Zambia World Wide

I was born in Ndola Northern Rhodesia in 1962 and apparently when I was born I was nearly delivered in front of an African orderly who was busy polishing the red cement floors with cloths on his feet. He would not leave and kept saying "Madam I have to finish the floor". My Mum landed up dragging him out by the scruff of the neck and I was born shortly after. All over Zambia people had cement floors that were stained red or green and then were polished to shiny smooth surface. The houseboys used to put rags under their bare feet and do a sort of shoe shine shuffle across the floor until it shone like glass.

When we lived in the bush we had a houseboy working for us called James and a garden boy called Elious. Elious had come with my dad from his previous employer as without my dad there to safeguard his job he would have been fired. He was a very sweet but very simple man as he had partaken one day of too much Chabuku and nearly died. The Chabuku that was made in the bush used African hornets complete with their stingers and then fermented with mealies (corn). My brother Allan tried making Chabuku (without hornets) and when it was finished fermenting it smelt so disgusting that we threw it out for the chickens. That was fun as we had a big bald necked cockerel who was so greedy that he shooed all the hens away and gobbled it all to himself. We had the best afternoon’s entertainment ever watching him dropping his wing to one side and trying to do a courtship dance around the hens. Stupid bird he kept falling over at every turn around the hen and his wing was dragging in the dirt. Actually now I think of it the bird was not so unlike some human males who I have had to "put" up with chatting me up when I was younger especially in the pub. Poor silly cockerel he was not himself for a good week after that. I guess he must have had the mother and father of all hangovers!

One day my Mum was driving down thee street in Ndola in her Mini when everyone was hooting so she looked back and there I was laying stretched out on the back parcel shelf without a stitch on! Apparently I had got upset while we were out as everyone kept making a fuss of a little girl who was dressed up like a "dolly" and as I was my usual tomboy self nobody had noticed me so I decided to "pose" in the back of the car. Being the youngest child is tough as you have to come up with these things to get you noticed! I used to ride in-between the coopers front seats hanging onto the seats to keep me standing. Can you imagine nowadays my mum would be accused of child neglect.

I am slightly claustrophobic but manage to talk myself out of a full panic so have managed to go caving in tight spots etc. I am that way because of something that happened to me as a baby. In Ndola in the early days people used to go to housey housey (a form of Bingo) once a week at a club and most people would leave their young children sleeping in their car outside (!!!!!) well I was an infant and was sleeping on the back seat in my crib and my 4 year old brother was asleep next to me. My mum came out to check on us and some kids had climbed in our car and one was sitting on top of me. My dad said my mum had got there just in time.

My family stayed in Ndola until I was about 2 and then we moved Kitwe.

I went to nursery school in Kitwe and my dad told me the story of how he took me for my first day in my mums mini cooper. When he got there I had climbed onto the rear window shelf and reffused to come out. The lady teacher said not to worry as she was used to reluctant toddlers so she hopped in and pulled me out and tucked me under her arm. Dad said he was so embarrassed as all he could see was my little arm coming up holding my little cardboard lunch suitcase hitting the teacher over the head! I remember her sitting me at a table and giving me some plasticine to play with and then telling me not to try eating it -- you guessed it I ate it and to this day every time I smell plasticine I can feel the texture in my mouth and taste it. Strange thing was that I had plasticine at home and had never even thought of eating it! I was only at nursery school for a very short time as it shut down after there were riots. The Africans set fire to their own beer halls (why?) and a lot of other buildings got burnt. The nursery school owners husband was chief of police and somehow landed up taking the fall for the fires. He was white and I think it was an excuse as they had started doing positive discrimination. I vaguely remember being in a car and driving past some burning buildings which must have been during the riots. When the country got its independence in 1964 from England to celebrate they got hold of a load of public documents such as birth records etc and put them in a coffin and burnt them.

My youngest brother Allan and I then moved with my parents to Funda sawmill in the bush near the Congo border while my sister Lynda departed for teachers training college in Johannesburg South Africa. My parents briefly let me spend time with a friend of my mums in Kitwe where I attended St Johns convent. I was 7 and had a reading age of 11 ( now if it was math’s it would be 7 months NOW) St Johns was the first formal schooling I had since nursery school. My sister Lynda had taught me all my basic reading and writing skills. I left St Johns after a matter of months and went back to the bush and my world of reading and animals.

Where I grew up in the bush in the early days there was no medical aid for the villagers so my parents bought medical supplies and basic medical books and did what they could as we lived over a 100 miles on dirt roads from any facilities. We had our own generator which went off at night and a two way radio for emergencies. The African picanins were always getting constipated due to their poor diet and my Mum learnt that the quickest and cheapest way to treat them was to take a bar of soap and cut a tiny piece off and insert it up their rectum so consequently whenever my Mum went to the sawmill to meet my Dad

all these little kids used to see her and take off running in the opposite direction crying for their mothers!

The African children were always getting ringworm and in those days the treatment was to shave the spot and then paint it with gentian violet. You would see all these poor kids with shaved purple patches all over their heads.

My Dad had to deal with a lady who had a huge boil on her breast so he had to lance it with the help of my Mum - now that was interesting.

I can remember being about 6 and watching fascinated as my dad bound together a guys foot that had been split open between his 2^nd toe and big toe back about 4 inches. His wife had caught him with another lady and she had used the hoe that she was working with to "fillet" his foot. Dad put Cicatron powder which was an antibiotic powder on it and we all helped to pull it together while he bound it and, off he went. He was supposed to come back a week later but, did not come back for about a month by which time the bandage was stinking and dirty as no one wears shoes and my dad was convinced it would be full of maggots but, when he opened it , it was perfect.

My brother Allan got Bilharzia which is contracted by drinking unboiled water. I was envious as the medication they gave him resulted in his pee coming out in various shades of bright green and blue. I could think of nothing more exotic or exciting.

We got a type of flesh eating maggot called a Putze. The eggs are laid by mosquito’s under the flesh and then they hatch out. Animals get them a lot. If you stroked a dog and his coat felt corrugated then you knew that he had them under his skin. The easiest way of getting them out was to cover the skin with petroleum jelly so that the maggots could not breathe and then they would push their way out early. Once you see them pushing you can squeeze them out.

My poor sister had to swim an important gala with an armful of Putze’s one day.

We also got Jiggers which burrow their way under your toenails and drive you mad as they itch like hell and you cant get to them to scratch. Eventually you lose your toenail.

I was lucky and got neither Jigger or Putze but did get another type of flesh hatching insect bite. I have a nice scar about the size and shape of a quarter on my right calf and my sister had a similar scar on her thigh. I went to my Mum one day as my calf was really red and shiny and was itching like mad. My Mum pricked what looked like the head of the red shiny bump and then squeezed until a small maggot like worm came out. A mosquito lays its egg under the skin and then injects a type of acid around the egg which by the time the egg hatches has killed off the flesh surrounding it. Then the baby "wormy" eats the dead flesh as its first meal courtesy of you the host. The scar is as a result of the lost dead tissue.

The local people believed in Witchcraft and the witchdoctor was always fighting with my dad and bringing the production of the sawmill to a standstill. My dad was actually an atheist but was always helping out the Catholic Italian Missionaries who lived even further out than we did because he said that they practiced what they preached and gave regardless of whether they got back plus they always gave us wonderful meals of spaghetti bolognaise and Chianti which I am sure fueled his good will!!! My dad put up two power stations in Rhodesia although he was never formally trained to do that. He was trained as an engineer and an aircraft fitter. He had no hips as he had to have them removed at 46 due to arthritis and could not have artificial ones fitted so walked like a penguin and was in pain all his life. He said he did things because of his disability, because he was bloody minded and would not accept that people told him he could not.

When we finally left Zambia we left in a homemade RV which my dad made from scratch. He built it from the chassis up and hand riveted it. We traveled across Africa to Cape Town and then went on a ship to Southampton via Las Palmas in 1975.

In 1968 we were attacked by Congolese bandits who later on went on to kill the people they attacked. My Mum got a cracked jaw but managed to escape and get help from the villagers and so saved our lives. I still have my Mums statement but unfortunately do not have any one else’s. I can remember standing by a very large (I was tiny) policeman’s side holding his hand while he walked me past a load of people who were in line (60’s so no age limit or two way glass) and I pointed to the person who had put my dads diving knife over his neck and then the man spat at me - then I remember no more however 40 + years later I still sometimes dream it but am never scared as that policeman always made me so feel safe unlike today’s cops with their stupid radar guns!

When I was growing up we were always getting baby wild animals as the Africans used to kill the parents for bush meat and they learnt that we would pay to try and save the babies. We had two chacma baboons - Molly and Joey. When I bought Molly they told me she was a monkey and then when my dad came home and saw the curve at the base of her tail he realized straight away that she was a baby baboon. Molly used to go every where with me and even used to sleep with me. I designed diapers with holes cut out for her tail after a few nights of having to get up in the middle of the night to change soggy sheets.

We bought a baby boy baboon called Joey when Molly was about a year old. He was still very small when he just disappeared one afternoon. We spent all evening and into some of the night searching for him as he was only a baby. The next morning we finally located his poor stiff little body floating in the river by the water pump. On close examination we realized that he had been bitten by a snake and then must have fallen into the water and drowned. As a family we are all way to soft so whenever any of our pet creatures die we suffer for weeks. Joey was buried with his bright yellow teddy bear that was bigger than him and that he had so loved humping - boys will be boys I guess!

We also had two bush babies called Pookie (part of Latin name) and Piddy ( because she was always piddling!) my brother Allan smuggled a load of flesh eating lizards in from his boarding school in South Africa back home to Zambia by having them in his shirt on the plane ! My bush babies ate them! We had endless baby deer and duiker which used to slip on the polished concrete floors so we made little shoes for them from bits of cut garden hose. When they were big enough we took them into town to a friend of my parents who had some sort of zoo/small holding. I have a lovely set of teeth marks in my right foot from Tikkie the civet cat. She used to walk down our very long corridor really slowly pretending that she did not know that my brother and I were following her and then she would suddenly turn around and chase us and we would run and leap up onto the dining room table. One particular day I got on the table but my foot was dangling. My mum explained that it was not Tikkies fault as had I been another civet cat with a thick coat she would not have even broken the skin.

We had huge tree’s growing on our property and my brother nailed flat planks of wood up the tree trunk to make steps so that I could climb to the very top and hide in the canopy of leaves. I was about 5 and climbed up to the very top which was about 30 foot above the ground and then decided I was not going to come back down so my poor mother had to come all the way to the top of the tree collect me under one arm and carry me back down again.

When I was about 4 and we lived in the town of Kitwe for a while my brother and I went off exploring near the hospital fence line. There was a huge anthill with loads of trees growing on top. Allan and I scrabbled to the top and when we got there spied what we thought was a ball stuck atop one of the tree’s. Allan got some rocks and started trying to dislodge the ball. All hell broke loose as it was in actual fact a bee’s nest and the bee’s started attacking us and stinging us. We scrabbled down the ant hill being stung all the time. I fell and Allan had to come back up to grab me and haul me down. We were running me behind half being dragged by my brother and still the angry black cloud of bee’s followed us buzzing and diving and stinging us.To this day I can still remember the awful burning stinging on my head as wave after wave of bee’s kept hitting it. My brother dragged me into a nearby river and kept pulling me under periodically to try and drown the bee’s. The last thing I remember is looking up through the water at the dark cloud of bee’s. We both landed up in hospital and I was pretty sick and was vomiting blood. They scraped razor blades down our skin to remove the stingers as there were so many stings in us that they could not use tweezers. My parents told me when I was older that they stopped counting the stings removed after 30. We were both really lucky to survive as my Father was one of those people who went into anaphylactic shock if he was stung by a bee or wasp and was supposed to carry medication at all times. I have no idea how we got back to the hospital or who rescued us but we were obviously very very lucky that the whole thing happened within site of the hospital. Weird thing is that I am not scared of bee’s now at all and you think the opposite would be true.

I had a Barbie type doll which my sister had sent me from South Africa as you could not get them in Zambia but the thing I most wanted was a boy Barbie which of course was completely unrealistic but my mother managed to get hold of an old headless Barbie from a church bazaar sale in the town and then we made a stockinet head which I embroidered hair and facial features on. I ‘dented in the boobs and wrapped stockinet around them to hide the indentations. I wanted a bridal doll and so my mother helped me sew a bridal gown from old lace and then because I said she needed a bust we made a bra with sponge ‘boob’ inserts. My parents taught me that there were no limitations to what I could create other than my own imagination. I made some stilts from some rough sawn wood acquired from the sawmill which I spent many a happy hour walking around on and the entertainment value was twofold as after the walking I always had a thorn removal session!

I have a lovely neat round scar just below my inner ankle bone from one of my many crafting sessions. I was holding a tin can between my feet (feet are so handy as an extra pair of hands) and was using a hot poker which had been heated in the hot water boiler fire to punch holes in the can which I had done many times before but, this time missed and punched my foot - very interesting as because the poker was red hot it cauterized the wound as it made it so it did not bleed and it made a rather yukky scorched flesh smell much to the delight of my brother Allan. My father as usual turned the whole episode into a lesson on cauterization and how it works. Every thing we ever did good or bad was turned into a valuable life lesson for which I am eternally grateful as it gives me a somewhat unique way of looking at life.

My youngest brother was always inventing things and then using me to test them as I was 4 years younger than him and more gullible and lighter and smaller. He made a hand glider from bamboo sticks and a cotton sheet and then we went to the top of the roof (corrugated iron) and he launched me off. I can still remember looking at the bright blue African sky through the white cotton sheet and then hearing the rip as the sheet parted and down I went just missing mama aloe and onto the baby aloes!

Allan decided to make homemade Biltong (jerky) from barbel (catfish) which he salted and put on the tin roof to dry. When it was time to try it I said that it smelt funny but he said it was fine and that I must just taste it otherwise it would prove that I was a sissy. I bit into it and into a wriggling maggot - I yelled at him and said I told you it smelt funny and he just laughed and said I told you it was fresh its still moving!

When I was a child you could get miniature brass darts that would fit into a match box. My brother loaded them into his rifle and fired them at me as I ran. I got hit in the bum ( good job I have always had plenty of padding in that area).

We had a river at the bottom of our property and then it was just bush. The river was at the bottom of a steep slope and we had a water pump in it to pump up our water. My brother and I got buckets of water and wet all the riverbank down to the pump house to make a mudslide and then kept on sliding down until all of a sudden my backside started stinging. I had been sliding so long that I had worn through my shorts and through a good chunk of my skin. About a month after that my dad had to burn down a big tree by the pump house as a large python had made its home in the base and had already eaten several of our chickens when they went to the river to drink.

My dad used to sit with his feet inside a cardboard box at night while he was watching television. This was so that Tikkie the Civet cat could not bite his feet. He also had to suffer the indignity of having a full grown cockerel perching on his shoulder who if he dared move would peck his ear. The cockerel had been a chick that I had saved from Newcastle’s disease and hand reared and had got it into its head that it was more human than chicken!

We had a huge white Tom cat that I had got as a tiny kitten and named Kitty Wee. Well when my dad used to get home in the evenings he used to get into the bath and we all used to congregate in the bathroom to discuss our days inventions and adventures and all the creatures of the household used to congregate as well. We had over the bath one of those plastic bath bridges that are for putting your soap and nail brushes etc. Dad was sitting in the bath talking and not so wee kitty Wee decided to walk across the bath bridge and the whole thing collapsed and cat with claws out landed right on my dads family jewels ( my dad had no hips so could not leap up) dad was yelling - we all took off laughing hysterically and my mum was trying to help but couldn’t control her laughter long enough to be of any use. There was no room in our household for any dignity or false pride.

Kitty Wee was forever coming home bleeding and battered as he was always fighting with the wild creatures in the bush however he would put up with all sorts of indignities put upon him by me. He would happily allow me to dress him up in a dolls bridal dress and sit propped up in a pram with a flowing blond wig on while I pushed him around the garden. Without the patience and companionship of these creatures I would have been a very lonely little girl.

We got given a black sheep as a gift from one of the villagers and we named her Nouella.Poor Nouella got that sheep bloat that they get from eating some type of weed and she just kept blowing up and up with gas. My brother Allan read how you are supposed to pierce behind I think the 12^th rib but by the time he plucked up the nerve to do it it was already to late. The villagers did not have medical care so there was certainly no vet for about 200 miles. We dutifully buried all our animals in the garden so there must have been a really weird assortment of skeletons buried out there in what was a garden in the middle of nowhere - sheep, baboons, deer, dogs, lizards, cats, birds, bush babies,snakes,etc.

I used to go into the pit that my Dad had dug for our garbage which was about 10x16 ft wide x about 8 foot deep. I would retrieve old cans and bottles and jars and wash them and then fill them with water and various leaves so that the leaves would eventually stain the water. These were my special teas that I sold in my pretend shop by the fence. Imagine years later somebody finding them and thinking they were some sort of brew to do with witchcraft! As you can see I have always suffered from an overactive imagination.

We had a loose brick under the kitchen window which I worked completely out. I then pricked my hand until it bled and wrote secret messages in my blood on paper which I then hid in the wall and put the brick back.

Molly our pet baboon as she got bigger started to be mean to any visitors that came onto our property so we built her a huge enclosure in front of the big lounge windows so that she could still see us at night watching television. Allan would sometimes take his mattress and sleep on the lounge floor by the window so molly could see him. On this particular night Allan was woken by Molly screaming and rolled over grabbed his blanket which had fallen onto the floor and then started yelling himself along with Molly as the lounge floor was covered with marching mate belie ants. The ants had marched in a huge 4 foot wide column biting everything in their path from the river through Molly’s cage and straight through the house. Molly was hanging upside down from the roof of her enclosure as the ants were every where. We all had to get up and get flame guns and burn the ants off of moll’s cage so that the poor creature could reclaim her home.

My mums friend Hazel Blowers came out to the bush to visit us when Molly was still small. Molly never went near strangers but strangely enough went straight to Hazel and sat on her knee and kept patting her stomach. Hazel laughed and told us that she was expecting a baby which was not obvious to any of us at the time - Molly some how knew

As children my brother and I landed up eating some really strange things as we had been taught to be polite and were aware that the Zambian custom of offering to share food was taken very seriously. They are a very poor people and their staple diet was mealie meal ( a porridge made from ground corn and water with no seasonings whatsoever and very bland) They would then have a pot of whatever meat or fish they had managed to secure. You would take a piece of mealie meal in your hand and roll it into a ball and then dip it into the main pot of fish/meat securing some of the juice or gravy. The meat or fish was broken into small pieces using your fingers. Generally speaking the meat or fish still had the head attached. I was always glad that I could justifiably refuse fish as 9 times out of 10 it was fish and I hated looking at the head with its steamed white eyes. The eyes were considered a delicacy and were more often than not given to guests. I have eaten roasted Christmas beetles and live white flying ants as well as porcupine and some big fat caterpillars which were like rubber when cooked. The flying ants tasted like butter but their wriggling on the way down is a bit off putting, I have always refused to try snake as I have always had a thing about them. Wild water lilies can be a good source of food if you dig up the bulbs and eat them. My parents used to let us roam the bush and my brother and I made friends with all the villagers. We really were wild children. I never wore shoes other than when we went to town once a month for our food supplies.

After a visit to the town for supplies we would sneak into the kitchen and attack the Milo tin.. Bliss dried Milo eaten by the spoonful!

One day my brother and I nearly lost our lucky streak as we went out with our two dogs Fundy and Scott (who were brothers but one was tall and one was short.) Well we went off on our favorite mission of finding and destroying traps set by hunters. They set traps by bending saplings over a wire noose and when it is sprung the poor animal is hanging upside down in the air with a wire noose cutting into its leg. If it is lucky the hapless creature will have been caught by the neck and so put out of its misery. We had been taught by our parents to accept the fact that trapping animals was the only way some of the people had of keeping their families alive but, could never accept the way some of them only checked their traps once a week condemning something to an agonizing thirsty death. Anyway we went off tying the long elephant grass into bunched knots on the way so that we could find our way back ( a different variation of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb theme) we found a few traps and pulled them up when we heard a strange noise and then smelt smoke. We started running to get clear as fire in all that dried elephant grass takes hold really quickly and we knew the consequences of not moving fast enough. Well what had transpired was some hunters had seen us and set the fires around us in a huge circle. We made for the point that had the least flames and the larger dog Fundi my brother and I managed to make it through but poor Scott with his stubby little legs could not make it. Allan got badly singed jumping back and then jumping over again with Scott in his arms. When we told our parents ( we had to as Allan was a bit singed all over) they just told us to be more careful and my dad told the sawmill workers to pass the word that if anything happened to us there would be consequences.

The only time I have ever seen my Dad lash out at someone around our property in a semi circle and then it was wild bush. Well for two or three days we had heard this terrible crying and could not trace its source and then finally Allan traced it to about half a mile away in a huge thicket about 100 foot away from the river bank. He had to crawl into the thicket to find the source of the noise. It was a poor jackal that was on the ground with a steel wire eating into its leg. It must have been in agony as it had gnawed through its own flesh in an effort to get free and what was worse it was obviously thirsty and the whole time could see and smell the water so close by. Allan told my dad and he said that we had to put it out of its misery and as Allan could not get in through the overgrowth with his rifle my crippled dad dragged himself through the bush and shot the poor thing. My brother brought back its body so we could bury it as we somehow felt that we owed it to the poor creature. Well while my brother was digging the hole in our garden and my dad was standing watching an African who was obviously not from one of the local villages or from the sawmill came and started demanding that we give him back his jackal. I started yelling that he should not leave his traps unchecked for days as it was cruel and then he started laughing hysterically and tried to grab the dead jackal. My dad stepped forward and hit him - wow I don’t know who was more shocked us, him or my dad. It was a silly thing to do as we were in a black ruled country with positive discrimination where people were getting deported for the flimsiest of reasons. However nothing ever came of it as my parents had a lot of people who over the years they had helped and we never saw that hunter ever again so for all I know he was reported to the tribal chief and was dealt with by their rules.

My Dad came up against the local witchdoctor several times as he had to prove that his muite (not sure of the spelling but it means medicine) was stronger than white bwana Jacks. Dad was always telling him to put a curse on him and he did but, as my Dad lived until well into his 80’s I guess it never worked.

Just before we left I can remember the witch doctor arriving in a nice car with a driver. He went into the workers compound and had a talk with them about giving money etc to ensure the good spirits and then he produced a tiny toy plane and threw it up on one of the thatched roofs and said that at night when it was very dark he would make himself tiny and then climb into the little plane and fly away. The plane was gone in the morning along with the witch doctor but then so was the driver and vehicle!. He had just modernized his tale telling to encompass a slightly better educated audience so was a very progressive witch doctor. The witch doctor some years before had cursed someone in the village and the person had indeed died. He I guess believed in the curse so strongly that he literally gave up and died. This is one of the reasons my dad was always challenging the witchdoctor to curse him as he wanted people to see that they did not have to live under his tyranny but, you cannot change hundreds of years of beliefs overnight especially when you are dealing with people whose life is so simple and they have no education apart from ancient folk lore. There was always problems whenever any Africans from the town came to the bush as they did not have the simple honest code of life that the villagers had.

The smell of the first rains in Zambia was amazing and people would go outside and just stand in the rain. One of the things I liked doing after the rains had started was to go outside and find some pieces of hexagonal pieces of earth that had shiny surfaces where the rain had dried off. I then would lie down and stick my tongue onto the smooth shiny surface????

Another thing I used to have hours of fun doing was to find a funnel shaped lion ant tunnel and then patiently lie on my stomach while I tried to catch a lion ant on a rod made from a piece of grass. The trick was to gently get the grass to tumble small grains of sand into the funnel neck so that the lion ant thought it was prey starting to slide down the trap then he would pop his pinchers out to grab the hapless creature which in fact my grass and a quick yank and I would have him out of his sand funnel. I always returned them after I had caught them as the fun was in the catching.

We started off having a few chickens for eggs and dad said the cockerels would land up being a meal if we got more than one. Well that lasted all of 5 minutes after my dad saw my poor brother with an axe in his hand and a cockerel with his neck stretched on a block looking dazed as Allan is stroking its neck apologizing. Dad decided it was not worth the accusing stares from his kids. I had declared that I would not eat any chicken and so had my Mum so that was that!. We landed up with nearly 50 chickens.

I used to get the little chicks and pretend they were in training at a circus school. I made a mini tight rope walk and would help them across. The strange thing is that the momma hens never went for me they just stayed scratching dirt near to where my circus school was.

I found a piece of dirt in the garden that was a different consistency from all the rest and discovered that when wet it had an almost clay like consistency so would spend hours and hours making little clay pots while pretending I was a famous potter who was traveling to all sorts of exotic locations selling my amazing pots. You have to remember that after my brother left for boarding school I landed up being without anyone to play with and my mum was spending more and more time on her bed reading so I had to “create” my own entertainment.

My Father built a social hall for the sawmill workers and one day was busy doing some wiring in the building and I as usual was accompanying him. I was jumping from one wooden bench to the next playing a counting game when I slipped and fell with my front teeth hitting the edge of the bench. I knocked my brand new two adult front teeth backwards and peeled back all the gum away from them. I got so embarrassed that I ran all the way home with my mouth poring with blood. We were too far from a dentist so my Mum pulled my teeth back forwards and pulled my gum back down and then made me gargle for weeks with salt water. I could not chew for weeks and to this day hate my smile as I do not have the flap that holds my lip to my gum.

I have my mothers overly loose joints and have dislocated my fingers on several occasions. I was on a beach in south Africa as a child with my brother Allan and was getting very cross with him as he was showing off in front of some girls and ignoring me so I threw a dead crab at him and he chased me and tried to kick me on the butt I put my hand back to stop him and he landed up kicking my hand and dislocating three of my fingers. I screamed and he grabbed me and ran with me to my parents. My dad made Allan hold me down as my hand had already doubled in size and the blood supply was getting cut off. He then pulled each finger out further and then pushed it back in. I had my hand in a sling for weeks. This was the second time I had lost the use of my right hand. The first time I was about 7 and was making homemade toffee (caramel) by boiling sugar and water and condensed milk. Well one day I was by the pan getting some on a teaspoon to drop into a cup of cold water to see if it had boiled long enough when our dogs jumped up and knocked the whole pan of boiling sugar solution all over the kitchen. I jumped back but unfortunately got some down my leg and all over the outside of my right hand and in-between two of the fingers of my right hand. I cannot describe the pain as that boiling hot sticky toffee melted its way into my flesh. My parents took me to see the medical orderly that had just started working for the sawmill (my Dad had fought long and hard to get him) well that was the start of months of pain as he said the veins had been burnt in- between my fingers and we needed to force my body to grow new ones so every time I got any sort of flesh to grow on my wounds they would get tweezers and rip it off forcing it to bleed. I landed up getting blood poisoning as well. I had huge big red tracks from my hand leading up to my armpit and the constant throbbing was something I never want to have to experience again. However as barbaric as it sounds it obviously worked as months after having to learn to use my left hand all the time I finally could use my right again.

We all have different memories of growing up in Africa which vary considerably due to location circumstance and age but the one thing we all appear to have in common is our agreement that we had a great childhood courtesy of a great land.