MINUS THE MORNING:

A ZIMBABWEAN/RHODESIAN MEMOIR

PROLOGUE

chinzvinzvi [LLL]Z n 7 Undigested food (vomited by animal or found in stomach of slaughtered beast). cp chizvizvi K; matsetsema M.

In a place in Rhodesia, just after the white rebellion was consolidated by our declaration of UDI -- which was when I was still so young -- I knew life as a wild child, in an underdeveloped land. This was a time when all of life resounded with a sense of a newness -- hope. Indeed, as whites, my parents felt themselves to be part of a bright spark of Civilisation's new beginnings. As children, my school friends and I also thought of ourselves as Africa's estranged rebels. Yet many of the blacks, too, were in rebellion. Only their rebellion was not against the British, but against "us" whites. Born in 1968, just after the rebellion began, my life in Africa was very sweet. At least, this is my psychological truth, as is this autobiography. Whether or not historical truths are portrayed herein, I do not know for sure.

My childhood memories have a kind of dreamlike quality and texture, as if they come from another world. Perhaps this is not just a feature of my reliance upon memory, but rather more like the blinding quality of the intensity of something burnt into your memory by loss, joy, hope and fear. The essential quality, however, is loss. What is lost is an innocence, which pertained to the time and place. This was not an innocence which all shared, so I hope that I may be forgiven for speaking only from the perspective of a rather limited and fortressed consciousness. It is true that this mind-set, was "encamped around" in a number of ways - and not least was the censorship of the media to which the government of Rhodesia subscribed, in order to maintain the innocence that could preserve a high morale. Another way in which consciousness was fortressed was by means of Christianity which enforced an almost Victorian ideology of psychological and moral innocence at any cost. Thus it was that I could pull my father's ears, in a much later dream, stretching his head, whilst announcing to him that, "You may have very few ideas in your head, but given that they are so few, you ought to keep them!" That such an attitude could have been buttressed by pity and tempered by fatigue is probably the hardest thing for one not born to battle within an ideology of innocence, which has been buttressed by the blood of those who battle in wars literal and ideological - wherein Christianity has been chosen as a means to dominate.

We lived in a British sub-culture: The super-green grass lawns existed in a way which was enhanced by "our" sense of "our" power; the pastures existed, protected, fenced around, but not by rules and regulations - or so it seemed, to a naive impressionistic eye, around this time. Rather, hope itself was contained in these images from a world gone by. This writing unites that which was once lost with a very living present -- memories of those still alive today.

In my writing the naive perceptions of my childhood self have been given priority over those of myself as an adult. This is not to imply that my adult self is any the wiser about issues colonial and African. Indeed, I do not intend to portray anything resembling "wisdom" as it might pertain to issues of a moral and multi-cultural nature. Rather, I wish to portray the psychology of an innocence which had no idea about what sort of innocence it was - an innocence which was imposed as ideological straitjacket, from one generation to the next. I am speaking of an innocence of imposture - the mystical sense one has, of belonging to a culture of the past - which, in turn, strangles life out of the present. This was part of an intellectual experiment in emotional regression, which I undertook as an author. As far as possible, I aimed to obtain an authenticity of time and place, by retaining a child's natural perspective. I was -- as many of my countrymen and women -- more emotionally connected to the land, and less to an idea of my rights as an individual, of which I was mostly unaware.

Indeed, only in time were the consequences of having these cultural tendencies finally felt, through my social circumstances which forced me to fight some of the aspects of the society which had once sustained me. When one finds that a community's set of values only embrace a mode of innocence too narrow, too tight to be sustained in a non-moderated society, one is compelled to fight what of that narrowness remains in one's own spirit, so as to defeat it finally. At the same time to fight the values and the situations which one has known and loved is like jumping out of a plane into the wide blue yonder. One fears that by a letting go, when one finally detaches one's grasp from nearly all that one feels one's parents dream and for you, then nothing else will grow.

The fact that I'm a thinker and not a feeler as such has no doubt caused me troubles that would best be untold, if only half truths would suffice. Even now, that I have made another breakthrough in my thinking, leaving me higher on the mountain of thought, on a safe ledge, I feel rather tired. It's as if gravity wants me going the other way and fast. Thinking is the air I breathe, the food I eat. Yet I come from the kind of culture that feels it is a betrayal for a female like me to think. Thus the development of thinking has for me been a long, arduous, and very solitary process. The breakthrough recently was the realisation that I now had the tools to say what I think without emitting a deep sigh at the gap between the reader's experiences and mine, a gap which previously I'd thought could not be bridged with words. I now see that one can write clearly in such a way that at least provides a conceptual map for the reader, even if they haven't experienced everything I have to say.

The opposition to my being a thinker goes way back, it seems. I remember lounging forwards over the back of the driver's bench seat in the old car, asking questions. "Why is it that...?" and "Why do you think...?"

"Be quiet!" snapped my mother. "You ask too many questions."

I felt like I'd been deprived of air.

I grew up relatively ignorant about all sorts of things. I had the mental machine power, but not the grist to work with.

There were things that I was expected to know naturally, as if by virtue of something essential at work, like biology. I was supposed to know what it was politic to say, and when to say it or when to keep quiet. If rage descended upon me, I had made a mistake.

My father didn't believe that women could think. They had to be slapped down enough so that they weren't precocious. It turns out that I reminded him of his overbearing mother.

He decided that I couldn't navigate my way through regular workaday world because I was exhibiting the typical female traits of non-thinking. The only thing for it was to beat me down to make me see sense.

Thew problem, as it appeared to him, was despite having completed a Bachelor's degree, and having been independent in the world for quite some time, I "couldn't even speak properly" (much less, think). To him, I represented everything that was wrong with the world and with his own ability to come to terms with it. I was the externalisation -- the manifestation of the inner symptom -- of his own distress. (It would have been unseemly, obviously, for such distress to have taken a male form.)

And then, the old school friends -- and once again, I have transformed myself into a thinker, against what would forge bonds and unity. I cannot send any more fuzzy tokens on facebook. I'm all out of trying to form connections in that way. And the other childish self -- the one I used to be -- is mocking at me now and proclaiming that I have betrayed my roots. How dare I have turned into another person, thinking too much? I'll surely have to pay a price for falsifying the books. No person has more than one personality throughout their life, says common sense.

After migration two ways of living were to collide -- stretching myself and my family beyond our limits.

Today, I am alert to much more in my near environment than most people are. Why would this be unusual for a child whose backdrop of life was war? This war started only a few years before I was born, and continued throughout my formative years. By my mid-teens, it had almost finished.I respond to many situations which appear too peaceable with a deep feeling of dissatisfaction as well as anxious tension. I am too bored to pay attention to much “ordinary life”, and at the same time, I am waiting for the bomb to drop, the axe to fall. I cannot believe that it will be too long in falling. When it does, I realise that it had always been falling. I revert to a deep peace. This is familiarity. What was hiding behind the screen as ambiguity and the human suppression of aggressive impulse, breaking through painfully only now and a-then, has finally revealed itself in vulnerable starkness. Good!

Yet, I would be happier, much happier, with robust humour that would frighten away ghosts, than with this false calm of a too cozy environment, defended by a sense of the vague processes of cultural supplication against power.

Fugue/rewind

I'm taken back to my early childhood by the play of the persistent yellow sun upon the window's ledge. Space overwhelms me as I make my way over the green lawn, onto the tar-mac, down, down, to the place which sends out the tender effusion of dried daisies, rubbed into a powder, above hot polish-wax. The classroom itself is dark and lonely as an orphan, a wooden raft of polished timber darkly a-sea upon a pane of yellow light. Vigilant sun storms into the broad-ranging far window, appealing life, and imploring life to action, despite the isolation that one feels, a returning child to this classroom of yore. One is bacteria being played on by a bright primeval sunlight. One cannot help but feel lonely in this light, which both commands and beckons.

The smallness of the wooden dark school chairs, the tiny, sturdy wooden desks, set not far off from an ascetic green-board, passively abandoned now, but reminiscent of old chalkdust, recalls a hundred highly anxious days. This classroom is in darkness -- it takes a while for the eyes to adjust.

I'm organically alive and small, and take things in not just through my inquisitive nostrils, which feast on burnt or powdered daisies, but through my whole body, environmental sounds reverberate upon my skin.

I have to go out and run, or dive into the white cold and light blue - the freezing pool, which may or many not sustain me in one goal, to reach the other side of the width end in one wet, frightened piece. The grass that I had to tread to get up to the pool was soft, above the solid ground.

I know only one sensation, that is, not being able to defend myself, nor understanding any reason to do so -- yet being afraid. Everything looks larger than me. There is one place, a sloping yellow floor, next to my best friend's walk-in pantry. It emits a sense of ascetic doom, a vague feeling of sadism, as yet not named, because my friend's cook often is accused of stealing stuff from there, but really, C. has told me, she's the real one who takes the jelly powder.

There is another sensation which lurks around the primary school ablution, where the air inside rings of an evil spell of witches and sinister intent. Here "Life Buoy" soap resides, and forces up into its closed environment its pungent odour, no-one can escape.

We are all too small to escape these effects of our environments. Rather, they suffuse into our brains, penetrating us, allowing no small-boned lethargy to develop in us, no "lazy bones". The sun is intolerant, and will have us running, small legs darting over sealed colonial grounds which are green and hopeful like the very dawn of civilising power. Brought up thus, we move towards the sun, as relentless as it is fecund. While, anyone who is found "dawdling" has their legs whipped.

In a recent dream, I followed the trail of images to the mess hall -- actually children's obscure drawings laid out on the ground in a kind of disorderly continuum. Found the tiny shack and single filed around the verandah section, past my mother who has been living there for some time. The question floating through my mind was would I be able to do the skydive, leaping into thin air, without an adequate length of psychological preparation? A panther loomed in the corner of the loosely hewn bamboo wall, as we, more routinely than obediently marched on by. "Watch out for it!" I cautioned, but a second later, it was too late as the animal had taken a whole skull between its jaws. Then I heard a fatal crunch.

In the womb of innocence

In the morning of my life

I wanted the sunshine

The morning of my life

It was when the world was NEW

There was no future, then

not ever

for every moment -- we truly lived it;

We did not know of any future;

we consumed the present to its Full--

until it was . . . Gone!

Now there is grass and suddenly there is mud. I could easily crouch down and pick some up. . It had an uneven, crumbly texture, moist and red. It took me a split second to make the decision to bend down and pick some up, and put the handful in my mouth.

My mother was ahead - I thought she couldn't see.

Just then she turned around, "What's that in your mouth? Did you EAT some of the soil?"

It tasted so delicious - rich, and with a kind of warm, mineral flavour, that stuck on the tip of my tongue's sense memory.

"You must NEVER, EVER eat soil, " she said.

"Why not?"

"It's full of germs!"

I was leaning over the bathroom basin, thinking, why should something as nice as soil have to be washed out by soap? I shall never forget that taste of mineral rich soil. That was my first taste of hallowed African soil!

One day one of the African women came to our gate. I saw her there and she said, "Do you want to go out for a walk?"

I waited at the gate. She picked me up and bundled me on to her back, secured around her waist with several blankets. Then we went down the street, bouncing gently despite the material constraints. She stopped and spoke in the language of Shona with her friends, and after half an hour was up we came back bouncing home again. She had turned me into a young infant.

I thought, "This is strange -- why can't I walk!" Even at that age, I wanted to assert my rights, by walking.

I thought in baby-think as if had been mistaken for some other child.

I told my mother how I had sat inside the blanket and she acted bemused.

I didn't like the wrapped up feeling; I wanted to run free.I felt like I was hidden in some other culture, a mistaken identity, perhaps. All wrapped up cosily in that blanket, I just felt I had to have a way of cutting loose!

On a shiny morning, an electric day, the pool was being filled with water. Each day, I would come home and the pool would have been filled a little deeper with that water.

It came out of the hot, black hosepipe, and it filled from the bottom to the top. It welled up, from beneath. It got deeper and deeper in a way that totally changed the character of the pool, as an empty, hollow crevice. The colours where the water had been filled were different from the light turquoise where the water hadn't climbed up, yet.

It was a much more rich and wallowing green, which moved around, slitheringly, as though it was alive, as it gradually crept, higher and higher up the pool's surface. It was like a dream - an immense amount of wastage - like water disappearing into the garden, when your mother told you to "switch off the tap - you're wasting it!" Except this water was getting more and more, like you could imagine it would be if it was going underground, into the mud, but it was not disappearing like you would have thought, but only folding over onto itself, and getting more and more filled each day.

It was certainly breaking the rules for water, and the rules about leaving the tap on. That was why it was so exciting.

The very first thing that I used to do when I got back from nursery school is check to see what level the pool water had got up to. First thing in the morning, too, I would check how high it was.

Then I would visualise all day how high it might be when I got back. The hosepipe fed water into it throughout the day, and also during the night. But it took a long, long time. In the beginning we could paddle in it at the deep end and the water was a bit brown and warmed up from the sun. But soon the water began to reach the shallow end as well. Then it became too deep to walk in.

It took two weeks for the whole pool to be filled up with water. That is why I was very excited to see its progress on the way home. Also, I really didn't want to leave for nursery school, but my mother said, "Don't worry, you can see how much deeper it is when you get home!"

Soon it was totally full up, except for maybe half a tile, so we stopped filling it up. I was too scared to go in the corner of the steps where the deep end started. So I played on the shallow end-side of the steps, where I could see the bottom. Except one day when my dad pushed me into the deeper-end corner, then I splashed around, and kicked, and swallowed lots of water, nearly for fifteen seconds.

Those were the days that I forgot about the play school. I went home and looked into the pool and it was six inches deeper than it had been the morning earlier. "What's an inch?" I said to my mum.

I looked at the flowing waters in wonderment. It was true that it was creeping up in "inches". The old pencil marker we had drawn was now several "inches" below the water level. And tomorrow, who knew how far it might have crept? I was astonished.

Taps weren't supposed to be left on like that. I wondered if anybody else knew. It was a special secret, only our family knew.

Then we could swim in the deep end, and the pool would stay the same as that for a very, very long time. You didn't have to empty it like it was a bath. The water could stay in there forever - or for, maybe, ten years. It would be the same water that we'd put in, ourselves.

It was very sparkling during the day, and some of the leaves that dropped in would make strange patterns, on the bottom. At night it was dark and loaming. It was warm and sparkly, even sort of viscous. When my mum and dad went skinny dipping in the pitch of night, and invited us along, that is how it was, too -- only we had a cold floodlight, and the warm water made buzzing sounds in your ears as you dove under it!

~

My only problem was that I had to go to that nursery school building in the valley.

I didn't want to be taken there, at all. It was all red and blue in a way that hurt my eyes. Everything was geometrical too. I wanted to stay at home – at home with the grass and the pool and the soil that tasted so good to me.

My mother took me within the storm-blue walls and into the little adjoining rooms, that were overheated. There were toys in the cupboards, and there was a playhouse section, and the toilets were tucked just around the side, beyond that section. They were painted in a bright colour of lemon yellow, or orange, colours I found immediately jarring and overwhelming to my sensibilities, because of the staleness of the air down near the ground. The ladies who worked there sat me down with other nursery school kids, and ordered me to "play".

It didn't interest me at all. So I 'pretended' to play, and walked around and picked things up, and looked at them, and pretended to be interested with them. They were toys the other kids were "playing" with. I didn't want to play until I found the bricks. I pulled them out of the cupboard near the wall, and placed several of them on top of the other ones until I'd made a castle. These were the most interesting toys! But then the nursery school ladies said that these were boys' toys, and that I needed to play with the girls who were in another room. They made me leave and put the bricks away, then they took me over to some people playing "house" and asked if Jenny can play with them.

So I realised how they were playing "house". I pretended it was fun, and that I really enjoyed being the "mother" or the "child". But house was too boring for me. I knew I had only an hour to wait until it was home time, because the nursery teachers told me.

I wanted to go back play building blocks in the next room, but I wasn't allowed to play again with the "boys' toys", a teacher said. It was wrong to enjoy playing with those blocks, all alone. So then they found me some more "friends" and asked if I could join them. I didn't really like these friends, either, because I didn't choose them.

I drew a hand with my red crayons and attempted to sketch the chubby fingers of the picture of a "man". Only the girl next door to me was indignant in her outrage.

"That's not how you draw hands!" the girl said while jabbing my ribs with her elbow, "This is!" She drew a perfectly simple stick man, with twigs for fingers. How do you feel when someone tells you that what you can see is different from how they see things? If you are like me, you think all the more, and that is how you see the world as being a very complicated place!!

Did I learn to draw stick fingers after that? Not at all. Rather, I surmised that the other child must know more than I. But I could not let go of what I knew, either, Reader, do you ever let go of what you really know, just because someone tells you differently? Not I! So, I drew the my human figures with an x-ray vision into their skeletons after that:

PICTURE: The flesh inside the centre of the head is balance. . .The head is enormously fat . . . pink-red is the colour of spirit . . . the arms are reaching out, to embrace the world . . . either flowers or grenades are all about , and yet, it doesn't seem to matter . . . for, beneath the stage, flowers grow, heads and arms applaud!

Still, life was a gift or so we were led to understand, and I felt it too, like the growth of juicy radish seeds, in red, fertile earth. So, once outside the stifling rooms where we were forced to play, I wanted to go home and see the swimming pool.

My friend Nicky lived next door. Her real name was "Monique" but everyone called her Nicky.

She had a big Jacaranda tree in her garden that used to drop its violet flowers everywhere around, about two inches thick. Then afterwards that would all go soft and turn into brown cigar-coloured sludge that was slippery to walk on.

My friend Nicky's house was connected up to our house with an alarm button. That was in case my mother needed to call for help when my dad was away at signals on army duty. It was a white button right under the mirror of the dresser but you could easily see it.

Nicky's dad drove a dark green Mercedes Benz and he had a tweaked moustache. They also had a boxer dog that barked and charged against the fence. I didn't see Nicky's dad very much, but I knew that he was tall. Nicky's mother was thin and quite old, and very serious. They were all Catholics. At Christmas I used to hear them singing carols when I walked at dusk between the veggie beds.

They had something called "stations of the cross" and if you missed one out you could end up in hell. Nicky said I would probably end up in hell, since I didn't follow any of them, although I might not... Nicky's family had good voices, though. And it was good to hear them singing.

I wanted to have power, too: As time went on, me and Nicky invented a secret code; and then we would lock ourselves inside the shed and burn our hairs over a candle. Nicky also burned ants at the stake by putting them on the end of lighted matches. Nicky was cool!

Don't you just want to grow up as soon as you can? -- I KNOW I wanted to. And yet most of my approaches were frustrated ones!

I had not turned five when my friend Nicky said to me, one day:

"My mother says you have a speech problem because you can't say, ''Yellow'' yet, properly."

I urged, "I haven't."

She responded, "Say yellow."

I articulated the word.

She asserted, "You're just saying 'yewwow'!"

That day I went home, and I said to my parents, in the lounge, drinking their tea,

"Nicky says I can't say yellow properly," I pronounced. "Listen: 'yewwow, YEWWOW'."

They affirmed, "You're saying Yewwow - try saying "ye-LLow."

I tried again: "... YeWWOW."

No, they reprimanded, "Try saying, yeLLow."

I couldn't. "Why can't I?"

"Try saying it in front of the bathroom mirror," my Dad suggested.

So, I put my face right up against the mirror and in my burst of confidence, then I articulated:

"YeWWOW!"

I tried once more - "yeWow!" I pronounced.

But I had misted up the mirror and I couldn't see my expression any more.

The magic hadn't worked...?

I was angry so I called my mother in.

She urged, "When you're older, you will be able to say it."

I uttered, "HOW old??"

"WHEN will I be able to say it?" I demanded to know.

"Maybe in a few months..."

"But when, DEFINITELY?"

"When you're five."

I looked into the face in the misted up mirror as I burst into tears -- the cultural magic hadn't worked, and I would now have to wait for nature, now, to take its course.

In the heart of Africa, life was beset around by male and female moods from those around me: This formed the weather around me. Good weather! Then it was my birthday and I had a party and two white horses came to it. I thought my parents had brought them as a surprise, but they had just wandered down the drive. Then they stayed for a little while, but then my dad said, "I had better go and look for their owners." That made me really mad because I wanted them to stay. "How did they get here in the first place?", I wanted to know. "Oh, they must have smelled the birthday cake!" Well then I couldn't understand why they weren't allowed to stay. They had decided to come all by themselves. I was in tears.

No one could explain why horses, which came of their own free will, would have to leave my birthday party. Why could this sheer delight not remain?

It may be sad; it may be strange or weird

But tell me, tell me --

Is it so bad as you feared?

One day we went to vote in a big brown tent. Actually it was sandy brown, and probably not all that big. It was big enough to fit about twenty people in if they squeezed, but it was hard to see what was going on with so many people. The tent was made of sack material, it looked like, and was kind of square inside. We had to wait a while and it was very tense, and I got yelled at for something. There was a huge downpour at about five o'clock and it was totally dark because the sky was covered over with black clouds, and there were some yellow lights that lit up everything inside. Also there was a big bill poster of about five serious looking men with fat faces, and they were in stark black and white in a row at the back of the tent, where they were stuck up at the level of above the heads, but you could only see them when the people moved. We had to use an umbrella to get in the tent and then back to the car, because the rain was black and very heavy on the canvass and was pushing it inwards, beating harsh and perpetual torrents to the ground.

I was really angry because no one told me what was going on. I wanted to know what was special about those men, the ones who had their faces on the canvass, and why we had to study them and think so hard about it. Was it something on their faces that could tell you which one you had to choose?

I asked my parents and my dad took me back to the tent because I was frustrated, and he said, "That is so-and-so from that party and that is so-and-so from the other party"

So he told me all the pictures each had names.

"Well, which did you vote for?"

"For that one over there!"

"Is he the best?"

"What do you mean?"

"Is that who everybody else is voting for?"

"Well, he's a moderate."

"But isn't he the one everyone else is voting for?"

"No."

"But why not?"

I guess that was when I was really young. That was the first time that politics was shown to me, but nothing really was explained. I guess it was too serious to explain.

And there was always Christmas in the Park...snapped frozen in the grass. And it was very cold that night. The ground was lit oddly with isolated angled lights so that it seemed illuminated - a frosty green. It was too quiet to be believed. Little streamlets sprinkled between cold dead rocks - eerily. Beside them unnaturally emerald and rounded leaves sprung forth, out of the shadows. And my own shadow was extended and leapt back and forth along the slope unpredictably as I passed by the partly concealed lights - the bright green ones and dull insipid fading gold ones. I ran ahead to keep warm.

Here there were people frozen in time, in supernatural exaggerated form. Oh, and didn't I respect their stillness, this eternal quality? When I grew up I'd want to be as perfect and as still as one of those! I'd need a lot of hairspray and a lot of poise to do it though!

Nobody would ever move again. Their eyes, fixed upon their loved ones, must be frozen solid too. Mary would never reach Jesus. Joseph would remain in a perpetual state, a thousand year anxiety, always looking vacantly, intensely into the horizon, never finding what it was that he was looking for. His overlarge lantern, an angled, London street design, brightly smacked his shadow down on to the grass without a hint of compromise. Joseph's black shadow stretched out hard over the light. Black-edged - he was more thwarted in his hopes than all the plastic Jesus family put together. He was an asphxia of death figure, which eerily promised life, even in coldness.

Then, I ran on ahead, and across the stream and up the rocks, where gnomes stared blankly in their limited circle of light. There were ferns and blackness and the path meandered around in an uncertain, compressed manner, and then suddenly back down again. The doll's house looked a little brighter with its optimistic lights, but it was stark and even colder. Its shadows were opaque, and quite unlike the sun.

The dolls must have been an after addition. No one could live in such a floodlit wooden box. Freezing -- for all of the luminosity of its artificial radiance. Solemn, holy, dolls.

I skipped across the emerald lawn and did quick handstands on fresh ice-bitten grass.

I got to mail a letter to Father Christmas in the post box near the iron railing at the corner. The post box was red, with pretend snowflakes coming off it and it had "Ice Pole" written on it. I breathed frost air, and was lifted up to twist the letter through the dark black slot, and with difficulty, lent forward to let it go.

Oh, let it go; let it go!

I am writing to YOU!! The one who knows!

I'm writing you with love in it.

One who knows [more than I do].

Then, around the corner, went to watch the fountain in the square for several minutes. And it changed from blue to pink to green and mauve and purple, in the lights, and you could never tell what colour it was turning, or which fountains would turn on next to make the ring around the highest fountain, growing in the middle. I was only allowed ten minutes at the fountain. I would have watched all the night.

"Jenny - we have to go after five minutes."

"Why?" [I had to know before it would be possible to leave.]

"Because the fountain stops after five minutes."

"How come?"

"Because it gets tired."

"Why does it?"

"Because the electricity that makes it go starts to run out."

Thus was my immense frustration at the age of four (or was it eight . . . Or older? Was this my immense frustration, too, at the old age of . . .thirty?). . .

Give me reasons, give me answers, do:

A lie's no good to me: The truth no good to YOU!

YAY!

Rusting crisps in swirling blue vinegar bags

and lemonade!

We were so poor. Sometimes we could even afford to buy a coke and a crunchy packet of potato chips to have along with the braai, which was made up of steak and boerewors (those South African sausages). The potato crisps packet would rustle because the plastic wrapper was of very sharp and light, robust material - so it used to crackle, high-pitched and noisily.

My dad would pour himself a beer, and if it was a hot day, sit out on the verandah - but not always. My sister and I drank Mazoe orange, which came as a concentrate, and you could smell it when you poured it -- it was tangy -- and you could almost taste it even before you drank it. Then we would listen to the radio, which was mostly joking about something.

Some days, before the jokes began, there were messages on the radio to soldiers. I thought this could be serious, but nobody treated it like it was serious. So, then I thought that it was just part of the half-seriousness of living.

They were the messages from the families with some personal stuff about them and how everybody had not forgotten them.

But that was over, then the jokes began, denying fear. And this is how I came to know how to turn off fear which most people feel!

chipotero ƒ~HHL]KMZ n 7 Person or place to which one goes for protection. 2. Intermediate stage or place between poimt of departure and end of journey. <-potera chipotono ~HHL]Z n 7 sp Small owl.

My friends and I liked lying on the rock at the side of the pool, on the weekend. We were mermaids, and this was our nectar and oasis. The rocks alongside the pool edge were full of sparkles but then it lost its sparkles and turned dull when you dripped on it. It would dry up very quickly, after fifteen minutes, and eventually it would almost suck your legs to it on a really warm and very lightly humid day. Then your legs and body would have pink rock-ovals on them.

Some days there would be upside-down buzzing black beetles in the pool. Sometimes maybe even as many as twelve or thirteen, or fifty even. And I would have to get them out before I could swim in it. On those days it was usually warm and the water was warm, too, although sometimes it would also be dark and overcast and there would be a storm brewing. Then it was good to swim in the water because it went a deep green-blue colour and got little crescent waves and you could never see the bottom. This was nature's hollow.

But it made actually a shivery feeling afterwards, in those days. That was because the water was warmer than the air when you got out. After that, we got a fence around the pool that was welded out of long tubes of steel and painted green. And we got tire innards to float on, and one really big one, my sister could lie in, with her legs out, over one side.

Some nights we would have a group of people over for a braai, and we would floodlight the pool with a high-amp bright light, and swim, and just relax and warm ourselves against the heat which came out from the coals and fire and the bricks under a plow-disk. It used to be drafty, sometimes.

But when I was nearly four the one thing I wanted more than anything else was to have a pop-gun. I saved up all my money, in one cent and five-cent pieces, and after two and a half months I had enough. Then I went down to the store and found a really nice, wooden present - a pop gun - and after that my sister wanted one too. There was a large, tall tree in just about the centre of our garden, and I used to try to hit the cork at a particular chalk mark on the trunk. The popgun phase lasted me about a month.

Then, when I grew older I gravitated towards "cap-guns". There were these little gunpowder "caps" in this red ticker tape and what you had to do is tear off one or at most two studs at a time, and you could put them in a plastic rocket, which you dropped face down. When it hit the concrete there would be a snap and "PING", and then just straightaway a soft residue of gunpowder. When I grew a little older, I began to think that camouflage was sort of sexy. If I ever did get married, (which was hardly likely for a free spirited child), I would marry GI Joe. And did that have anything to do with the little boys all dressed up at parties in some cast off army gear?

But first, I had to graduate up to primary school. The walls There were polished-red, like thick boot shine, and the floors were equally sharp-polished and opaque. There were hats hooks to deposit our grey felt hats (or khaki bush hats if you were a boy). And there was a luminous waxed smell as you approached the classroom area. Smells in Africa were important to us all!

In the mornings Amos would sometimes polish our shoes for us, on frosty cold mornings. But you had to ask him politely:

"Amos! Would you, please, polish these. . .?"

And most of the time it was better to get up earlier and polish them yourself - only it helped if you were running late.

Sometimes,I would be cheeky to Amos. Then our conversations used to go a bit like this:

Amos, have you seen my hat?

Where you POOT it?

"In your kia!!"

Ah, you too cheeK-ee -- You Mumpara!' (idiot)

"Me not mumpara, YOU mumpara"

AHHHHh! - YOU Mumpara STEREK! (very much!)

That sort of talk was funny! It made time go fast!!

gurudhudhu [LLLL]Z ideo of Bubbling in water.

Like anything you experience suddenly, like a dramatic clash of thunder and lightening, I learned to revere the school pool, which our teachers slowly marched us to, one afternoon each week. We had to be solemn and keep really quiet, not make any noise, or the whole line of us would have to stop and stand still until the teacher had identified the noise-making culprit. Then we would start again on our slow march towards the significant landmark. Once there, we changed into our regulation black speedos and lined up with a kaylite swimming board to hold on to, to plunge into the shallow end, and make our mad dash, kicking to the other side, amidst the thunderous waves of coldness. You had to be prepared to leap if you were the one next in line, whenever the teacher blew her whistle.

Once we had made it to the opposite side of the shallow end, we would reach up to the cold hard bars on that other side, and pull ourselves up, our bodies shivering like drowing rats. A couple of laps like this, and we were finally allowed to return to the changerooms to dry ourselves and feel safe.

Days like shown in the photo above, between summer and winter, when the clouds were thick and heavy, but the breeze and air still warm and humid, they were the times when water seemed like sky, when underwater summersaults seemed like caressing warm and cool airs of mysterious gods.

School started at quarter to eight, and you would look bad if you were late. School was not so bad all up, except I always thought I would get lost. In KG1 that my fear was that I would lose my way, going to the classroom. During the first few weeks, my dad arranged for my mother's friends, children, the twins, to meet me at the gate at five to eight, so that I wouldn't get lost. But sometimes they were late, and then I'd have to persuade my dad to take me in, which wouldn't do because he was a "parent" and I couldn't be seen with him. Also it would have made him late for work. So, I had to walk through the frosty coloured lawn, and look tough. At a certain time, we queued up in our classes outside the assembly hall; then Mr. Walters would usher us in, one class at a time. But in KG1, we were right at the front of the assembly, and went in first. These rules invoked a daunting, even dangerous, power to me. No one was ever seen to break the rules, although they were made to be bent, even maybe a lot. We bent the rules all the time --- A lot! We were child barbarians.

We marched down to the classrooms after assembly, in a single file. That was important --to be neat and tidy, crushing in on another, with both joy and derision: It was the day we were explained about the hat pegs. The top row of the hat pegs was for the boys' hats, and the bottom row was for the girls' hats, and under that there was a bench to sit on. There, the wall was shiny red and polished, but above the hat hooks it was all wrinkly and smooth at the same time, and lighter blue. And that is when we put our hats on to the hat hooks, dangling stupidly on their elastics, if they were girls' hats; or thrown, in seeming haphazard fashion if they were the boys' khaki bush-hats, and we were siphoned, in a single file, into the classroom The teacher told us we were KG1 and this was our classroom, and that when she came into it, we should all say, all at once, "Good morning Mrs. McCarthy!"

First, too fast, then rather too slow. Then, in a slow, but even, animated drone.

I had a quiet sense of fear, of a portending drama.

But what that really was, was our first, foremost learning drill! I didn't mind it at all!

my school hall & excellent places

I was still in KG1, where we had that teacher who would throw our work books across the room if they were wrong. I once drew a man jumping over a log to illustrate the word "jump". Only I drew two men jumping over logs somehow. . . perhaps because I wasn't concentrating. What could I do?

I tore one of the pages out. Then went to queue up for approval.

"What's this?" intoned the teacher, pointing to my torn-out page.

"I don't know," I confessed. In my daze, I had already forgotten any of my reasons for making two pictures. Probably I had just lost track of the first one? The truth is, I was not always too alert!

Before I knew it, my book was hurled across the room with fierce threats about the willful removal of my pages - and I never got my requisite red tick. That teacher, a crone, was more easily tricked by others. My inexactitude left doubts in some people! My mistake was leaving ragged edges. . . this I learned to deal with, by removing them stealthily.

In KG1, when I was still learning to read what "ceiling" meant and "floor meant by the signs on the classroom wall and floor, I was so daunted. But by Standard 3, fifth grade, as I became, I didn't care to be so intimidated.

When I came home from school I used to drop my cardboard case off (with its white slash markings, to prove that it was not a bomb), and head right out to the veggie patch to eat the peas. I picked one, popped the pod, and scooped out all the babies with my teeth, like I'd been taught. Then I'd throw the pod, carelessly, a few metres away. Then, I was feeling one with that shocking, vitalising force of nature.

Bennit had his own sector of veggie patch around the side, and grew some mealies and some other stuff. When I had stripped the pea patch of any ripe ones, I would have to wait another few days, for further foraging. One day, I came home from school and headed straight to the veggie patch where I met Bennit's wife. She was seated, leaning out against the wall. She didn't say a thing.

My mother said, "Hi Bennit - who is this?"

"Ah - is my Fullies."

"Ah, good - is she going to stay here?"

"Yheeez."

Fullies stayed and went for a few months at a time.

When she returned, she was rubbing on her stomach, looking pleased.

"What is it?" I wanted to know. (We didn't talk much about family life, least of the life of the servants.)

"My future", giggled Fullies.

Bennit and Fullies were very relaxed about themselves and their place in the land, and made us feel relaxed, too...

gwera [LH]Z ideo of Opening door slowly.

Curiously enough, around this time, I sensed that so many things were hushed up, kept from children's ears. I made this intellectual surmising as an adult--a surmising from almost negligible childish feelings. Still, not entirely negligible:

Somehow, I - I knew something wasn't right. There were only small signs, hints of a suggestion that the adults were alarmed by something terrible. What was it that they couldn't protect us from? A small slip of paper had encroached on our territory. It was folded in half, all up no bigger than an envelope and completely blank on either side. Its blankness itself was frightening, because we couldn't be sure of what it meant.

It had taken up residency at the base of one of the curtains, in the corner of the lounge room. My mother warned me, "Don't go there, anymore, because it is now dangerous!"

Dangerous! Initially I was incredulous: Then I looked around, and saw only a piece of paper. As I approached the piece of paper, it began to snap at me; opening and closing its folded halves like a mouth. Blankly, maliciously, it followed me around the room, snapping at my heels, as I tried harder to evade it. It was as if it was driven by a whirlwind. Later, I went to visit Bennit in his servant's quarters, standing on the clay red earth. Bennit lived in a very small building out the back of our house. It wasn't very mice because when you snuck in there when he was away, it was very dark, and smelt like ash and food. He had a bed, and a shower and a central area where he cooked his food, and the floor was black and slimy.

The paper suddenly appeared again. I tried to wriggle up my mother's body, into her arms, to get away from it. She just laughed. She said she couldn't help me to escape this time, and she seemed reluctant to do anything about my danger.

The paper kept on malignantly snapping.

My parents were unable to protect me any more.

courage and strength

We had to dive off the three-metre board, in single file.

Better just to leap without much thought, but I lingered on in the back and gave my place to everyone. Then I had nowhere else to go because there was nobody in front of me, except for one, who hesitated as much as I did up to the ledge. She abandoned me - off the ledge - with the mildest coaxing and encouragement from the lower female on deck. Finally it was only me. The other had gone to get changed and to become warm again. I announced I couldn't dive. "Well, jump then - you're the last one left." I looked down to the water, which was a cold ice blue, or black. I jumped. I hated heights, and so I didn't feel anything - and then. . . Splash! And then the struggle with the water to get through it, out, free from the cold water ignominy. I was cold as the water and I soon learned to repress even my fears, as if they were merely "ignominy". Well, they didn't deserve thought, only forgetting.

Mrs C. always gave us singing practice in KG2 - this was when we were in Mrs. Staude's class. We still had Mrs C. every Wednesday after break - and that was something I didn't look forward to. I hated singing because it was humdrum and because we had to sit for what

seemed like an hour on the wooden benches, and not move. Whenever I used to see those wooden benches being put out, I used to feel drained and resigned. The air was turning stale, all at once.

"Here we go. . . it's singing practice, all over again."

We sang songs "All things bright and beautiful" and other hymn-like dirges, with Mrs. C. plodding away solemnly on the worn out piano. She'd turn occasionally, to make sure we were all enunciating our words, her face contorted in an appropriate expression for the song we were being forced to sublimely wreck, or otherwise endure. The girls were seated on the left side bench, adjacent to the old piano, which was pushed against the wall. The boys sat along the right bench.

Old Mrs C. could divide her attention equally between us this way, gazing left, back on to the music, gazing right. My KG1 teacher also made our lives happy and insanely joyful in retribution by confiscating all sorts of things from us, and some of it was expensive, or precious, or hard to come by. She even confiscated erasers if somebody threw them. It didn't actually have to be the person whose eraser it was. That made us mischievous, made us rebel.

I can well remember the little boys and their ambush of the classroom. Wait until Teacher’s gone to collect your things – your eraser, your ruler, your bits of coloured pencils that you were intent on flinging around the class. Paul was the stealthy one, the brawny ringleader, and I was drawn into the fray. Rob was second in charge. Somehow early accommodation to gender roles meant that the boys were already more robust. “I’m going to get back my stuff. Do you want to come?” Entering the classroom was forbidden during break time. Paul inspired us with confidence, that “Forbidden” had a prefix – “merely” – stuck in front of it. It was interesting looking around in the Teacher’s desk. I would have got my things and run, but Paul was more content to bide his time. Ah! He found a stapler to play with. “Let’s see how this works!” Ah—“Ouch!” he’d impregnated a staple half way through the surface of his thumb. “Let’s gap it.”

Teacher’s scoldings after break were nothing compared to the joy of having conquered forbidden terrain. I will never forget the lesson I learnt that day, the idea of “merely”.

Paul and Rob hated singing practice, too, and there was hardly a break between old Mrs. C's piercing gaze, and a thought to any other would-be distraction. Just enough though. . .

Paul and Robby undid their flies and exposed themselves to us. That was cheeky! They did it because they were making fun of Mrs. C., who carried on obliviously singing a harmony to my distracted thought that, "These are very bad boys." Then kabang! -- I was six! I had always liked going to school. I used to scoop over the polished floors with my feet. They were very shiny and wooden. Then I would line up with all the other KG2s, along a row, within the first few lines inside the hall. We sat beneath the stage and crushed up close together, sometimes touching knees. The sun streamed in the four or five ground to ceiling windows. Sometimes you would find a rod of sunspot to sit in if you were near the front. As always, it caught the dust and highlighted the gold brown, sifting particles. Everything was geometric, smooth, aligned. The curtains were pushed over to each side, dark blue and high. They never flapped or moved, because the air breezed in only from the other side where we had come to start the school assembly. It was warmer inside, against the reddish wood, but slightly colder in the breeze, which gusted outside from the early morning frost and dampness, still. The breeze came in from outside, the source of vitality, and made us realise how close we were to our land. It was such a gentle caress, no sense of this breeze has ever been forgotten by me.

It was in KG2 that we had a sign that pointed to the floor, which said "floor", and a sign pointing to the roof, which said "ceiling". I still remember those signs, and somehow that classroom environment seems like the place my homeless soul would end up in, if I ever went wandering.

The lingering smells of the Kindy block were remarkable and unchanging. They were of old crushed daisies, forced to relinquish themselves into something new. There was the smell of warm red wax polish for the floors. That was heartening, and made us feel secure.

Once we looked outside the window, and they were putting in another slide, of a flashy bright red and green sheen.

"That is the KG1 slide, " intoned our teacher, loomingly. "It is very nice as you can see--but you must stick to the KG2 slide."

The KG1 slide was packed with KG1s pushing each other down the slide at a range of different angles that tea break. We sat and watched, and then eventually returned to the silver slide, which had the more precarious angle. It also had a shortened end-bit, which was sloped to dump you on your bum - flattened on the sand. That made you feel tough, that you could ride that slide!

On Wednesday afternoons, it was our "swimming day", and we lined up with our bundled "cossies' wrapped neatly in a towel, and swimming cap, and marched up to the pool right at the top-end of the school. Swimming was really horrible. We grabbed kaylite boards and lined up along the shallow end. The teacher would blow a whistle and say, "GO!" which was a cue to jump in, swim to the other side. And then queue up and freeze a while until your turn came 'round again. But in a way the splashing up cold silver water was magical, too. This was adult freedom-- to be able to swim, independently, with a board!

One day we all queued up to march up to swimming when the teacher said, "Everybody stop laughing and talking or we will turn back!" It didn't make any sense, because we had already stopped talking, but then when we had gone a bit further and we were halfway there, all of a sudden the teacher said, "Okay! That's it! I have already warned you. Now we're turning back." So we turned around, and she marched us all back again. That was a mean teacher. She made you worry a bit, about some things. Like, if you brought your things with you or not. Did you wrap you towel properly around your costume, or by mistake leave your black speedo back at home, somewhere. She made you think a lot about these things, so always there was extra adrenaline, around swimming day.

mayarutsiro [LLHHH]MZ n 6 Training of children. <-yarutsa.

Intoxicating!

Life itself is springing forth.

Time slows in its tracks

The Sun!

It is an air goddess --

generating the Earth

So Perfect.

Morning was Broken,

the right to live was granted!

"Morning has Broken" was our theme song for the day. It was Mr. Walters favourite, so we sung it once a week. In summer, I think we must have sung it much more than in winter, but I could be wrong about this. Mr. Walters commented on how beautiful the morning was, and asked us to sing about it.

So we did. We sung about it all throughout the year, and as we moved back and further in the rows (as I got older), we continued to sing about it.

And the mornings seemed so fresh, so obviously delightful.

Not that any of the words made too much sense. Finally a teacher who considered the words explained them to us - only by then perhaps I was in Standard 4 or 5. She explained how it was a Biblical theme, and unravelled some of the words we had gotten wrong. For example, "Eden saw play" meant that Eden saw the light playing, as it were - or just to say, "it happened at the time". It had nothing to do with a saw, or mystery, or playing with tools. Also, "God's re-creation of the new day", wasn't really about recreation, (which I thought later), or that God and the new day were somehow combined together, and were one and the same thing (which I had thought earlier), but that they were actually separate things altogether, which actually didn't make as much sense to me, at the time.

The other bit I had got wrong was "minus". . .

Because I thought this was a song about the truth, I thought there must have been a way of finding it. So, you start off with the whole, and then you start to "minus" it:

"Minus the sunlight. "

"Minus the morning."

"Minus the one light . . . Eden saw-play".

This would then take us back to the beginning - to the first morning.

And that had some kind of symmetrical and poetic sense.

Of course, the meanings that we sung about must have been very complex! In the old days, when I was only kindergarten, the Bengal boy used to come at both tea-time and break and park his bike in the staff car park, in the shade of a big oak tree. Then we would buy Bengal juice or milk in plastic bags, and chew the corners off and suck out all the juice. The Bengal bags were five cents each but went up to six cents in Standard 1.

I had a wiggly tooth and I was hoping to get five cents for it from the tooth fairy, although Linda's mother gave her fifteen cents. I had been wiggling it all day, so it was really, really loose, which made me hopeful. In fact it was only attached by the smallest thread, and I could tell because when I jostled it with my tongue it just about had the movement of the whole 360 degrees. This was a good potential source of interest. And I bought a bag of milk because I was incredibly thirsty. I used to live for Break time when we could buy our bengals. Only, when I took the first swig, my tooth had gone! I couldn't believe it! I had actually swallowed my tooth that I had planned going to spend all night watching over, because the tooth fairy was still a real, alive thing!

It was also in KG that I fell down the steps. The steps were bright red and were polished every day with bright red polish. So were the corridors bright red. There was a particular smell about the Kindergarten block that was fresh and childlike: you always knew when you were approaching it. Maybe it was the smell of polish that had been, day after day, warmed up by the sun. But it was more like the smell of daisies and ever heated tar. That is where I slipped: I must have missed a step and landed on my knee.

And I looked at my knee and it had pink scrapes of the skin all coming off, and there was sand and gravel stuck to it where all the skin had come off. And then I looked and there were deeper gouges and blood started to ooze out.

I said to my friend, "What shall I do?"

And she said, "I'll run, find the nurse for you!"

Then she found her, and I walked to sickbay with toilet paper held over my knee, so I was walking crooked and bent over. And the nurse made me sit on this big white bed, several feet up off the ground. And then she dabbed it with Mercurochrome, which was this bright red stuff that covered over all the blood. And that made it sting, but when the Mercurochrome had all dried up it looked much better and got this golden sheen about it.

I thought, "If you ever fall down, you have to cover it with red to make it look much worse than it is, and then you've got to make it sting!" And after that you feel much better.

This was the age when I still wondered at the colour of butter. But there was still a lot of stuff you couldn't get: You just couldn't get any butter!

When we got it, that was magical! Sometimes butter used to come into the shops and then there would be a huge swoop upon the fridges, and it was "Strictly One Per Customer". So I used to stand in a different queue and purchase my slab of butter, whilst one of my parent figures would stand in another and process the groceries at large. That butter was some mystical stuff!

Cheese, too, was of a similarly mystical stuff because these same rules again applied. We had "Gouda" and "Cheddar" and they were all tightly wrapped, cold and hard and slightly rubbery in texture. The influx of cheese and other dairy products into the supermarket once every few months was certainly one of the more rewarding shop experiences, and in strange, and minor way, in a child's mind, like hitting a pot of gold.

But the supermarket was a safe place over all. There were looming potential disasters, but then also the potential rewards - and the promise of the little pots of gold.

I was already a great supermarket veteran, as if from way back.

Both my parents were very stringent with pocket money. That was because our money was so little. I wanted to buy a packet of sweets that cost twenty-one cents. But I only had twenty cents.

Then, I began crying and searching the supermarket floor with all my eyes for one extra cent. I pleaded for it with all my frustrated powers of persuasion.

But that extra cent never came.

I'd have to wait 'til next week's pocket money. I never knew what it was like, to have a lot of money, I didn't care to try to accumulate any.

In days like these, Ruffles and Pasha still used to steal the eggs out of the henhouse. Ruffles was my brother Malcolm's dog and his responsibility. The Keeshond with the curly tail, Pasha, was mine. I'm not sure how they learned to do this, but somehow they learned. Once they'd managed to lift up the swinging door, they only had to slot their noses in and grab the egg with a delicate teeth baring gesture, and then carry off their treasure to a patch of grass where they could crack it and devour the contents freely. They also used to steal sadza from next door, and swagger in with battered dishes which we'd never seen, but could have come from anywhere - we thought they came from next door when we found a hole under the fence!

Sometimes Bennit would tease Ruffles and make him bark by jostling at him with a stick. Then, Ruffles would release his chesty brass roars of defence. Most of the time, Ruffles would take detours around twigs and bush in order to avoid black people.

Ruffles continued to grow up into a fine thing, with his only lacking tendency to feign attack against whatever made him nervous. That which made him tremble was often very slight - a stranger in the grass, an unknown person at the gate - especially if that person was a black. He never bit anybody as there was always a fence or several metres between him and his ostensible target. I don't know if my sister had a dog, but maybe she had the cat. The cat's name was Tabby, a slim lined tortoise shell. The black hens belonged to EVERYBODY.

Back then, though, I didn't have many marbles because I wasn't crack. It was important to be crack. But somehow I didn't try hard enough. My head was always in the clouds. I took up photography, for its ability to magically replicate my world. Yowee!! -- Magic!!!

I only used to roll up oners, at times a tenner, only if I was feeling really dangerous.

I didn't have too many smokies so I held on to them whenever I got them. I had a few biggies and I acquired a biggie bustie once, but I didn't know how much it was worth, until I lowered the stakes and found out that it was actually worth less than a oner. A tall, lean girl dweetzed it from no less than one of my foot's distance away. (Each foot made it more difficult to dweetz.) And I was sorry to lose that bustie, because I was secretly fond of it. It was dark blue and shattered all around the edges. I didn't think the girl who dweetzed it would take as good care of it.

Sometimes I won a lot of marbles with a castle, which could be surreptitiously flattened and put behind an almost imperceptible (I thought) grass hump, which acted as deflection. But the really crack girls would stamp down the grass with their feet until the eye was perfectly aligned, and they might even rearrange the castle so it didn't sit so flat. Then they would bowl it over with a smokey or a biggie that were each worth three points and therefore three attempts. (If they used an ordinary marbles they were worth only one go.) Oilies and spaghettis were valuable and of slightly negotiable exchange worth, because they were also both raries. Once I won nearly twenty ordinary marbles with a tenner, and I went home feeling really good. I jingled them in their sachet. At the end of marble season I used to scramble all my marbles, which didn't take long, but was kind of fun. Then I'd go and find a space around me for all the other scrambles. After this, marbles weren't worth anything for another season. But it was still good to carry them around. But all the scrambles took place after the headmaster, Mr. Walters, announced each year, "marble season is officially over" from next week. Only then, on the last day of the week, on the last day of marble season, when the clock said that it was exactly five minutes until the end of break, then we would scramble all our marbles. And sometimes this might take a bit longer than the bell so that we might all have been a minute late for class. But this was not really a problem. The teachers were good to us, because they enjoyed and understood all about marble season. They just disappeared and let us play. They respected us and that is why we also respected them!

I always returned to the grassy patch, just up from a light rise, aligned not too far from the chicken hatch, and in the shelter of the mulberry tree. A capaciously growing patch of jade and cool tranquility, which you could plomp yourself in, and have the tender grassy flickers come up to beyond your thighs, dogs and children likewise cooling themselves in this vagrant patch.

And we were supposed to shake our heads disparagingly at it -- but I knew that it was all a game, this attitude, for it was a nest for dogs and children, cooling me impossibly on a warm and sunlit day. And though we said, "we must cut that some day as it's unslightly, in the way we said it we were reassuring ourselves that such a gorgeous patch of grass should never be cut, not ever, although it would be right in honour of the civilisation that spawned us. We were just warding off its spirit by asserting the propriety of keeping things more smoothly in their proper way. No blind spot acknowledged is every a blindspot, so "I know I'm sinning" means the sinning is negated: This is how is was supposed to work.

And then, one day, I feigned against the urgings of the spirit of civilisation, "This grass here should be cut some day! It's grown so tall!"

It was an acknowledgement of the tallness, the impossible tallness, capacious, rampant and free. It had been a miracle -- but one to which a more direct compliment would have drawn the fire of the spirit of orderly normality. It seemed clear that one could only compliment such a miracle in the most indirect way. One should pretend to be its enemy whilst encouraging its rampant growth -- much as the teachers at school pretended to discipline us whilst encouraging the petulance of our emerging spirits.

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