Hopping and skipping to find my way

At the age of twenty I arrived back in South Africa after seven-and-a-half months camping around Europe, some of it with my cousin and two friends. I had worked a little, as a temporary secretary, receptionist and kitchen hand in England and Scotland, and was ready to get my teeth stuck into something a bit more meaty.

I landed back in South Africa during December, which was a bad time of the year to be looking for a job, and sadly there were no suitable posts as a secretary available in any of the legal firms in Durban. I did manage to land a nicely paid job in the legal department at McCarthy Leyland car dealership in Durban. It was a grand title for a department where myself and one elderly lady issued letters of demand and Court summonses. After that, the files were handed over to real attorneys.

The other staff were pleasant, and I enjoyed the job, even although I sat in a windowless room in the middle of the building. The highlight for me was getting to use the company cars when I had to deliver files to the Magistrate's offices in and around Durban. They were all small automatic cars - I can't for the life of me remember the type of car I was allowed to drive - and I was disappointed I didn't have gears to play with, but the sense of freedom was great.

This is the closest image I could find to the type of car I drove
whilst working at McCarthy Leyland. They obviously were not
the type of car people through the years have collected!

The major drawback of being The Legal Department at McCarthy Leyland was that the work had a low level of brain power consumption. Sadly, because I can't often say this about my life, I became bored.

I worked closely with the Credit Manageress and began to think that what she did every day in her own office, looked quite interesting. I suspect that my interest was spurred on by wanting to please my father who was a well-respected accountant. I began to look into part-time courses at a local college and enrolled for a two-year Credit Management course. However, my choice was for the wrong reasons. Numbers are not "my thing" and taking a course out of boredom with the added advantage of pleasing a parent, means the main ingredient was lacking - my heart. My heart just was not in it.

One day I bumped into one of the attorneys I had worked with previously and he offered me a job at the firm of attorneys where he was now a partner. I jumped at it. The credit management course became history and I moved to the car repossession department at De Villiers and Strauss in the centre of the city.

It turned out to be another damp squib as the work was very different to any I had done before and, despite many requests, no-one took the time to sit down with me and train me. Consequently I hated what I was doing because I always thought that I had either done something wrong, or was about to do something wrong, which is not the feeling to have when you are dealing with matters of a legal nature!

I requested a change and was very happy indeed to be given the task of working for a number of the articled clerks and occasionally the over-flow work of the partners of the firm. Except for a few occasions when my shorthand skills were called for, I conducted my own symphonies with piles of files and dictaphone tapes. This was work I loved. There were different litigation matters which I could follow through the correspondence, Last Will and Testaments from the Estates department and a touch of conveyancing from the property attorney.


I set myself my own challenges of increasing my typing and shorthand speed and seeing how quickly I could get through each pile of pale blue files, some tied up with the usual pink legal ribbon. On occasion I'd need to refer to information in the firm's library where I discovered the full set of Prentice Hall books and found my own grandfather's name there from back in the 1920's when he was one of the first attorneys to bring Prentice Hall law books to South Africa.

I never met my grandfather as he died about five years before I was born. He became a South African judge who was, I believe, sidelined to Circuit Court Judge in Natal as he was considered too liberal and too critical of the harsh and unfair sentences bestowed on black people in South Africa during those early days of apartheid. He did have two roads named after him though, Roland Chapman Drive in Umbilo, Durban, and Chapman Lane in Pietermaritzburg, so he must have been fairly well regarded. I'm proud of him.


As with many jobs, there are problems. I loved the work at De Villiers and Strauss but there was a high level of sexual harrassment there, particularly from two of the attorneys. It was polite sexual harrassment, but constant, and I found it very stressful. I am amused to this day to recall the one and only time in my life of being called a prude! I was happy to own that title at that time.

I spent about 18 months at De Villiers and Strauss. Mr de Villiers and Mr Strauss were both exceptionally nice people and certainly not part of my stress there. I had loved the challenges I set for myself to better my abilities and reached a point where I wanted to be secretary to a partner of a firm so I would have more challenges to set myself. I had polished my typing skills to a really accurate and high speed, and felt confident that, having worked with such a variety of legal matters through each person who gave me work at De Villiers and Strauss, I was ready to learn more.

Within a day of looking, I found myself accepting the position of secretary to Barry Garland, partner of the firm Mooney Ford and Partners, up on the 32nd floor of City West Building in Durban. This was the best job I ever held in the legal world. Barry Garland couldn't have been a nicer person, the work was interesting and varied and I loved keeping my own office free of piles of filing or work waiting to be done. The staff were all lovely people and I finally felt valued and confident.

Just short of two years later I got married and moved to Pretoria with my new husband. The biggest wrench was leaving that job. It was high-powered and I loved it.

In Pretoria I battled to find a job for a couple of weeks and finally accepted a position at one of the banks there. It lasted two weeks. If I typed one letter a day there that was a lot. I requested more work and was told to make my own work somehow because that's what the last lady did to fill her time. For heavens sake! All the benefits in the world that working at a bank in those days attracted, wouldn't have kept me there. I don't do boredom.

A week or so later I began working for two attorneys. I won't talk too long about these guys, or name them, because, to put it mildly, I don't think they were above board.



I was beginning to feel very unhappy with two less than satisfactory attempts to find a good job, and feeling like a square peg in a round hole. I come from a strongly English part of South Africa and Pretoria is a very Afrikaans area. Nothing wrong with that at all, except that I was very shy and stopped conversations in their tracks with my halting attempts at speaking Afrikaans. So I kept quiet rather than become a figure of ridicule.

This was all good though because when you hit a rocky bottom that's the time you start to push up again. Instead of continuing with the dicey attorneys, I found a two-roomed office to rent, shared it with the photographer who took the photos which helped Anneliene Kriel become Miss World back in the 1970s, and opened my own dance studio.

More about this turn around in career next time ....