As soon as I was given my first proper bicycle (a Raleigh) for Christmas at the age of 10 I was on the road. My mother was the most neurotic mother imaginable. "Don't climb that tree - you'll fall down." "Be careful, honey" was her creed. And yet such was the blandness of life in Gwelo she was quite happy to let me go cycling on my own all afternoon. And I didn't just stick to roads - one could dive off into pathways through the bush, twisting and turning. I was humming along a bush path at full speed once when I saw a big hole. It was a mine shaft - completely unprotected. I called some friends and we took turns throwing rocks down and listening for the distant splash. There was absolutely no danger from other humans - kids could roam where they wished. Cars on the road were no real danger because the roads were wide and on most roads there were cycle paths running parallel. Gwelo is also exceptionally flat - the whole of the Midlands was once a seabed. There was only one biggish hill called the Kopje (Koppie). My dad who studied Archeaology though Unisa used to take us there to find stone age axes - we found hundreds. When I was 11 my dad used to let me drive his Landrover on the bush roads behind the Kopje.
After moving away from Riverside we moved closer to town, into a house called a pise - it was basically poles and mud construction but well-built - very thick walls (picture above). After WWII there was a shortage of bricks so many houses were built like that. I remember it as being very cool with a long passage where I could play cricket with my friends.
We had a large family living over the road who initiated me in some of life's secrets. They had their own gang and we made a fortress in the bush. The password was "Bernadine" They taught me how to sling a brick about 50 metres. One of them had a girlfriend and there was talk of showing me some interesting things but the oldest brother looked at my wide-eyed face and said I was still too young. They had chickens in the yard and fixed motor-cars. Our next-door neighbours had a baboon which lived at the top of a pole. (You can just see the pole with a little hut on it just above my sister's head in the picture above.) Every now and then it escaped and there would be frantic hustling and bustling and closing of windows. My mother lived in fear of the wretched baboon.
I had my own pellet gun and used to blast my dinkey toys pretending I was a sniper.
I was back at my original school Cecil John Rhodes Primary and had two big crushes, one of them on a girl called Melanie. I was so painfully shy all I could do was fantasise that her bike had broken down and I could give her a lift. She must have sensed some of this ardour because at an end of term party we played "Spin-the-bottle" and she spun it straight at me. I was supposed to kiss her but I didn't, alas.
We moved into a nice house directly opposite my school and were there for my last two years of primary school. I would vie for first place with Jimmy, an American boy, who is now a Maths teacher in the States, and Audrey who sadly died of cancer in her 40's. In the final exam I just pipped them and was awarded Dux with a big book prize. Predictably I chose a lot of books about pilots and a novel by Stuart Cloete who was considered very racy.
I read prodigiously and was hard-working but when I compare my zero social skills and inability to talk to adults with the all-round skills of my youngest son who is about that age now I have to say that the modern child is much better prepared for life.
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