Skinny Dipping in the Moonlight

Children are always curious and inquisitive, but parents are not always around to see what their offspring do to find answers.

I was about ten years old, and my older sister, Elsa, was almost three years my senior. Our neighbour had two sons older than us, and two daughters of more or less the same age as us, all of which were unholy naughty. And there were some Dutch people a little further down the road who also had two sons – equally impossible to rule.

On the night I'm talking about, all these naughty boys, ranging in age from about eleven to eighteen, were kicking up a raucous at the cement dam that was close to the main road. It was a balmy night, no wind and pleasantly warm. Where we girls sat on the porch of the our neighbour's home we couldn't see what was going on at the dam, but everytime a car came down the road to the T-junction opposite the dam, there was yelling and laughter. So we girls had to investigate of course. Fun had to be shared, and we had to investigate.

My older sister, me, and the neighbour's two girls crept through the long grass towards the dam. The brakes of the windmill standing next to it, was fastened so the blades couldn't move, and it was safe to stand on the platform just below it.

As we sneaked closer, we could see movement on the platform above. The boys were talking and laughing, completely unaware of the eyes watching them from the cover of the darkness and the long grass beneath. At that moment a car came down the road, sweeping it's headlights across the scene by the dam. We watched in surprise as we saw the four scoundrels jump completely naked from the platform into the water.

We giggled and whispered and sniggered and gasped and eventually decided to go closer to get a better look. Well, of course we had to get a closer look! You must remember, that was way back in the late fifties, and skinny dipping was just whispered about as a terrible sin! Girls then wore pumps and gathered skirts, and often plaited their hair, wooing was still the norm, and virginity wasn't laughed at.

The boys didn't see us when we scurried across the open space to the dam because they were already up there again waiting for the next car. But ... so were we down here, wide eyed and full of breathless anticipation.

When the headlights swept across their buts and everything else, they jumped from the platform in two's with the light from the car brilliantly white like a huge spotlight on them. That is when I found out that men came in different sizes and it had nothing to do with how tall they stand in their socks. Quite a shock for a ten year old girl.

Big and small? What are the odds!

Anyway, we stood up and showed ourselves as the boys came helplessly falling down towards the water below, shouting and yelling at us all the way. This time the shouting and yelling was different because it was tinged with anger and shock.

Oh, we laughed and thought it very funny. The boys on the other hand, were ready for murder, so we turned and ran, not forgetting to pick up their clothes on our way to the house. We had to make sure they didn't catch up with us before we reached it though.

And there our parents were, demanding to know what was going on. We were all grounded, the boys included, but to this ten year old it was definitely worth it ... over and over again.

Kids will always be kids – curious and adventurous. I enjoyed my children from the day they were born, and their tiny hands and feet fascinated me. I gave them all the love I could, I told them fairy tales of princes and dragons and allowed them to use their imagination to the full. Later people told me that it was wrong, and children shouldn't grow up with fairy tales in their heads, but I shrugged such comments off as nonsense.

Today all my children are well balanced adults. None of them had ever been on drugs or took a wrong turn in life. They still enjoy fantasy in movies, but they have their feet firmly on the ground, knowing that they are allowed to be themselves.

In the seventies when my eldest son was born, the teachings of a certain Dr. Spock was much discussed. I never bought into his ideas, but many of my friends did. They never spanked their children, and treated them like little adults. The end product was not what they had in mind at all.

My sister had four children, two boys and two girls. She and her husband had enough money to buy their kids everything they wanted or needed. By the time they were in grade 7 they were into drugs, except for the eldest daughter who became seriously dependent on medication.

Eventually the youngest son died of Heroin and the second daughter took her own life.

Now, I want to know – If this Dr Idiot Spock had never wrote his books or influenced people the way he did, wouldn't the world have been a better place, a place where kids could still be kids and enjoy innocent fun like we did on that balmy night in summer by the cement dam? What I see around me, are young people with no manners with a dark side to them that's very unsettling.

Spock admitted on his deathbed that he had been wrong in his teachings, but unfortunately the damage had already been done. We see more and more the products of those teachings in people who believe that they are better than others, people who doesn't care about what happens to their elderly parents, people who believe they have the right to insult, to laugh at others, to belittle, et cetera.

No wonder people long for those days long gone when right was right and wrong was wrong, and good fun could still be enjoyed.