Gogo Maggie
She nursed for forty years, sang alto in the choir for fifty, and never once let anyone leave her house without a cup of tea.
Margaret was born in Edendale, outside Pietermaritzburg, the eldest of five. She walked her brothers to school every morning and decided, at twelve, that she would be a nurse. Nobody who knew her was surprised that she was.
She trained in Durban and nursed there for four decades, most of them on the children's ward. Parents remembered her name years later. She said the secret was simple: sit down, listen, and never be too busy to hold a hand.
She married Sipho in 1969 and they raised three children in the same house in Pinetown, with roses along the front wall and a kettle that was always warm. After she retired she knitted blankets for the clinic's newborns — more than four hundred of them, by the family's count.
