Neville was in his fourth year of an Honours in Industrial Psychology while Patsy was in the second year of completing a BA degree. The university was the first dual-medium (English and Afrikaans) residential university in the country and was supported and funded in part by the secretive, nationalist political organisation the Afrikaner-Broederbond.
Neville found himself drawn to student politics and was part of a grouping within the Student Representative Council that successfully challenged the views of the conservative University Council and the reactionary Afrikaanse Studentebond.
Patsy recalls vividly how they first met: “He just winked at me during a psychology test and that was it.”
Patsy is one of five children born in Bothaville in the Free State to Paddy (Francis) Gilbertson, an English motor mechanic who had come to South Africa during the Second World War to work on aircraft in George in the southern Cape, and his wife Sue (Susanna) Johanna Janse van Rensburg, the daughter of an Afrikaans-speaking couple. From George the family moved to Bothaville where Paddy worked for the Department of Water Affairs. From early on, Paddy’s mother, Frances, lived with the family, and Patsy and her grandmother shared a room.
Patsy was the only daughter, a middle child, with two older brothers, Brian and Anthony, and two younger brothers, Terence and Kevin. She found growing up with boisterous brothers trying and they would often squabble.
“They would pull my hair and tease me and my only recourse would be to bite them.”
Paddy was later transferred by the Department of Water Affairs and so the Gilbertsons moved to rural Qamata in the Transkei. The family eventually settled permanently in Port Elizabeth.
Paddy was a practising Catholic and would take his children to mass on Sundays although Patsy would sometimes accompany her mother to the local NG (Nederduitse Gereformeerde) church to which most Afrikaans-speaking South Africans belonged.
Patsy recalls the family was “pretty average”, not wealthy by any means but they “never lacked for anything”. She was, she says, an average student until the start of high school at the Holy Rosary Convent in Port Elizabeth; until then she “just managed to scrape through”. After a serious talking-to by her parents she decided to pull herself together, excelled academically and began to take pleasure in studying.
Patsy enjoyed a close relationship with her father and, later, her oldest brother Brian while she was in high school.
“Brian had gone to Rhodes University in Grahamstown and I can remember him coming back at some point and locking me in the bedroom and making me listen to some classical music and not the rubbish I was listening to at the time.”
Holidays, she recalls, were happy times in the home, particularly when Brian was around.
It was also around this time that her mother, Sue, was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she battled until her death at the age of 59, shortly after Patsy and Neville had returned from their honeymoon.
Neville was born in 1948, “the year the apartheid government came to power”, to Lionel Schonegevel, a farmer, and Ethel, a former schoolteacher, who farmed on Soetfontein in the Humansdorp district of the Eastern Cape.
He was their second child; their first was a daughter, Lynette. Neville has a strong and enduring passion for the outdoors and the environment, a love rooted and nurtured during his rural childhood.
The first seven years of his formal education took place in a small farm school established on an adjacent property. Neville was one of two pupils in his class in a school that consisted of only 15 learners. The children were taught by a woman who doubled up as its principal.
The Schonegevel siblings were the only English-speaking children at the school and Neville recalls these formative years with fondness although he did learn, he says, how to cope with the consequences of “being different”.
“For example, I fished and my mother knitted on Sundays and for this I was ridiculed. That and the fact that I was from a family who were strongly and openly opposed to the government of the day.”
From the age of 10 Neville was sent to Grey Junior School in Port Elizabeth, about 100km from home. There he developed a love of competitive sports.
A relatively “innocuous knock” during a rugby match became a “life-defining” experience for him as it later developed into a condition diagnosed as “osteomyelitis” of his left tibia and which resulted in three surgeries and confinement in hospital on and off for six months.
The medical interventions also awakened in him a lifelong interest in medicine. At high school Neville participated in a range of extra-mural activities, which suited his outgoing, easy nature. He also held a number of leadership positions, including that of head boy.
Neville recalls that a number of teachers at Grey High School were politically outspoken and contributed enormously to his growing political consciousness and opposition to the prevalent racism of the time.
After their marriage, and unlike many couples at the time, the young Neville and Patsy were in no hurry to start a family.
“We both just wanted to enjoy our lives and I had always told him that I didn’t want to have children,” says Patsy.
Neville initially found work in Stellenbosch near Cape Town, before being transferred to Johannesburg where Patsy joined him.
There she completed a teacher’s diploma at the University of the Witwatersrand but found teaching History (and marking History essays at 1am) not quite suited to her personality. She enrolled for a post-graduate diploma in Library Science and completed an Honours in Information Science.
It was while working in a library in Germiston that Patsy first began to fixate on her weight. She had been a “chubby” teenager and remembers that her brothers had teased her about it.
“I worked with this woman who used to eat very little and I was watching her and I thought it was possible to do the same.”
After some time Patsy stopped eating completely and eventually became dangerously anorexic. Her condition soon grew so serious that she was hospitalised after collapsing
