Flashbacks.


By Raylene

Someone jolted my stash of days long gone memories!

Things like,
  • the bread boy riding down the dusty roads and the milk boy who sold chocolate milk and orange juice in plastic packets and we would make the teeniest tiniest hole to make it last forever!
  • turning our bikes upside down after school to fix the puncture, but in the process stripping the bike to the frame and waiting for dads help to put it together again!
  • Shoeless kids, climbing up the baobabs, knocking off the cream of tartar pods and spending the entire Saturday sucking and spitting cream of tartar pips whilst exploring the veld on our bikes
  • Sneaking into the pantry to pinch the last tin of condensed milk and wheedling and trying to convince the cookboy that the �medem� said it was ok to boil it up for us on the stove .
  • koeksusters pinched from ouma's tins in the pantry on the weekends, little pink sweets, playing darts and going off to the club!
  •  In chiredzi we used to go to the "flicks" every single Friday, we would sit in the open air , whilst mom and all the other adults drank in the bar and played darts, those were the days when the kids slept in the car, sipping hot custard that the cookboy had made .
  • Riding in the back of the bakkie with my dad, checking on the farm, cutting down sticks of sugar cane, sticky and sweet, juice all over your hands and face.
  • Catching curly wurlys with a blade of grass, little red rain spiders, eeeeeewwwww baboon spiders in the house, silkworms, spinning different designs being fed different coloured leaves, red, blue, yellow , white, competitions to see who could bring in the best ones to school, mom screaming blue murder because one of the silkies or moths were found in her underwear drawer!
  • I remember the boiler and how much trouble there was if the "boy" hadnt stoked it! - my mother shouting at him time and again� I am going to blerry blahlah wena!�
  • I remember getting hidings with the "SLOP"!!
  • The smell of messesse (Not sure of the spelling) and hessian bags.
  • Getting into such trouble for climbing the marula tree outside our school and the headmaster Mr Whitehead calling my mother to come and "get this disgraceful child".
  •  Hooting at the gate for the "boy" to come and open it, ???!!!(I have to laugh at that one!)
  • The cook boy, the house boy, the nannie and the garden boy, the cook boys� kaya at the back of the house and trying to copy him when he smoked banana leaves!
  • Loquats, mulberrys and stained lips and t shirts!
  • going fishing on lake Kariba with my oupa, fighting the tigers.
  •  Helping my ouma make jam and orange konfyt....
  • convoys and making chocolate rice crispie cakes for the troops, mazoe orange juice,
  • the smell of molasses driving past  the sugar cane mills in hippo valley
  • wag n bietjies and stinging nettles -
  • digging tomatoes out of the salads to ease the sting.
  • Prickly pairs and hairy caterpillars!
  • Rondavels and vellies
  • the smell of my dad when he came home from being in the bush so long we had lost count of the days!
  • Singing "Rhodesians never die" in the car at the top of our voices.
  •  The Rhodesian flag hanging on the wall in our pub, the copper elephant hangings and wild animal ornaments everywhere
  • the word �sis� and eating watermelon in the pool on Christmas day, school fetes and playing marbles and �open gates� in the dusty playground. How I could go on����. Man! I do miss it so very much, but it isn�t the same anymore is it?