Friday, January 20, 2012

Water spray and the Seven Geese

Stories from South Africa
Catherine Nicolette;



We were complaining to Dad and Mom that we had no-one to play with. It was holiday time, and our friends in the neighbourhood were away at the seaside. We were stuck in Welkom, an area with much veldt* between towns, and longed for the sophistication of the water, the sea, and the elan of being a travelled junior school Free Stater. Our friends used to come back from Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. They would give us gifts of polished semi-precious stones while commiserating with us that we never seemed to go to the seaside. We relayed all this with gusto to Dad and Mom. Mom sat there looking worried, as she always did at our family conferences. She went without so much in order to be able to put us all through private school with extra tuition such as music and art, and Dad laboured away at the mine for the same reason. Dad's work at the mine involved him nightly going down into the pits and risking his life to mine gold. He had
survived being pinned under a rock fall which left him with a chronic back injury which at times caused him agonising pain. However, to our young minds, we were hard done by. As I look back now, I realise how much my parents worked and did in order for us to have a secure and protected childhood. Yet, at the time, I was not able to appreciate this. So; I wanted to go to the sea, and my siblings with me; and we wanted water and water animals - right now!

At the end of the conference which the Whittle siblings and myself had called, Dad stood up with his authoritative and calm presence, and said, 'Right! Water and water animals you want, and water and water animals you shall get! No one will ever be able to say that my children did not have exactly what all the other children in the neighbourhood got.' And Mom followed him out the diningroom, saying plaintively, 'But Sean, we don't have the money to go the seaside with all the expenses we have to pay.' Much we cared, sitting around the diningroom table. We had got our way; in our own minds, we were well on our way to the seaside.

Yet again, I had underestimated my canny Irish father. The first sign that something was rotton in the state of Denmark was when I came back from school the next day in the bright African sunshine, to be met by seven streaks of white feathers coming around the corner with a distinctive honking sound, and my father's voice in the rear chivvying them jocularly along. He couldn't have... he had! Dad had gone out and bought seven geese and was herding them towards the large water spray strategically placed in the middle of the garden under the massive overhang of the yellow-pollened mimosa tree. He herded the geese towards the water spray which, by a miracle of African technology veered first to the left, and then to the right. The geese honked, and then waddled through the spray. Next to the spray was a large plastic slide. Nearby a red and white blanket was spread out with, as the folks (our name for Mom and Dad) would say, 'all the blessings of God on it.' A party had been organised for us under the tree. Dad's motto was you only live once, so you might as well enjoy it.

The next week the neighbourhood kids, returning from the seaside, stared enviously as we ran whooping around the garden, jumping through the veering waterspray and throwing ourselves with abandon on the waterslide on which we would skid squeakily along, laughing like mad. The geese would run up and down, honking noisily, and then waddle through the spray. All of a sudden, neighbourhood children were lining up outside the Whittle gates with their cozzies* rolled up in towels, and their parents asking permission for them to join us. We became the toast of the neighbourhood, and my siblings and I basked in the glory.

However, eventually the worm began to turn. The goslings grew into fat geese, and a sinister and cold glint entered their eyes. It is well known in South Africa that geese are fiercer than watchdogs and, indeed, are used to some effect on some farms for the same purpose. The geese fawned over the alpha male of the house, our Dad. But they grew to loathe my brothers, sisters and myself - for no apparent reason. The real standoff came when, after a few weeks of chasing us, and frightening us by nipping our heels painfully, they stood hissing malevolently at our gates and refused to let us in to the grounds. It takes a lot to cow a Whittle girl, but I had several red marks on my arms and legs from surprisingly painful nips from beaks, and I wasn't going in for more.

Mom and Dad surveyed the situation. Things came to a head - if I recall after so many years and with a child's memory - when an anonymous complaint was lodged that Dad was keeping livestock in a residential area without a permit. After some official to-ing and fro-ing, it was established that according to bylaws geese are in fact not pets, but considered as livestock. Dad, with Irish grace, bowed to the inevitable and we came home one day to a geese-free zone with easy access to the house. Where were the geese? We did not know. Years later I heard that Dad could not bear to have anything happen to the geese of whom he had grown fond, and gave them into the keeping of a friend who had a local smallholding farm. The son of the friend was somewhat bitter that the Whittle geese were destined never for the cookpot, but lived to terrorise him when he was on the farm outside of school hours. A Free State smallholding farmer's son to his very soul, he considered animals to be sent for the reason of gracing our tables after visiting a cookpot, and it galled him to see the geese living - exempt from any such fate - to a ripe old age.

And thus ended the saga of the water spray and the seven geese.

Luky;
Actually, the geese were ducks. Sean got the ducks from a mining friend of his who had a smallholding. It was the mother duck and her six little ducklings. They used to follow their mom in a totally straight line wherever they went, and I used to wish that my kids would do the same. One of my sons as a toddler used to throw himself off the kerb into the traffic when we were walking along, and I had to put a protective harness on him so that when he jumped unexpectedly, I would be able to haul him out of harm's way as he used to pull his hand out of mine every time. Eventually he stopped doing this, and I was able to leave the protective harness as a thing of the past. One day we were walking in town, and he saw a harassed mother carefully holding onto the straps of the harness in which she had her child. My son said, 'Look at that wicked mother! She's put the child in a dogleash!' I told him that he had also been in one, and he was outraged.

*veldt - Afrikaans word meaning dry fields
*cozzies - South African childrens' name for swimming-costumes

*Photograph taken by Rev. Catherine. Please feel free to use the picture copyright free for any Christian, educational or spiritual purpose.

No comments:

Post a Comment