Albie and brother on beach young boys

IN ALBIE’S WORDS: That would have been on Clifton beach. I been born at the end of January, and he had been born towards the end of August a year later, so there were eighteen months between us. Johnny and I were very, very close. We did lots of things together, and we shared everything. What became a famous story was how once I was standing outside a small ice cream shop above Fourth Beach and looking at somebody who’d just bought an ice cream, and my eyes were like popping. She was eating from a cone, and she kindly said, ‘Would you like an ice cream?’, and I said, ‘No, I'm sorry I can't have one because my brother's got a tummy ache’. When he told the story, he’d say he’s the one who said no, it was I, his brother, who had the tummy ache.

I think back with some sadness on how, as we were growing up, I tended to push him away emotionally to get my own space. He twice contracted rheumatic fever. There were no antibiotics then, and he got lesions to his heart. He later became one of the first beneficiaries of open-heart surgery in the world. So, my mom’s friends commented to her that her son the lawyer went to jail, and her son the doctor to hospital.

We had good times together in the later years of his life. I inherited his motor car. Vanessa discovered that there were tennis rackets in the boot. This encouraged her, at the age of 50, to take up tennis, and she went on to represent South Africa in an international competition at the age of 55.