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used to think Reeva resembled the actress Liv Tyler with her long brunette hair and pale, pale skin. Kristin said that, compared to her, Reeva seemed quite streetwise. She was also an earnest student and drifted towards the more studious types in the class; she attended lectures, took notes, always got good marks. She used to say to Kristin that one day they’d set up together and have offices like Ally McBeal in the American TV legal comedy drama.

During her final years of varsity, we nearly lost Reeva. She was up at the stables with Barry when she fell from a horse and broke her back, severely compressing two vertebrae. After little Pinto, Reeva had moved on to bigger horses. From the age of ten or eleven, she would ride for fun with friends like Samantha and Gwyn and help Barry by exercising some of the racehorses he had in training. She was very comfortable around horses, but you can never protect against a horse having a freak stumble or reacting in fright to something unforeseen. I was busy shopping at Makro, stocking up on bulk purchases for my spaza shop, when Barry phoned me and said, ‘Now I don’t want you to get worried, but Reeva’s fallen from a horse. I think she’s okay.’ The girl who had given her this horse had reassured her that it had already been worked for the day, and should be quiet, but as soon as Reeva was in the saddle, this horse took off and threw her over its head, bang, on to the ground. Her face was full of sand; she had blood coming out of her mouth. Barry took her straight to the doctor – not the hospital, the doctor. You’re not supposed to move people with potential back injuries, but the ambulance here comes four hours after you’ve called for it, so you have to make a judgement about what you’re going to do. Barry made up his mind and took her to our doctor. The doctor X-rayed her back and said it wasn’t too bad, but insisted she go immediately to hospital. At the hospital they diagnosed two vertebral compression fractures. They put her in traction, using weights around her neck to relieve pressure on her spine, and the specialists admitted they were unable to say for certain whether she’d be able to walk again until the day she was ready to stand up.

You can imagine how frightening this was for all of us. For four months, our energetic, vivacious daughter was confined to a hospital bed, flat on her back, unsure how fully she would be able to resume her independent life as a student. This was followed by months in bed at home. It was an anxious time as she felt frustrated about falling behind in her studies and potentially wrecking her modelling ambitions. She had worked hard to attain straight A grades to get her to university and she wanted to get the most out of her law studies. It was incredibly traumatic. I sat by her bedside every day as if she were in a coma. Privately I’d cry, fearful that she would never regain her mobility. Not knowing for so long how bad the injuries might prove to be was very wearing; Reeva cried a lot, lying in bed. She developed an infection from being bed bound, a nasty case of shingles, and lay there a very sorry figure with this pale white face and big red blotchy marks everywhere. When she had visitors, though, she’d make light of her situation and lie there making wisecracks.

There was such anxiety in the build-up towards the first time she tried to stand up that she fainted. She’d been lying down all those weeks… we were all watching her take to her feet… and then she falls down, her legs giving way beneath her. I was thinking, oh my word, maybe she is never going to walk again. Slowly, oh so slowly, she did regain her mobility. The doctor said she was very lucky. But she would never be able to ride again. In Johannesburg a few years later, her friend Kristin wanted to learn to ride and thought Reeva the obvious friend to ask to come along to support her. ‘She really wasn’t keen,’ Kristin recalls. ‘She was scared,