"With Love from Phyl"

ELSIE SONIA BENTZON was a member of our church from 1994, coming from the Salvation Army .  She died in May this year, a little before her 98th birthday.

Born of a Norwegian mother and an Austrian father, she was deserted by her mother.  But her father put her in a foster home and visited occasionally, promising to give her a good education.  But within a few years the 1914 war had begun and he was interned, never to be seen again.  She loved her foster mother and did well at school, after which she entered into secretarial work.  She never married and rose to be secretary to company chairmen, even going abroad to conferences.  She was very precisely and clearly spoken with a fantastic memory.  I think she enjoyed life, if a little alone.

When I first began visiting her in Peterscourt, she enjoyed her little wooden upstairs flat with its view over the houses.  She did not want to leave when demolition began.  But she did walk badly by then and could not shop for herself.  So she was swept off to a Nursing home at Banstead.  She was not too happy here, with frequent wars with the authorities.  She did not take too kindly to administrative hedging and tended to want her own way.  Then she was moved to Parkside at the other end of Banstead.  Here she had a lovely upstairs room (shared) with a view over the gardens.  She was still a pleasure to visit with her tales of earlier days.  But gradually her hearing got difficult and we took to using pad and pen.  But recently, as her sight failed, that method failed too.  We continued to take her oranges which she preferred to flowers.

We remember her, too for her imaginative verse, three of which have appeared in the Newsletter.

Latterly, when I ceased driving, Pat, our Minister, would take me and they got to be good friends.  In fact, I think that Pat was the last of us to see Sonia alive.

When Pamela Galliers and I went to visit here last week, we were shocked to be told that she had been dead since May.  No one had told the church.  She had two Salvation Army visitors, a couple who visited her and some kind of male relative, probably half-brother.  The nurses seemed a little surprised to hear that we did not know,  despite them knowing us quite well and signing the attendance register, too.  They spent quite a time with us, talking about Sonia.  She had been in hospital for two short periods with internal troubles, about which Pat did know.  Before that she had been reasonably healthy.  And so a great character of the C20 has passed away.