See how they’ve grown!

They can’t fit under side-tables and they can’t play with toys indoors. In fact, they’re not allowed to be boisterous in the house because they’re just too big.

We do need them inside and outside the house, though, because they’re our Security System. Burglaries - and break-ins for more sinister reasons - occur here, sometimes having very unpleasant results. We have a good electronic response system in place, and we feel even safer having the additional immediate and vicious reaction from our German Shepherds.

Here they are, at eleven months old, each weighing +/- 50 kgs. Their bark is viscious. Already, when people walking down the road approach our house, they move to the opposite side of the road.

Shep

Sally, with Shep looking on

I was once bowled over by Sally when I inadvertently moved in front of her. She'd seen another dog or a person walking too close to her gate!

The Crane Flower

I took these photos today, in our garden.

Perhaps you can see why it’s commonly called the Crane Flower.  I’m open to correction, but I think the plant is also known as a Strelitzia or Bird of Paradise.

It’s a monocotyledonous plant. The Encarta dictionary says that the floral parts occur in multiples of three. This picture shows clearly the three parts of the flower. One part of the flower looks like the long beak of a crested crane, and the other two parts look like a crane’s crest – hence it’s common name. 

A picture in Wikipedia shows a male Greater Bird of Paradise with its wings displayed. Have a look - perhaps you'll see a similarity between the flower and the bird. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird-of-paradise

After some days, the flower becomes tatty. Here’s a photo of a second Strelitzia plant in our garden. These flowers need to be cut.

It’s a fairly common site in the area in which we live, and although some of the characters in my children’s stories probably won’t have seen these flowers, those in areas with a reasonable water supply will have. 

[I’d love to hear from anyone who is familiar with Southern Africa and would be interested in doing some illustrations for my stories.]

Sticks and Stones

Our eldest son did Correspondence Schooling with me for a short while when we lived on the mine. He did very well but really needed the sporting and academic challenges of other classmates. We weren’t happy with the idea of boarding school, so applied for and got a transfer to a town where there were good schools.

It was several years later, after more moves within Rhodesia, that we felt the political temperature rising higher than it had ever been. Like many thousands of others, we moved South, taking with us minimal assets.

I remember a chant from my junior schooldays, we used it frequently when we were being bullied: Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never harm me.”

Recalling that chant now, the sticks and stones (and bullets) certainly harmed thousands.

The vitriolic words certainly drove people out of the country.

But the words I had written had already been captured by a publishing house, and the resultant income became available in South Africa. 

Thanks to the Children

Thanks to the Children

When our eldest child was six, we lived on a very remote mine in the far south of the Matabeleland Province. Our move necessitated me home schooling him. It was then that I started dreaming up stories again. They weren’t, however, about the Mrs Brown of my junior boarding school days (see ‘Boarding School Again’). They were all set in an African environment and the characters and creatures were all of Southern Africa.

Our house was set on a hill and the abundance of life in the immediate surrounds fed my imagination. There were snakes galore. Just in time I stopped our younger son from picking up a spitting cobra on our doorstep. After we’d lost a few of our rabbits we found a black mamba in the rabbit run. A nightape stole, beheaded and drank the blood of a few of our hens. My mother who was visiting us once jumped onto her bed to escape a large hairy spider that ran round and round the floor of her room.

And so it was that those creatures, together with Southern African people, flora and fauna became part of my stories for children of all ages.

You’ll see a lot of wildlife in the pictures that accompany my Ebooks when the artwork has been done.

Boarding School Again!

The nearest boarding school was in Lusaka, the capital of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Again I was separated from my siblings because I went to the Junior School and they went to the Senior Schools. However, I soon made friends. One of my friends from those days recently reminded me about ‘lights out’, which was the last ‘routine’ of the day when the matron made sure we were all in our beds and ready to sleep. There were about 14 of us in our ‘dorm’.

That’s when I told a story – after lights out. As far as I remember, it was always about Mrs Brown. I have no recollection of any of the story content, just the pleasure of ending the day quietly dreaming aloud.

One school holiday when we couldn’t go home to Easter Farm, we went to stay with our Aunt Marjory. I was about eight years old and I remember telling her very seriously, that I was writing a play. Bless her heart, she asked me all sorts of questions about it – she understood how I loved story-telling!

The rest of my formal education was simply that - formal. I'm sure many of you can relate to that! Of course there were also the normal teenage dramas as well as 'snot en trane' (snot and tears) through that period. Happily I came away with what was needed for employment. 

Much later, when my children were old enough, the urge to tell stories started again.

Our Own Farm

We returned to Broken Hill and my grandparents. In time my father identified and bought a farm. It covered approximately 3,700 acres of virgin soil, was quite a distance from Broken Hill and had never been farmed before. It was tremendously exciting for all of us.


My father worked on developing the basic structures on the farm, while my mother worked in town. We siblings stayed with my mother in the house they rented, and went to local schools. I don’t remember much about the schools so I doubt they interested me. I looked forward to going out to the farm during the weekend to see what our Dad had done.


He lived in a small sort of malformed e-shaped thatch structure that had neither door nor roof. There was only one room and that held a camping bed and a tin bath. I presume he cooked over an outside fire or ate out of tins. His first project was to build a chicken run.


In due course the farm was named Easter Farm. The poultry farming venture flourished. However, it wasn’t always easy, particularly when the red (what we called) Saruwi ants invaded. A swarm of those ants could wipe out an entire run of poultry overnight – and they did that a few times. Eventually dairy cattle replaced the chickens, and fields were developed for tobacco and maize crops. When it became a viable proposition, my mother stopped working in town and joined our Dad on Easter Farm.


What did that mean to me and my siblings? Ah no - boarding school again!

Tanganyika and the Groundnut Scheme

My next school was some thousands of miles from the first one. The British Government decided to develop the very rural bushland in Tanganyika, into farmland. They decided that groundnuts were the answer, and in order to proceed with the scheme, they had to not only send equipment there from overseas, but also to enlist farmers who knew how to farm, to show the local Tanganyikans what to do.

My father, a farmer in Southern Rhodesia, applied for and secured a job on the scheme. I don’t remember the trip from Southern Rhodesia to Northern Rhodesia, but my mother’s parents lived in Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia, and we spent time with them, preparing for the long journey ahead. We had a green Vauxhall sedan, a lot of luggage, and a very long trip ahead of us. 

One of my memories of the trip was a task our father gave us. We each had to shout when we saw the wild tree he allocated to us. My sister had the brachystegia, my brother had something more difficult, and I had the baobab. I still have an inner prompting to say something about any baobabs I see!

Another thing we were each given was a noisy instrument... one was a whistle, another was a triangle, and the third a drum. I daresay there was a time limit allowed for those!

Eventually we settled into our house in the bush near Kongwa. The British Government had built houses as part of the scheme.

The school we went to was a long way away. A driver took us in a Land Rover and we urged him to go faster and faster along the dirt road! I remember the bottle of cool-drink my mother gave us each day. We had to share it during our break time. We marked the bottle and each took our turn to drink only the amount within our marks. I don’t remember anything about lessons, but the teacher gave me stilts to play with at break time.

Perhaps after a while my father realised that the Groundnut Scheme was bound to fail (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_groundnut_scheme ), and he decided to prepare our departure.