A Carefree Farm Urchin.

            Can one honestly remember anything about your childhood before the age of about four?    I can’t.

            We were poor, very poor.   We lived in a house made from the earth with pretty wall paper covering the walls inside, but on the outside the mud-walls were smeared with a mixture of mud and dung.   Now I can hear the young people saying “Oh Sis!”, but it was an art practiced by the black women of that time.   They used a special muddy soil and mixed it with cow dung into a nice paste and smeared the walls with their hands.   The women were very artistic and could leave the walls smooth, or with patterns made by their fingers.   As a little boy I would help to mix the paste by trampling it with my bare feet, and I even helped to smear the walls.   I did not mind dirtying my hands.   Black women were very good with children and never stopped a child who wanted to learn and help.   The paste dried on the walls, leaving a nice colour, and made the walls waterproof  I am not sure where they found the mud to mix with the dung, but it must have been something that could bind.   There were no bad odours or anything like that.   I think my mother’s relatives must have looked down on us as they had well built houses.

            The verandah floor was also smeared and I can remember sitting on grandpa’s lap watching our faithful servants, Aletta or Sophie on their hands and knees performing miracles.   My dad had made deck chairs which stood on the verandah and grandpa liked to sit and snooze there.   His lap was my refuge, especially when an old black woman named Jane, who drank too much, wanted to catch and kiss me.   I would run to him, climb on his lap, and he would lash out at her with his walking stick.   I would hide my face in his neck and feel secure with his white beard tickling me.

            I loved going to the fowl pens with my dad to collect the freshly laid eggs, but you had to beware of the big rooster that would kick little children.   He was a magnificent specimen, but he did not dare kick an adult as he knew that this could land him in a cooking pot!   One day, when the fowls had been let out of their pens to eat green grass, the old rooster threatened me, so my sister, Daphne, said that we could chase him with a long gum tree branch.   Forgetting that the branch was heavy to handle, Daf and I approached the cheeky fowl, but he took one look at us, hopped over the branch and attacked, knocking me down.   She dropped the branch and, taking my hand, we ran home to be comforted by our mommy.   Meanwhile the rooster was informing the whole world of his victory by crowing loudly!

            My sisters loved playing with their home-made dolls, which even had hair made from the raw sheep wool.   I wanted to play with them, but my uncles said that if I wore a dress and girls panties then I could do so.   Never!   I did not want to be a girl so I made friends with the kwediens on the farm.   We played by the dam where we could slide down the muddy banks on our bare bums and there was clay with which to make cattle, horses, sheep and pigs.   I became an expert and, in later years, I could make the most delicate animals.   We dried them in the sun and even baked them in a fire.   This was where I had my first sex lessons by having our animals mating before you could make babies for them.   I loved asking my dad to make me clay oxen and watched those big hands and fingers doing so.   He showed me how to make a hut by covering your bare foot with wet soil and withdrawing it slowly.   He was so clever and could do anything, but he did not have the time.   He made me a sling (Catty) with which I could practice killing doves and birds.   I was never very good at that, but he could hit a tin with a stone quite a distance away.

            We had beautiful trek oxen and some of them were huge. (Oxen were also called bullocks)   They were well trained and tame and knew their places in the team when they worked ploughing the lands or pulling the wagon.   One day while my friends and I were playing around the dam, along came these big beasts for a drink of water.   They were strolling around the dam to where our toy oxen were drying so we tried to chase them away.   ‘Engelsman’, a big ox with long horns came straight for me. Hooked his horn through my braces and dumped me into the dam.   Tannie Bezuidenhout, who lived with her family in grandpa’s house, saw what happened and came to my rescue.   I had a nasty bruise on my face which she washed before taking me home.   The little kwediens had run away as they thought that they would get into trouble.   This was a warning for little boys to respect those wonderful working animals.

            Sometimes I wished that I could dress like a pikanien or kwedien, he only wore a ‘stertriem’ and nothing else.   A “stertriem” was a small piece of material pulled through the legs and tied in front and behind to a piece of string around the body.  Something like the Bushman wears.   They had no shame and enjoyed life to the fullest, and should a ball or two be sticking out, it did not matter as all animals also had balls.   My mother made my clothes; trousers with a button up fly and shirts with a tail behind and a bit shorter one in front which was always tucked in to the trousers.   These were kept up by a pair of braces which were buttoned on in front and behind.   As far as I know, no men or boys wore underpants, there were none.   Only very rich people had them.   Shoes?   Forget them.   We went ‘kaalvoet’, even to school.   A very important article was a hat, which was a must to avoid sunstroke.   The woolly hair of the ‘pikanien’ was enough to cover his skull and his black skin was already tanned.   By the end of a day, after playing in the dust and mud, a little white boy could easily be mistaken for a kwedien!

            I have many more stories from my childhood, but it will have to wait until next time.

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