Rutland lad makes mischief
The following stories were dictated by Maurice John Soames, born in 1917 in Kelowna, to his daughter in Maurice’s later years and relate to his memories as a boy growing up on his parents’ Latta Road orchard in Rutland.
Maurice’s mother was Bessie May (nee Tucker) Latta and his stepfather was Harry Latta. The Lattas moved from Kelowna to New Zealand in 1938. Maurice remained here until his death in 1993.
Submitted by Dianne (Tucker) Fidler
What a Bee
When I was just a youngster, I lived on a fruit and vegetable farm with my parents, brother Harry and two sisters, May and June. There were a lot of small farms of this type in the area, farmers all trying to eke out a living as war veterans “Soldier’s Settlement” farms.
It must have been a very hard life for our parents, working from dawn till dusk every day, hoping for good crops and decent pay for the crops. We didn’t know what the word “luxury” meant. Anyway, one day I talked my little sister into coming with me down to Mr. Learmouth’s property, about four farms away, where, amongst a lot of tall trees he had a lot of beehives.
Now, honey was one of the things we just couldn’t afford too often and boy, oh boy, how I loved honey. Well, away we went down the road with a kitchen knife hidden up my shirt in case anyone saw us and guessed what we were up to! Wasn’t I crafty? Well, we finally came to the bend in the road alongside all those tall trees, and after having a good look around, sneaked through the fence and into the long grass under all these trees. It was a minute or so and we were amongst the humming of the bees and better still, only a minute or so from the honey!
I could just about feel it running off my chin! June said something about bee stings and being frightened for about the third time, and for the third time I told her to just hang on for a minute, there was nothing to worry about and that we would soon be eating honey. I lifted the top off the first hive and had just started scraping away at some honey-filled wax when my sister started to cry! She’d been stung on the hand. “What bad luck,” I thought, just when we were ready to have a good tuck in.
It was then that I felt something crawling and fluttering upwards inside my shorts! Oh, wow! In no time flat, I had my shorts off, and having a quick look, spotted a bee on my underpants. I took two or three swipes at it with my honeycovered knife, but in my panic missed
him (or her)! Terrible fear grabbed me and in desperation, off came my underpants! I looked around and saw June just crawling back through the fence, crying her head off. I didn’t have to tell my feet what to do — they were already doing it.
I was out through the fence like a shot, and off up the road towards home with a couple more bees buzzing around me.
I didn’t even see Mom as I sped past her (apparently, she had become suspicious of our actions and followed us to see what we were up to). I had known fear many times in my life, but had never felt the extreme terror of trying to escape the ferocity of those disturbed bees.
According to Mom and the three neighbours whose homes I had to pass, the noise I made was really something and the antics I performed, had to be seen to be believed.
Years after, old Frank Stockley reckoned he’d never seen anyone semaphore signalling so fast and Mrs Hillborne said I pawed up more dust and dirt than her husband’s big Ayrshire Bull!
Well, I finally got home (and here’s one for Ripley), I didn’t get stung once! I didn’t get a hiding either, as my parents reckoned I had learned my lesson the hard way! Be that as it may, over 50 years have passed since then and the embarrassment of it all still comes back to me; and I often think about my neighbours and their kids, and the ribbings I’ve suffered for all those years until we finally moved away to another district. If there was a moral to this story, it certainly wouldn’t be ‘ How not to get stung’.
Bring ‘Em Back Alive
I remember it was spring and the snow had long gone. In place of it, there was quite a lot of wind and the ground was soggy from all the rain. Colin, May and
I had been to the movies the day before and had seen a very interesting film called “Bring ‘Em Back Alive” starring, I think his name was, Buck Rogers (actually the actor Frank Bucks).
Anyway, this film was all about the trapping of wild animals in Africa and bringing them ‘home’ for the zoo, or circus or something. The idea of the exercise was to dig a big deep hole (or pit) putting branches across the top, then smaller twigs and finally leaves and a sprinkling of earth. This was so that the animals coming that way would, by their weight, fall through this, ‘ah’ – for want of a better word – camouflage and be trapped because the pit was too deep for them to get out of. It was then easy to net them, put them in cages and ship them away.
For us kids (we were about six or seven years old), this was just about the most marvellous thing we could ever expect to hear of, leave alone see on the screen.
We were still talking on and on about it but it was too wet a day to wander far from the house so we decided to make one of these ‘pits’ for ourselves under the eaves of the house by the front steps. It must have taken us a couple of hours I guess to dig this hole about three feet deep and three or four feet wide.
By the time we had finished it had started to rain again so we all went back inside, after a good look around at our handiwork. Man, it looked good! You couldn’t see any sign of the hole; we had covered it so well with laths, leaves and dirt.
Well it was a long time after and getting close to tea time when our Mom came home from work, tired and with her arms full of goodies for our meal. Because it was so wet, and the parcels were so heavy and it was a long way around to the back door, she decided to come in the front way.
We watched her through the window coming towards the front steps and, in our excitement over the nice things, we would be eating in a few minutes, we forgot all about our ‘animal pit’; until we saw Mom almost disappear into it! Oh boy!