Mother bought our much-loved house at Glencairn, and for the next few years holidays at any time of year were spent there. After much family discussion, the name �Corrie� was chosen for the house, and Mother got a suitable piece of wood and carved the name which was hung at the top of the front steps. There were three double bedrooms - when we had visitors Jim and Russell slept in a tent at the side of the house - a livingroom, a kitchen and bathroom which had a tiny chip geyser and tin bath with the lavatory opening off it. There was a maid�s bedroom, and a shower and lavatory in the yard. Glencairn is notorious for its South-Easters, and various improvements were made to the house to minimise the effects, but as youngsters we took the winds simply as part of our life.

We roamed the mountainside behind the house, with its small tortoises and its wealth of deep blue agapanthus, red Antholyzas and crassulas, little orange chincherees, mauve pelargoniums and banks of vygies. Down on the sand flats Russell and I had many games and dreams of making our fortunes as we played with thick green wind-and sand-smoothed bottle glass pieces in the almost-buried ruins of a factory which had once been established to make glass but had gone broke.

Russell and I went for a picnic up the sandhills one morning; Mother had given us sandwiches and knew it would be possible to work out when lunchtime arrived because we could count the trains - one went past every hour to Simonstown, and returned soon afterwards on its way back to Cape Town. After a short while, however, we decided that we must have missed seeing at least one, if not two trains, and being very hungry ate our sandwiches. Mother was not very pleased to have us home at 11 o�clock, quite ready for morning tea - and another lunch! We sometimes walked to Simonstown, shell-gathering on the way at Shelly Beach, and touching the sides of the wreck of the �Clan Stewart� when the tide was low and we could wade out to it.

In Simonstown we enjoyed the steam engines being turned round on turntables to face the right way to pull the carriages back to Cape Town. The line was electrified I think about 1922. On calm days it was a delight to watch the seals in the sea below Glencairn station, and in very stormy weather the waves washed almost onto the railway line. Another hazard which needed constant attention from the authorities was the build-up of sand on the line during South-Easters. The sting of that wind-swept sand on our legs was one of the reasons why we nearly always ran at Glencairn.

Coming from the beach one passed the Hotel and a few houses which were all on the hill side of the road only - on the other side a steep bank led down to the sand-flats. A very few houses were gradually built a little higher up the hillside. From Corrie it only took a few minutes to run to the beach - it seemed that we never walked along that gravelly dirt road, and our feet soon became hardened as we ran backwards and forwards. Duiweltjies were a threat to bare feet, as these hard little seeds lay with one of their three wicked horns straight up ready to pierce a foot; they got their name from the devil�s evil face on the three sides of the thorn.