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Letters to Virginia

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Letters to Virginia

Written by: Andries Fourie
Narrated by: Lawrence Bransby
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For more than twenty years, Virginia worked for Andries Fourie's family in South Africa. Known to the family as Eina, she cleaned their home, cooked their meals, washed their clothes and became one of the most important people in Andries's childhood. When he was frightened or hurt, he ran to her. She carried him on her back, comforted him when he cried, sang to him as she worked, and gave him a sense of safety that he was too young to understand. Yet while Eina was at the centre of his childhood, Andries knew remarkably little about her life. Where had she come from? What had she experienced? What did she think and feel? And what did it cost her to care for a white family while her own son, Siyabonga, lived apart from her? Decades later, after leaving South Africa and building a new life in Scotland, Andries begins writing letters to the woman he has never forgotten. Through these intimate, sometimes painful letters, he returns to the South Africa of his childhood: the homes he lived in, family breakdown, school days, Durban, Warner Beach and Umhlanga, childhood adventures and fears, and the ordinary experiences that shaped his early life. But alongside those memories runs another story: the story of apartheid. As a child, Andries accepted the world around him without understanding it. As an adult, he looks back and sees the racial divisions that shaped both his life and Eina's. He remembers beaches marked Slegs Blankes, the freedom he enjoyed, the privileges he took for granted, and the profound inequality that existed beyond the boundaries of his childhood world. The further he looks back, the more questions emerge. How could someone be so central to his childhood while so much of her own life remained invisible to him? What happened to Siyabonga? What did Eina experience when she returned to her own home after spending her days caring for someone else's children? And what might she say if he could ask her now? Letters to Virginia is a deeply personal journey through childhood, memory, love, privilege and loss. It is a portrait of a changing South Africa seen through the eyes of a white child who understood little of the world around him and an adult who has spent years trying to understand it. Above all, it is a long-overdue conversation with a woman whose kindness helped shape a boy's life, even though he never had the opportunity to hear her story. Virginia is still out there somewhere. And these are the letters he hopes might one day reach her.©2026 Andries Fourie (P)2026 Andries Fourie
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