Secrets of a Stewardess by Gretchen Ryan

Author:Gretchen Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

8

SUICIDE ON THE SLOPES

I had been privileged as a 10-year-old child to experience the thrill of skiing. Not water-skiing, which most South African children learn to do before they learn to walk, but the act of donning clunky boots attached to long, slender runners made of wood intended for gliding over snow. Being geographically so far removed from Europe, or any destination that offered snow skiing, meant that very few South African children were lucky enough to be taken on this type of holiday.

I remember arriving in the picturesque village of Villars, nestled high in the Swiss Alps. My brother, who was a year older than me, and I felt as if we had been dropped into the fairy-tale world of Hansel and Gretel. Only, there were no witches here, just elegant people speaking a language we couldn’t understand. Our hosts were gracious. They were the elderly parents of a couple who were both doctors at the missionary hospital near our home. Jean and Simone and their two daughters had become very close family friends of ours, in our rural hometown of Bushbuck Ridge.

Theirs was the quintessential wooden alpine chalet, where we indulged in bircher muesli and cheese fondues. We learnt to ski by day and spent some of the afternoons ice skating on an open-air ice rink, surrounded by icing-sugar-covered mountains with the strains of Lara’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago ringing in our ears. It was a song I recognised, because our parents used to play it often in our car. Not via Bluetooth, mind you, but rather via one of those enormous cassettes that resembled the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which got shoved into a gaping recess somewhere under the dashboard.

My next skiing experience would be many years later during a university break. That holiday ignited my passion for the sport, so I was delighted to find that the airline was going to be magnanimous enough to sponsor my future exposure to this recreational activity on a very regular basis and to a variety of venues.

The skiing community in the airline clamoured to be rostered on ten-day Zurich flights, as soon as the season got started. A ten-day flight, in effect, gave us eight days at the destination, with a day in the middle when we would do a shuttle to another European city, such as Brussels or Amsterdam. Very inconvenient. Sometimes, we’d have two days before the shuttle and five days after. Either way, there was always enough time to hit the slopes.

Lizzy and I had put in our request well in advance. It would’ve been unusual not to have other skiers on the flight but, to be on the safe side, I always requested one of these flights with a friend, or sometimes a whole group of us requested the same flights to be sure we would have playmates in the Alps, the Sierra Nevada, the Black Forest and even the Snowy Mountains in Oz.

With my snowsuit, moonboots, gloves, socks and goggles hogging 95 per cent of my suitcase, I headed to the airport for the flight to Zurich.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.