Gives it her best shot
Myrtle Ryan
EMMERENTIA Lecourt de Billot turns 100 tomorrow. She is still elegant, upright, reads without glasses and is bright as a button. She also has a delightful sense of humour.
It was a cold, rainy day when the Sunday Tribune visited her on the Durban beachfront. She was dressed in a warm winter suit. “I had forgotten how much it weighs. When I put the skirt on, I nearly fell to my knees!” she joked.
Despite her upper-crust name (should one bob a genteel curtsy on being introduced, I wondered) she displays no airs or graces. “Just please refer to me as Emmie,” she insists. “After all, I have had two husbands and, with such a long surname, I sound pretentious.”
Who are we to gainsay someone of such a venerable age!
She was born Emmerentia Truby on June 18, 1918, in Smithfield, in the southern Free State. Nowadays the town is home to a thriving artistic community, but a century ago it was a dusty “dorp”.
After completing her schooling, she headed for the bright lights of Johannesburg where she took a job as a clerk, punching tickets for the South African Railways. There she met Douglas Ellis, who was working as an engineer.
“He was studying privately to get his pilot’s licence,” says Emmie, “and I used to fly with him over weekends. He did all the acrobatics – the loop, the falling leaf. As a 19-year old girl, I loved it. It was exciting,” her face lighting up at the memory.
Petrol was being rationed at the time of their marriage. Ellis’s family lived in Aliwal North, so the couple decided to hold the wedding at a halfway point. “We were married in the Cathedral in Bloemfontein, by Anglican Bishop Browne.”
After getting his pilot’s licence, Ellis became a pilot with SAA, while Emmie was transferred to the South African Railways Police, becoming secretary to the security chief in a special division, which dealt with all the confidential work during World War II.
She spent a total of eight years with the Railways. “During the war I also joined the South African Women’s Auxiliary Service,” she says.
Then in 1951, tragedy struck. “My darling Dougie was piloting the SAA Dakota which flew into the mountain near Kokstad. They had been given a weather report for the coastal route, rather than the interior, so were flying blind when they crashed in the mist. He should never even have been on that flight. As a Skymaster pilot he was supposed to be on an overseas run, but had been asked to fly the Dakota to East London to deliver spares. They were on their way back to Durban for a night stop, when the accident happened.”
Briefly, Emmie then worked for Lever Brothers in Durban, spent time with her father and sister in Smithfield (her mother had already passed away), then returned to Johannesburg. Ultimately she got a job in the then Belgian Congo, as a secretary to the South African Consul-general in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in 1956. “I had a beautiful flat just one block away from the Congo River and it was paid for by the government!”
Fortunately her dog Limpy was allowed to accompany her. “We seldom walked anywhere. It was just too hot and we certainly never played tennis!” she recalls.
Over the next four years, she worked under a series of consuls Emmerentia Lecourt de Billot, who turns 100 tomorrow, is pleased to have lived an action-packed life. (who had been transferred there from Rome and Buenos Aires). Life was a giddy round of cocktail parties and dinners at various consulates and private homes. She also acquired a pet leopard cub after Limpy’s death. Some pilots had found it in the jungle outside Bangui (now the capital of the Central African Republic). “I called it Throm,” says Emmie.
As independence drew near, violence loomed, but mainly in the jungle and outlying towns. Still she recalls one Sunday when “all hell broke loose, but it was mainly the locals fighting among themselves, over who would be the president of the new republic.”
Emmie had wanted to give Throm to the Smithsonian Institute in America, but they declined due to having just received many animals from a safari company elsewhere in Africa. On the advice of the Smithsonian, she gave her spotted pet, which was now getting rather large, to the local zoo. Every day she visited and took Throm for a walk on a leash around the zoo grounds. Sadly Throm became and died.
With independence, the expats left the Congo and Emmie returned to South Africa. She found a job in Margate, where she also joined the Red Cross, becoming an ambulance driver. Returning to Durban she took a job in the antique shop housed in the former Presbyterian Church in Aliwal Street.
At a party, she met her next husband, André Lecourt de Billot, from Mauritius. They married in 1964 but, sadly, he paralysed died in a car accident.
She has been very involved at St Paul’s Anglican Church in central Durban, takes pleasure in attending KZNPO concerts, and does voluntary work for The Association for The Aged (Tafta). She moved into Tafta Lodge on the beachfront in 1999.
She can see the sea from her room and there is a magnificent view of the harbour. “It is beautiful at night with all the twinkling lights. I hope to die in my room and nowhere else,” says Emmie.