The mother of rock chick Jo Wood has revealed how as a teenager she stole the heart of Nelson Mandela.<\/p>\nThe mother of rock chick Jo Wood has revealed how as a teenager she stole the heart of Nelson Mandela.<\/p>\n
Rachel Lundell was 16 when she won a pledge of undying love from South Africa\u2019s future president, who at the time was living in a tiny village in Umtata in the Eastern Cape.<\/p>\n
Rachel, now 78 and living in Devon, had just finished convent school in 1951. She was working in her aunt\u2019s fruit store and cafe after having second thoughts about life as a nun.<\/p>\n
She had first been offered a job at a baker\u2019s shop in nearby Mount Frere but was sacked before she had even started when the owner discovered that Desmond, the black delivery boy, was her brother.<\/p>\n
Rachel said: \u2018Desmond was darker than me; I was blonde, freckled and white. My father was white and my mother looked white but her grandmother was black and she passed those genes on to us in varying degrees.\u2019<\/p>\n
Desperate for work, Rachel was then offered a job by her aunt, Gertie Morrison. But it was Gertie who put paid to any chance of romance with Mandela in apartheid-era South Africa.<\/p>\n
Rachel explained: \u2018We had a lot of black customers and he was no different, buying cigarettes and peanuts in quite large amounts.<\/p>\n
\u2018There was no frisson of excitement when he came in or anything like that. He certainly wasn\u2019t what you would call handsome but he had a twinkle in his eye.<\/p>\n
Little did Rachel know at the time that Mandela was already married to Evelyn Ntoko Mase, with whom he had three children: Thembekile, Makaziwe, who died aged just nine months, and Makgatho, born in 1951 \u2013 the year of the love note.<\/p>\n
That same year, Mandela was elected president of the African National Congress Youth League and by April 1952 was spearheading the so-called Campaign of Defiance. <\/p>\n
He became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, standing down five years later.
\nIn November 1952, Rachel set sail herself for a new life in England on a Dutch cruise ship with a passport and ticket arranged for her by a missionary.<\/p>\n
Her destination was suburban Surbiton, South-West London, where she lived with her sister Joan.
\nAbout a year after arriving, she was gardening at the front of the house when a local boy, Michael Karslake, strolled past and persuaded her to go to the cinema instead of the square dance she had planned.<\/p>\n
Rachel said: \u2018I was all dressed up in my check shirt and denim trousers but something told me to go. I was supposed to be going off travelling in Europe and he had a job lined up in Canada.<\/p>\n
\u2018We never looked back, though. We married in 1954 and I\u2019m proud to say I found the right one for me. Mike gave me four lovely children, the first of whom was Josephine.\u2019<\/p>\n
Jo, now 57, was famously married to Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood for 26 years and has just published a new memoir \u2013 Hey Jo.<\/p>\n
Eventually, Mike and Rachel retired to Devon. Mike died in 1990, leaving Rachel with just four cats for company. Rachel said: \u2018I still talk to him and only the other day his picture floated down off the shelf. I knew it meant he was still with me.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The mother of rock chick Jo Wood has revealed how as a teenager she stole the heart of Nelson Mandela. Rachel Lundell was 16 when she won a pledge of undying love from South Africa\u2019s future president, who at the time was living in a tiny village in Umtata in the Eastern Cape. Rachel, now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[688],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infotainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}