By Vicky Rowling
Soon they will celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary. Through a twist in the track and a runaway ball of wool, Anne and Wim met on a train during the fabulous fifties. Their lives were forever after intertwined. They could not communicate. He was Dutch and she was English. But words were superfluous. They instantly spoke that international language of the heart, called Love.
As a pretty young girl of 19, Anne, who adored knitting, was winding wool on her way to work in Durban one morning, when a twist in the track sent the ball spinning across the train compartment floor. It wound its way in a tangled web between the polished green leather seats. Wim, a gallant young Dutchman newly from Rotterdam, went scrabbling on all fours after it. He managed to rescue the wool and returned it to the lovely young lady, but not before he had grasped a unique opportunity. From floor level, Wim enjoyed a good, uncensored look at Anne’s shapely legs. “At 80 years of age, she still has beautiful legs!” says Wim, now 84, with a naughty twinkle in his blue eyes.
Anne smiles in her kind and serene way, but her pretty green eyes gaze at him unseeingly. Tragically, she turned blind almost overnight a number of years ago, when her optic nerve was irreparably damaged. “It was hard to cope with,” she says frankly. “I didn’t know what to do.” The Veenmans are, however, blessed with five caring children. They live in a cosy garden cottage, on the property of their daughter Cheryl and son in-law, Edward. Cheryl and her sister, Erica encouraged their mother to continue doing something that she had always loved and that was knitting.
So Anne has knitted blanket panels, sewn up by Erica, for each member of the family and for others. She has also knitted scarves. Not a stitch is dropped and the tension is beautiful and even. Wim helps her to decide on colour combinations. He also sings to her. “It’s something I’ve always enjoyed doing,” he says. “And it encourages her.” Wim is an avid reader and his next great love, after Anne of course, is the authoress, Nora Roberts.
Anne’s latest venture of which she is justifiably proud, has been to knit scarves specifically for the underprivileged children supported by the Nelson Mandela Trust Fund. The Trust was so impressed with the support of an elderly blind lady, that they informed her daughter that in future the Mandela Trust Fund would send more wool for Anne to continue knitting the scarves for the children. Anne is overjoyed. “I might have no vision,” she says with humble sincerity, “but there is something that I can do for others and that is to knit.”
