Harry's Tales: A Spirited Lady
"I tried sex once at 40, didn't like it and never did it again.''
Harry Wroth tells us of his astonishing maiden aunt.
A dear elderly maiden aunt of ours came to live with us towards the end her life. She was quite a character and a very successful business woman in her day. Life was quite exciting when she was around. She was born in 1899 and in the prohibition years worked in the United States of America. She came out with this remark once, "I tried sex once at 40, didn't like it and never did it again.''
When the Second World War broke out in 1939 she was employed as a private secretary to a prosperous wine merchant in the Cape. He specialised in the importing of French wines and spirits and this was his mainstay. She travelled with him wherever he went in South Africa and sometime in 1940 they found themselves in Johannesburg.
France fell to the invading Germans - and their main income source with it. The wine merchant was flabbergasted. What now? His secretary however kept cool and suggested salvation to him. They caught one of the last Junkers 52 flights of the Airways to Cape Town. Internal commercial flights stopped for the duration of the war.
In Cape Town, through contacts, they negotiated and secured the rights to sell to anywhere in the world, excepting countries in the British Empire, a vast range of products made by a large South African Co-operative Wine and Spirits producer. It sounded almost ridiculous. The World was at war and shipping was almost unprocurable, or so the Co-op thought.
The alert secretary however had connections in the United States and at that time they were not at war. For the first year the USA was not involved and there was plenty of shipping available. As the next decade unfolded the world war came to an end. The flabbergasted Cape wine merchant found himself very wealthy indeed and the astute secretary enjoyed a handsome royalty for years.
