About me

This is where it begins...

My earliest memories are of the fun I had out of doors. 

We lived in very remote rural areas where the streams sparkled. Picnics were our outings, and we took our bathing costumes with us. Mine was yellow. I don’t remember ever hearing of crocodiles in the stream we frequented. An outing I don't remember but which is often related in family get-togethers, is about a picnic we had. We were all cooling off in the stream when one of my siblings called out, "Mommy! Mommy! Help me! The raisin's carrying me away!" Happily it was hilarious rather than serious.

I remember playing in the shallow irrigation furrows on hot days. The furrows ran through our garden. A dear little kitten, Whitespot, kept me company. I loved her but I doubt that she loved me on the day that I picked her up and tried to put her into the furrow. My mother, was watching me through the window, and soon spoiled my plan.

My siblings and I were all soon able to swim, and our father built a swimming pool in the garden. The pool had no bricks, cement or lining. It was just a very large mud pool. A plank served as a diving board. How we loved that pool. 

Farm children in remote areas had to be either home schooled or sent to boarding school. My siblings, who were some years older than I was, went to boarding school. After an attempt at home schooling, so did I. I was five years old at the time and my school trunk was almost as big as I was. The school I went to wasn't the same one as the one my siblings were at. It wasn't even in the same town.

The thought of boarding school upset me terribly and my mother gave me a wind-up clockwork roundabout to pacify me. The first thing the matron at the school did was to take away my new toy in case the other children broke it. I never saw it again. I'm sure I must have cried myself to sleep...

I had to adjust to a lot of new things. The other children spoke Afrikaans, a language I didn’t understand. I had to clean my own shoes and I’d never done that before. I had to make my own bed – another thing I’d never done before. We said grace at each mealtime – something else new in my life. We weren’t allowed indoors at all after rest time in the afternoons, and I had no friends so I sat alone on the edge of a big field while the other girls sat in their little groups and played.

Perhaps because of my loneliness after school hours, I excelled in the classroom. It wasn’t long before I was moved from Sub A to Sub B.

(Next... We leave the farm. See Tanganyika and the Groundnut Scheme.)