Fiery Fun

Kids will always find a way to be naughty, it just comes with the package.

I was about eleven years old and was very tight friends with the neighbour's son, Marcel, who was a year older than I was. We were always up to mischief when we were together, which was mostly on weekends.

This particular day was in the winter. The grass was dry, the trees had shed their leaves and a light breeze blew over the veld. Marcel and I were cold and we imagined that a small campfire would put some warmth into our cold bones.

Some of the dead trees had been cleared and thrown onto a heap, so there was enough dry wood for the fire. We found a piece of paper and some matches and we were set for the day.

Next to the heap of wood was a clearing where we planned to make our small fire. It was far away enough from anything that could catch fire and start to burn. Yes, we were careful, because growing up in an area where there was an abundance of dry grass in winter, taught us to be carefull. We lit the fire, fried some pieces of chicken that we got from the colonel's butler and talked about what we were going to do for the rest of that Saturday.

We had a few things in mind and soon we were bored with the fire and all charged up for adventure. Marcel stamped out the flames and coals and we left. We didn't realize that Mary-Anne, his little sister of five, had been watching us from the other side of the woodpile. Had we known, we would have done a better job of stamping out the burning wood, but we left and Mary-Anne stepped in. Later we tried to reconstruct how things happened that day, we realized that she had dragged a small, dry tree to the still hot embers and blew on the coals to catch fire.

Oblivious of what was happening at the woodpile, we went to the river to build a raft. It was while we were busy there that we saw the smoke in the direction of the gum-tree wood. We abandoned our raft and ran back to the house to find out what was going on. The wind had picked up and by the time we reached the woodpile, it already had turned into an inferno.

Workers and farmers came in bakkies (small trucks), cars and on foot, carrying wet hessian bags. Suddenly the peace and quiet of the Saturday morning was gone. People were shouting and yelling, and against the background of the raging fire we could see them with sacks whack whacking at the fire, ever so often standing back from the singing heat. My father also arrived with his two farm-workers.

My heart was thumping in my chest. Was this what we and Marcel had caused? It was dreadful! How could it have happened? The flames were charging towards the two houses, one being surrounded by huge trees. There were pines among them, and we knew that the colonel's house was going to get burnt to the ground because of its thatched roof should it catch fire.

The smoke was thick and suffocating. Whole trees burned like torches, and nothing in the area was safe from the flames. So every living animal was taken down to the river for safety where the younger children of the workers had to keep them together.

Marcel and me were too small to fight such a raging fire, but we each picked up a wet sack and started to help extinguish the fire anyway. I could feel the intense heat against my skin and I really panicked. Fire isn't a polite thing, it wants to burn you. A few feet away I could see Marcel frantically trying to distinguish the flames, but it proved to be too much for him as well.

Then the wind changed direction and the next moment the flames were all around us. I heard myself scream from shock and fear.

Someone dragged me out of the flames and poured some water over my clothes.

"Go to the house!" Marcel's father yelled. "I'll deal with you two later!"

We dropped the sacks and slinked off to the house where Mary-Anne sat watching the fire with widened eyes. We joined her not knowing what the little pest had done.

Outside the fire jumped the road and was getting uncomfortably close to Uncle Huup's house. We could smell the acrid air, and the smoke burnt our lungs. The fire was getting much too close for comfort.

Aunt Ruth came into the room where we were.

"Go to the back of the house ... stay in the kitchen and don't go outside."

"Why don't we leave, Mother?" Marcel asked.

"We can't ... the roads are blocked by the fire. Now go to the kitchen!" She didn't wait to see what we do, but left quickly.

We ran to the kitchen where we stood by the window watching the fire outside. It was quite hot even at this distance. They had a huge back yard where there was nothing that could burn so it was safe there for the moment.

Suddenly there was shouting outside, and we saw people running past to the colonel's house. It was a very old building with a thatched roof ... and they had many valuable antiques inside although that wasn't something that had any meaning for me at that time.

We watched as the fire scorched its path down to the colonel's house, emitting smoke and ash and heat, and we remembered how hot it was.

After another very long hour the wind dropped without warning as though it was tired of cheering the fire on. The suffocating smoke still hung in the air, the ash still drifted down, but the roaring sound of the flames was somewhat subdued.

It was more than two hours later when uncle Huup returned and said: "We saved your father's house, Ruth. It was just the barn and two of the outbuildings that burnt down."

So it was over at last. Marcel and me sat on the doorstep of the kitchen, and didn't say much. One of the neighbours came to uncle Huup.

"Someone had made a fire by the woodpile and dragged a small tree into the flames. That is what started the fire."

We were on our feet, not thinking clearly.

"We didn't do that!" we exclaimed, admitting that we had made a fire close to dry wood.

Marcel's father turned to us.

"So you made a fire while the wind was blowing?"

"A small one, Father," Marcel said apologisingly. "We extinguished it before we left."

"So how did it start again?" He obviously didn't believe us.

And then we turned to Mary-Anne who looked as guilty as could be but kept quiet. To this day we both maintain that we had nothing to do with that raging fire, but still no one believes us. I don't know where Marcel is today and if he ever thinks of what happened then, but maybe he will read this and laugh about it, happy that we escaped back then with just a stern reprimand.

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.