamps and antique documents in his retirement.
Among his prized keepsakes is Rosalie's autograph book - the "must have" version of the Instagram feed in those days.
Friends wrote messages such as "by hook or by crook I'm the first in your book" and drew "extremely high quality" art works and tributes to the autograph book owner's qualities.
"You know what I'm hoping to do on her birthday? I am going to take the autograph book she got when she turned 11, 100 years ago, and ask her to sign it."
But then he laughs as he envisages her complaining about the fuss and that he had kept "that old thing" for so long.